Doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?

I miss Gramma. This was her favourite holiday and it hurt like a bleeding wound all day. I started crying when my cranberries gelled-- something she always wanted them to do and when I made her favourite pie.

It's been a year... why does it hurt so much still? Will it always hurt like this?

We're going to be in Boston for the day to check out the Day of the Dead festival. If you want to catch up, we'll have both cell phones with us.

more animals

It's been like a week since I updated. I'm kind of blah today.

We have been doing a lot of nothing in the last week. The tree fell over on New Year's and broke six of my grandma's ornaments, so that kind of spoilt the day for me. We went out to dinner with Sam and then came back here and drank far, far too much champagne and ate leftover wedding cake. The rest of the week I just kind of did nothing.

We've seen Sweeney Todd and The Golden Compass over the vacation. Both were very good.

I went to Mum and Bruce's Little Christmas party yesterday, had an awesome panic attack when someone started asked about the anniversary, horfed up my dinner, and then promptly drank too much wine. Mum gave us $20 for Epiphany. I have a set of earrings for her that I forgot to give to her yesterday.

I have the day off tomorrow courtesy of The Sears Appliance Fairy who will sprinkle magical appliances on my life tomorrow between 7:30 and 9:30. Because "after 4pm because we have to work" really means early in the morning, yo. But hey, at least we will have a new stove tomorrow and we can stop having to eat out ALL THE TIME. First thing Imma do tomorrow is bake damned bread. Steven wants to make tuna noodle casserole. We are lame because we've been fantasizing about what we'll cook first when we have a stove again. I am making a chicken this week-end :)

( We are not going to discuss my lush addiction behind the cut )

I also bought three filters for my camera: a star filter, a neutral density filter, and a diffusion filter because Ritz was having a buy two, get one free and my grandfather gave me an AWESOME tripod, so now I just need to, you know, do something with my pictures/website. It was make Samantha's wallet cry day at the Mall. We had dinner at Johnny Rocket's and then headed home, where Steven had to watch American Gladiators.

I'll have kitteh pictures tomorrow when I dump the camera. I love my huge memory card so very much. Kitteh couldn't decide whether she wanted OMG!LUVINS or to try and chase the squirrels through the glass. It is a hard life.

Funny Kitteh Story: My grandfather has one of those liquor cabinets that one side is a curio and it rotates to reveal the bar behind it. I had been playing with the cat and I went to show Steven the bar. I thought the cat had just sort of wandered off till I closed it back up and relocked it. Soon as I moved, she was over there, nosing around, pawing the sides, trying to figure out how I made the magics happen. When she couldn't do it because she has no opposable thumbs, the look she gave me would have frozen water in July. It was all ...Humans... Opposable thumbs... When I rule the world... Damn them... It was great.

There's some potentially really big news that I'll probably post about soon. We just kind of found out today, so I'm still kind of ruminating about it.

Blah. Tired.

I am currently baking my last batch of cookies. Like I said before, I think the final count is between 6 and 7 dozen: 2 dozen Viennese Crescents, 3 dozen sugar cookies, and 2 1/2 dozen poppyseed cookies, plus the gingerbread cake that I need to make whipped creme for tomorrow. Anyone local want to drop by tomorrow night for dessert and coffee?

I am not overly pleased with the oven. We figured it was kind of off since things took forever to cook, but Steven finally went and bought an oven thermometer. Turns out it is really off. I started preheating it around 3:30, setting it at 500* and the highest temperature it made it too was 250* and that was only briefly. It hovered mostly around 200*. I also noticed the tin foil I used to line under the coils with has gotten so hot that it's crumbling and I can't put anything on top of the stove without it getting really hot. I had to move the gingerbread off the stove because it was almost as hot as when I took it out the oven yesterday.

I should think about eating dinner soon, I guess. We had a late lunch. I could have soup, I guess, or leftover Indian.

I guess I'm going to make the onions and applesauce tomorrow. I just realized I forgot to make them and now I'm tired.

So, in order not to be the world's biggest grinch ever, I have decided I am going to bake things today. So far, I am considering making gingerbread (the bread kind, not the cookie kind), Viennese crescent cookies, poppy seed cookies, and probably sugar cookies. I might make snickerdoodles if they're not overly hard. That should keep me busy for today and tomorrow.

Mm, snag #1. No brownie pans. I will be making in this a sheet cake pan instead and foisting it off on people.

I also need to make applesauce for Teh Piggy tomorrow and probably whip the sweet potatoes. I can't remember if we have brown sugar on not. I guess I should look for that, huh.

I was originally going to make a pie, but I just don't feel up to it. I'll thaw our cheesecake instead, I guess.

We went on our first solo trip to see my grandfather yesterday. It was hard, as expected. The house seems really strange. It's very empty and sad feeling. My grandmother always had tonnes of lights on (to my grandfather's dismay; he likes to save electricity), so it was dark, too. I've never been in the house without her there. We'd been times when my grandfather was in the hospital, but it never seemed so empty, then. It wasn't creepy, like at my grandmother Takacs's house after she died, just sad and muted.

We mostly sat in the office, with my grandfather, talking. I wrote out a couple bills for him to sign, since he has tremours and can't write very legibly and balanced the chequebook. It was hard to see my handwriting under hers in there.

I was in the house less than two minutes before the cat came tearing from the other room and flopped on her back for bellah rubbins. She haunted me throughout the house for the whole day. Anywhere I went, she was half a step behind, meowing at me. Any time she got ahead of me, she kept looking back to make sure I was still there. She wouldn't go outside and any time I sat, she was in my lap.

I think the hardest thing was that my grandfather kept calling me Lee or Ohnie. Steven caught it a few times and it made my heart catch every time I heard it. Eventually, they went downstairs to check out a clogged sink in Grandpa's workshop and the cat and I continued to kind of haunt the upstairs.

Her ashes are in the back bedroom. I saw the box when I went to check out the scale. I've lost a little more than ten pounds since the last time I was there. The cat had gone into their bedroom and wanted me to sit with her on the bed, which was more than I could handle. Ma cleaned off her bureau, so that was just strange, too. I know it's so it doesn't look like she's just run to the store and will be coming home, but it was hard to look at. I remember looking at her photos and her telling me about them when I was a kid or how sometimes she's let me use a little of her make-up.

No one's cleaned up anything in what used to be my room there. Her shoes and stocking are still on the box where she took them off the night before she died. There are a couple of cards addressed on the bureau and other things where she'd put them down. Her clothes are all folded on the ironing board, ready to be put away. I thought that room would be the hardest, but the living room's actually the one that I really can't stand being in. I went in long enough to get some Vaseline for the cat, but I couldn't stay in there.

My grandfather shooed us out around 3:30, so we went home. We picked up some of our Christmas stuff from Ma's and then we came home and mulled apple cider with vanilla schnapps in it. It seemed to help the laryngitis I've had for the last couple days.

I've mostly just felt sick all day. I did a little work on my charcoal, but I was antsy and didn't like what was coming out. I'll take it back to school and do work on it tomorrow. I did lightly fix it so it won't get smeared.

I guess we're going to try and get our tree today, after Steven brings in his end of the laundry and I finish watching some stupid programme on some weird dog-thing up in Maine.

Ok, do people actually take a drive to Plymouth Rock on Thanksgiving? Seriously? Television was just talking about it, but I'm hoping it's lying.

...have I just missed this tradition in all the time I've been here?

Happy VDay, Internets.

( Valentine by Carol Duffy )

This was the last reading from our wedding ceremony.