Ancestral knowledge

Friday morning on my way to work, I heard on the radio that the temperature would be in the 30s that night. A tiny voice in my head said, "cover your plants." Hopefully my seedlings survived (I was out snowboarding all day and didn't get a chance to check on them). Now all I have to do is remember to uncover them.

I also found a germinated seed in a lemon. I've decided to try to grow it. Who knows, in five or ten years I could be cooking with Meyer lemons from my very own tree. I imagine it would be very productive, as R's family's tree, the parent of the seed, is always dripping with lemons.

In other cool news, I'm now a published author. To be fair, it is in the family magazine, but still. Here it is.

Oh, the irony

On Sunday, I told my sister that, unless we got any snow while she was on her birthday trip to Las Vegas, she probably wouldn't want to go skiing when she got home on Thursday. Well, we got the snow, but my sister won't be going skiing, as she is stuck in Las Vegas. Due to the snow.

Still talking about the weather

Apparently that is what this blog has been reduced to. In all fairness, though, rain is newsworthy in San Diego. Thanks to the poorly maintained roads and bad drivers, the sheer number of flooded streets and crashes tends to make headlines.

In typical San Diego fashion, Monday's rain was followed by a very sunny Tuesday, as it can't rain two days in a row here. It poured again today, but it looks to be getting back to normal for our Christmas visitors. However, nature has left a little gift in the mountains - snow! Totally going snowboarding this weekend.

Really, though, it hasn't been all work and contemplating the weather lately. There has been some cooking going on as well. Today I made teriyaki chicken from scratch, which was super easy and much tastier than the stuff from a bottle. I've also cooked up various winter treats, but I'll have to share the recipes later, as I want the treats themselves to remain a surprise.

NOW it feels like winter

They'd been promising us rainstorms off and on for a while now, but this time there was finally more than a drizzle. After I made it to work, in turned into a deluge. Driving around on San Diego's poorly-maintained roads was actually fun, as I got to splash through some rather deep puddles.

Getting into the spirit of things (a little bit)

I've been feeling really lazy lately. So lazy, in fact, that the thought of all the work that goes into getting an actual Christmas tree seemed like too much effort. Still, I wasn't quite to the point of not having anything (especially since we're sticking around this holiday season), so I decided to light up the metal cactus that my aunt and uncle gave me as a wedding present. As it turns out, little white lights are all one really needs to feel festive.

I still can't believe there are only 3 weeks until Christmas

The Christmas lights came on this week. Many of the houses on my block leave them up all year (we're classy like that), but they only turn them in in December. One of the houses has a giant star constructed on a pole on its fence. At night, with the lights turned on, it looks like a five pointed star in a circle. I'm sure they're going for the whole star of Bethlehem thing. During the day, however, it looks like a pentacle. Considering the block (and the sheer number of "Yes on 8" signs this October), I'm sure they would be horrified.

Now is also the time for picking out Christmas gifts, particularly as we hope to do the majority of our shopping from Amazon. We've been checking out Dr. Seuss books for the nephews, which has been an exercise in nostalgia. R and I both seem to want to give the Dr. Seuss books we read when we were little, which, I suppose, shows the impact of good books on young minds. I could clearly hear my mother reading some of the lines when Are You My Mother? showed up on the search menu, and I couldn't help extending my neck and craning my head to the side the way she would when she read the oft repeated title phrase.