If You Can’t Find Something Good To Say…

Wasn’t it your mother who always said “if you can’t say something nice, then don’t say anything?” (Or was she the one who ended that statement with, “then, come stand by me?”) The water is going to be turned off; the boiler won’t light, and it’s snowing. The temperature in the house is very low, obviously, and this is being typed with gloves on.

Not a lot of nice things to say.

So, since a picture is worth a thousand words, let’s do pictures instead. Of nice things.

Like ABC gingerbread cookies — the ABC meaning, in the best fourth-grade style “already been chewed.” Tasty gingerbread cookies, which we will soon be baking, since it’s good to run the oven to heat the house. And the neighbors are having a bad enough week to NEED cookies. Desperately. In the realm of things for which to be thankful, OUR flat hasn’t flooded once. The basement neighbors have flooded three times now. And Lesley downstairs has had her floor torn out twice now to get at some pipes which, when modernizing this flat from Georgian plumbing, the plumbers just …left uncapped for some reason. (YES. It turns out, after the firemen beating down our door, and ripping out the tub, etc. etc. etc., that the whole leak-into-Lesley’s thing wasn’t even coming from our flat. Not Our Fault. Just builder error as usual. *sigh*)

Of course, none of their boilers has failed once. And ours… Um, yeah. Back to the nice things.

In the realm of “nice things,” even the very smallest deserves mention. This cowgirl is made out of paper, and cut with a little laser cutter called a Cricut. It’s got tons of designs which are adorable — and it’s one of those expensive crafty trends going on right now, which, like stamping and knitting and making those myriad fleece blankets, is probably going to pass pretty quickly with most people. We have zero idea what we’d do with one of these cutters, especially since T. isn’t teaching anymore and the whole bulletin board decoration thing is no longer an issue, but they’re cool, and create great party decorations. This was hung from the ceiling at Miss B’s New Year party where D. took pictures. (While T. was upstairs doing laundry. To each his or her own; a good time was had by all. Great chili dogs, anyway.)

Birds and persimmons – a match made in heaven, as far as they’re concerned. Was a bit disappointed not to get a chance to pick persimmons this year and put them in the fruit dryer. T. refuses to eat them fresh, and D. prefers them that way, so there’s somewhat of an impasse going on. Have you ever had them in cookies? Pinch My Salt has a great recipe that turns out sticky, moist, sweet persimmon goodness. That’s definitely a “something nice” to think about!

At the San Jose Tech Museum, after geeking out at the Star Trek exhibition, and sighing over all of the aliens, costumes and space ship models, we checked out the regular museum exhibits. We designed a roller coaster, had our heads scanned in 3D, played a giant, wall-mounted piano, made ourselves dizzy trying out our VJ-ing skills — kinda like DJ, only sound=picture — and had a good time playing with this robot — which takes a picture of your faces, and then draws you. It’s not… a human interpretation of your face, after all, that’s asking a lot of a bucket of bolts. But it’s a really unique rendering of a person, based on the planes of their face. People with glasses turned out to have an easier time recognizing themselves; people with full beards found that the face recognition software got overly excited by individual patches of hair. We never did get around to any of the girls in our group having their faces done, but the guys had a good time. That day was so full of fun tech-y stuff that we actually don’t have that many pictures. It’s truly a hands-on, get-in-there-and-play museum, which are the very best kind.

When all is said and done, we’ve only *just* gotten home, and maybe should give ourselves a break with the “something nice” thing. We are tired and slightly jet-lagged and maybe have the right to be the slightest bit crabby. At the same time, we’ve got a lot for which to be thankful — no unscheduled plane landings in Newfoundland, like our friend A. had on his way back from Minneapolis, no scary landings out on a icy runway. We have an additional space heater, just a little snow, a lot of ice and a bit of patience to see us through. Even though it is truly cold, awfully dark, and really miserable in our little flat (bathing is a real adventure, let’s just say — and the toilet seat is FREEZING at all hours, day or night), and we dearly hope that something can be done about the boiler soon (The guy thinks something crawled into the flue and died. Now, THERE’S a fitting epitaph [or even an epithet] to describe 2009!), all is well.

All is well.

Really.

Happy New Year. Stay warm.