Deck the Halls with wrap-ping pa-per, fa la la la la la, la la la la

Jenny here--
We are getting into the Christmas spirit up here in our icy temporary home. For one thing, it's snowy outside! The snow has stuck around with us for 5 or 6 days now! It usually melts within a few days. It's nice an thick, no slush. There are even icicles hanging off the eves :)

We put up our Christmas tree the other day. Yes it's wrapping paper :) (most of those presents went out in the mail, I just thought they'd look nice in the picture -- and points for recognizing our Settlers of Catan game in the lower right corner!):

Hung lights around the living rooms, and also some stockings (too lazy to move my water bottle....):

And then I made us chili "cheeze" fries (not really Christmas-y, but who's counting? -- in our lovely purple pasta bowls!):

We're enjoying our break very much so far. Lots of sleeping in, lots of knitting and baking for me, lots of reading for Joe. And lots of internet time for both of us. We're even picking up the rubix cube again. I can solve it again, but I'm going to try to learn the method for doing it in fewer moves ;)

Merry Christmas!

Undead Snowmen

Jenny here --

It snowed yesterday! All day long in fact. We tromped along in our boots down and up the trail on the way to and from our favorite Thai food restaurant - conveniently down the hill from us ;)
I like walking in unplowed snow. It keeps the bottoms of my feet surprisingly warmer than when walking on frozen ground.

To get to the title of this post -- Our neighbors are a Mom and her two sons, about 10 and 12 I think? I guessing here. But they were building snowmen when we left for dinner, and when we got back they were complete. ZOMBIE snowman! Ok, one snowman was standing behind the other; the snowman behind had snow arms holding the head of one in front and was eating its brains!!! It looked amazing! The boys had put kool-aid, or something red, over rocks and leaves to make it look like the brain of the snowman and stringy bits attached to the zombie snowman's mouth.

I am very sad that I didn't take a picture of it last night. This morning everything was all melted and it's raining again. Snow fell off the roof and flattened the snowmen. Booooooo. If they build them again, I'm not going to hesitate to get the camera. Creative little buggers ;)

Baby, it's COLD outside!

It's not just cold - it's FRIGGIN cold.

Jenny here. As I type this post the temperature reads 7 degrees. That's right, not a typo: 7 degrees, Fahrenheit. Yesterday it was 3 degrees! It's been fluctuating between 3 and 11 degrees for the past 48 hours.

Walking to school is, once again, a new experience. I now walk to school wrapped up in three warm jackets, a scarf wrapped around my mouth and nose and my hat's earflaps securely tied under my chin. The scarf wrapped around my mouth and nose is a result of the truly unique sensation of having a runny nose and it freezing around my nostrils! You know you haven't really lived until your snot freezes - lol. (Actually, little known fact, but a runny nose is tears. You know when you cry and all the sudden your nose is running? There's a special drainage duct from your eye to your nose to let excess out. Neat.) So my eyes were watering up because it's extremely dry outside too. No moisture in the air, no cloud cover.

It's supposed to "warm up" back to the 30s again in a couple days when it snows. It's strange to think of snow as the warm side of weather! I guess this is Alaska winter. It's like December hit and BAM, someone pressed the "Winter" button.

Other than the cold, the days are getting mighty short around here. We have just residual twilight after 3pm now. We're getting used to it though. I'm finally starting to be okay with just relaxing inside, holing up in our apartment and not feeling guilty for not getting out so much. Juneau really is just a place to hole up and be quiet and calm and peaceful for awhile. It's kinda nice.