Miser Family Update: lights and celebrations

The Driver's License celebration

Life in the Miser Family continues to be rich and full lately. The darkest week of the year has come and gone, and temperatures wandered down into sub-freezing. We've responded by being out-and-about more than usual, but also by piling celebrations one on top of the other, almost like they were blankets piled one-on-another against a cold winter night.

My husband keeps throwing more layers onto his bike outfit and zooming around in what sunshine there is on these frosty days. He also continues to attend Toomey with Tuesday protests, and he spent a bunch of time driving J-son to a recent legal thing. The "driving" goes well with one of the highlights of this week: the 50th anniversary of his drivers license, which we celebrated at a nearby diner.

The next night was the cause for even more celebration, as I-daughter and N-son performed with their musical corner downtown at a standing-room-only event. We were all shoulder-to-shoulder, enjoying the awesome music.

singing at a standing-room only event
(It's not my camera; the room lights are red).

And then the night after that. the celebrations piled on yet again: Winter solstice arrived, the shortest day of the year, and so we celebrated with a candlelight dinner.

13 candles and N-son

A bunch of non-academic people have asked me how I like "the break" now that I have a period of time "with no work for a while".  I could be snarky and point to the referee reports I've been writing, the talks I've been preparing, the pile of exams that are now graded . . . but the truth is, I like working on this kind of stuff.   In fact, I managed to shove my elbows around in my To Do list and create space to figure out how to make an advent calendar in LaTeX.   And my new advent calendar is fab: it has windows that are *exactly* the size of a common post-it note, and it has "\ifthenelse" statements that automatically put the days in the right places . . . So the answer is,  I love my break. 

We've headed into the few days before Christmas by heading down to my dad's home, to spend a bit of time with him and his wife and my sister and her husband.  It's good to be with family, and it's good to use the dark, cold days as an excuse for celebrating even the minor things in life.  

And that's the news from our family, which continues to be wealthy in our adventures.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.