The Daily Sabs

for christmas, randall surprised me with a melodica. if you don't know what one is, it is essentially a mini piano that you play by blowing into it. like one of those recorders you played in elementary school, but with an accordion keyboard on it instead. needless to say, i heart it. i've always wanted my own since back in college (i played one in our ridiculous college band - we had one gig and i played the melodica and more or less recited some letters to the editor) but never got around to buying one. i've been eyeballing them lately, and randall remembered for christmas.

something tells me he's going to regret this sooner than later.

yesterday i arrived home to find a surprise package from the birdhouse (aka scottelbot). inside there was a package of stumptown coffee, an i-dog pup, and this little guy. an owl inside of an owl. i don't have a name for him yet, but he and his wee pal are going to join the growing menagerie of inanimate animals wooden or otherwise (remember pekka from last christmas?).

do you have any name ideas?

as you can see in these photos, i am exhausted (just look at those pandas). which is sort of crazy considering i've done a lot of nothing over the last few days. this morning we woke up to discover it was snowing. we threw a few scoops around, but it was too powdery and dry to even make a proper snowball, let alone a snowpig. that was probably the disappointment of the trip, but what are you gonna do?

in the afternoon we drove around and then went back to my grandma's nursing home. today was bingo day and she had made us promise to play. bao ended up winning twice and i won once. grandma didn't win at all. as you can see, she didn't appreciate that fact. let's just say that she's a bit competitive.

as an aside, why didn't anyone tell me that snowflakes actually look like those kind you make in school? you know, the kind where you take paper and fold it and make random cuts? i just assumed that was some sort of romanticized version of snowflakes.

icymi, i'm not a native californian. i was actually born in havre, a town in northern montana. my dad was stationed at the air force station near there and it was actually my mom's first home in the us. it was small and probably a bit of a culture shock -- there were about 200 people there and you know, all that snow.

this morning bao and i decided to venture to the upstairs area of my grandma's house (it's unheated and sealed off, and no one's been up there for a while - but most of the cool stuff has already been taken out) and i saw this picture hanging up in my dad's old room. it's a picture of the air force station where i lived (that's right station, it wasn't even big enough to be a base). i spent the first year of my life here before moving to california. my dad says that the radar stuff and everything but the housing is still there. it would be neat to see it, but it's not like i have any memories of it. only pictures.

speaking of pictures, i also found some funny old pictures in my grandma's house. this one was my fave. it's my mom in her early 20s in taiwan. i think bao, samshrew and i all have this default fake smile.

i woke up ridiculously tired this morning (insert long story here about box elder bugs and sleeping in a chair), but when i finally got going it was time to play in the snow. bao and i wanted to build a snow pig, but my dad laughed at us when we said so. he said the snow wasn't "that kind" of snow. being snow n00bs, we had no idea what he was talking about and tried anyway. we failed, so it was snow angels instead. only the snow was really powdery and we just sunk in instead. i mostly managed to get one made, but bao gave up after he fell in and couldn't stand up on his own, let alone get turned over correctly.

afterwards we headed to grandma's home (as in nursing home) where we had coffee with the 2pm coffee club and then were dragged to communion services where it wasn't as weird or miserable as i anticipated. i'm just gonna leave it at that.

also, i've been taking a lot of photos of the snow, you can see some here, but here's my favorite so far.

i accidentally spent most of the day working on that dumb decade list. it's at 100 songs now, but needs to be cleaned up and orderized. i didn't mean to spend a chunk of today doing that. i meant to spend it wrapping gifts and baking things. i also didn't meant to go shopping today. in fact i wasn't going to leave the house at all (that was part of the plan in order to get everything done in time to do have a relaxing evening - things didn't go exactly as planned), but i randomly decided that it was time for a new baby digital camera and headed over to best buy. i got front row parking and managed to sneak in and out in five minutes, i didn't even have to wait in the bajillion people long line and they even had what i wanted on sale. merry christmas to me.

well folks it's time for bed. santa's on his way, but really, the early bed time is because we have to get up at 5am in order to get to where we're going on time.

5am!