Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from Mars!

This year, we began our holiday celebration on Christmas Eve, spending the afternoon making dumplings from a recipe in a cookbook Mother O'Brien sent us (I cheated and opened it early!).  

We began by making the filling -- spinach puree, bok choi, carrots, tofu, ginger, rice noodles, and scallions in sesame oil:

That was the easy part. Next the dough for the wrappers, dyed green with water squeezed from the spinach puree. It wasn't hard, but just a little tricky to get the liquid-to-flour ratio right.

Kneading:

Rolling and cutting:

Then attempting to roll these little nuggets into perfect 2-3" circles:

Hm. Not easy, but a lot of fun.

After rolling the wrappers, we stuffed 'em. Not bad for our first time out!

And who cares if they look like a herd of lumpy stegosauruses, when they taste this good!

It was such a nice way to spend the afternoon, it has been decreed that every Christmas Eve day shall henceforth be celebrated as Dumpling Day. 

AJ insists that I add here that in addition to being fun and tasty, this is also a great way to keep me from hanging around the Christmas tree shaking my presents all day. 

Ok, fair.

Christmas Day has been very relaxed. We enjoyed our friend Brian's orange-cranberry bread with coffee with orange zest, and opened presents surrounded by our festive decorations.

Our stockings:

Plus, stockings we had made for Pickles and the mice a few years ago:

Momma Arave's sparkly bough:

And, of course, our Christmas tree:

Even Lolo was feeling festive today, sporting the Christmasy red and green plaid kerchief that Aunt Jennifer and Uncle Paddy sent:

After breakfast and presents, we all settled in to enjoy our new toys and books. Lolo decided she wanted to get cozy, and put on her new sweater, lovingly knit by AJ:

Merry Christmas, everyone, and Happy New Year!

2020: Working From Mars

When I posted Lolo's Halloween portrait a few weeks ago, I couldn't believe that I hadn't posted anything all year. I mean, it's 2020. We are here. All The Time. Doing Everything. Right Here. Surely, there are things to mention?

The day to day sameness of living our entire lives in our house makes it feel like there isn't much to mention, but that's not really true. We've done a lot to make the best of everything being upended. There are video calls with friends and family, and streaming services, and games, and our nice garden to sit in. We have made beer, we have pickled many vegetables, and AJ is knitting Lolo a sweater. It's not the same as before, and we have had our moments of stir craziness, but we have managed.

The hardest part has been adjusting to working from home. 

It's been less of an adjustment for me, because I had been working remotely for several months previous to the stay-at-home order on March 17 -- my new boss was in New York, so I wasn't bothering with the commute most days. I got used to floating around throughout the house during the day, moving from my office, to the kitchen, to the living room. 

When AJ was sent home to work, and we were both on video calls throughout the day, we had to figure out how to divvy up the space in a more predictable way. I made some adjustments to my office, and now spend most of my time at this desk:

Although I still move to the warm, sunny kitchen in the afternoon from time to time.

I enjoy working remotely -- I like the quiet. The most annoying thing for me is that meetings are harder to make effective, between wifi problems and the loss of all the nonverbal cues you pick up on when you're live in a room with another person.

AJ went through a lot more trial and error. The downstairs room worked really well for a while: 

It's quiet, and the height of the desk was perfect. But there is something about that configuration of devices and/or the wifi router that makes a video call drop from time to time (which is particularly problematic when trying to teach a class), so she moved her assortment of computers and notebooks back upstairs, and now she's the one floating around, moving from her office, to the kitchen, to the living room. 

This corner is a great background for video calls (balancing on a sewing basket and a photo album, on top of a stool has been surprisingly easy):

None of these areas upstairs are ergonomically quite as good as the downstairs, but in the end, changing positions throughout the day is probably better than staying in any one place, anyway.

We have done a pretty good job of creating separation between work and home by getting ready for work like normal, and putting everything away at the end of the day. But it's not always easy to leave work at work in this situation. And trying to support students in this distance learning experiment has been utterly, thoroughly exhausting for AJ. 

The only one having the time of her life is, of course, Lolo. Here is an action photo of her at her work station:

Lolo isn't looking forward to our returning to school and an office (at least a couple days a week -- I'd love to do a couple here, a couple there), but we certainly are. Hopefully we're not long out from getting back out into the world!