Another bag of Skittles

As our merry vacation chugs to its inevitable conclusion, I realize that I have been remiss. Since the early episodes, in which I offered up the efforts of hours and hours of video editing, I have been pretty tenaciously recreating with the family, and have neglected to keep my readers (both of you) in ye olde Loope. So here are some updates.

Twice in two days now we have gone skating at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Skating Rink in North Adams. They redid the place over the past year - new insulation on the ceiling, new boards and benches surrounding the ice, new vending machines, a surface that no longer has a marked slope toward the south. And it's very nice. It has a sort of "if you build it, they will come" vibe - because the people who go there seem different. There were absolutely no rowdy thirteen-year-olds either day, no hockey dads encouraging their thuggish kids to play tag, no crazy people...Just families out for a skate. It was super, super pleasant.

And T! Oh, my goodness - that kid can downright skate. I mean, just skate - all the way around the rink, without falling, gliding for four, five feet at a time, picking up some speed...It's been amazing. Though both days, we have forgotten to bring the camera! Strange. So I can offer no proof. But believe me, that is a graceful little tyke on the ice. I hope she doesn't go in for figure skating, though - the Russian-looking woman who comes there (she's still there - the renovation didn't scare her off) gives me the willies. She stands at rinkside in an ankle-length fur coat and a fur hat - I'm serious - and calls our pointers to her seven or eight-year-old daughter, who spins and twirls while the rest of us amateurs glide past, feeling a little weird about "interrupting" their lesson by skating counterclockwise in an orderly fashion during open skating. I mean, I just don't want anything to do with a long fur coat. I'd look fabulous, don't get me wrong. But the whole situation seems less than completely healthy. Lovely little girl, though, and she can really skate. No, I see T more in the speed skating circuit. There is a speed skating club in Pittsfield - found out about it a couple of years ago. If she gets my thighs and her mom's calves, she's going to be lifting Cadillacs by the third grade.

And Q! He's bigger and faster than last year. I mean, he's not a hockey player (that is by design), so it's not like he looks like he lives on the ice, but he has really taken to it. Yesterday I discovered that I went a lot faster if I concentrated on pushing off with my heels, and told Q about it, and zoom! He looked back at me with his eyes big, and was thus kept interested for the next forty-five minutes. They really love to skate, and so do we, though Janneke's feet got pinched and cold both days.

We had our New year's bash, which was considerably smaller and quieter and ended much earlier than last year. Lots of previous guests were out of town, but we got a nice number together and enjoyed ourselves. At one point we were all playing...Oh, what's the name of that game - it's an electronic screen with several buttons on a disk, and you pass it around and new words pop up on the screen that you have to get your team to say. And Q kicked a$$ on this thing. His left hand would work itself into the most bizarre contortions, his face would take on such bright, liquid, guileless excitement, and he would stretch and strain his vocabulary (which turns out to be HUGE!) and his image-making capacity (also impressive) to get his teammates to say whatever had just popped up. I gained so much knowledge of his being from that game - it was a side of him I never see, this competitive, giddy, nervous, creative jitterbug of a guy that I didn't even know I was raising. And T sat on my lap throughout, and whenever the beeping would end with a buzzer and the machine was in my hands (OK, I'll be honest: that never happened), or Q's, or Janneke's, T would throw out a lower lip and begin to softly cry. "I don't like it when someone in our family loses!", she sobbed to me by way of explanation. Mercifully, she soon fell asleep, and I was able to slide out from under her and enjoy the game a bit more...Q stayed up for his very first ball-dropping ceremony, which went really well, and right afterwards we turned on the TV. (Badump-bump.) He was actually pretty freaked out by Dick Clark, who, I again assert, must be, at this point, purely animatronic. Good time had by all.

And Skittles. What can I say? That little critter has been absolutely everything we hoped she would be. Q went to bed tonight, sad because of a bit of a scolding he'd just gotten for a couple of things, and Skittles trotted into his room after him. I went in to say goodnight later on, and found her there, on the floor - and some time after that we went looking for her, and found her in bed with him. We suspected Q was not allowing her to leave, but after a while he came out because his head hurt, adn Skittles trotted out after him - and when he went back to his room, she trotted back down the hall. Then, around 10:30, Janneke went to look for her again (there have been some piddling issues, and we get nervous whenever she's been AWOL for a while), and came back to report that Q was sound asleep, and Skittles was curled up next to his head, purring loudly. Not because she was being stroked or fed or anything - She was NEXT to him as he SLEPT, and this inspired her to PURR! What a cat. We hit the jackpot. (And I hereby knock on wood.)

And so I bring you some more photos of her. With us. In different positions.

There is video in the works as well...

OK, the Skittles photo doesn't want to upload, so here are some others. Also holiday-related, also gorgeous.



These are the madelines that Janneke made for Santa Claus. As good as they look, they tasted better.



We caught Hobie up where he shouldn't be when we came back from Mark and Ronadh's house, banging the door and singing as we came in. So when we saw him, we turned on some lights and went and got the camera and banged some cymbals together and lit some firecrackers and then took this picture. That is one old, deaf dog.



T in front of the Christmas tree, with her ballerina outfit. Why? Because we can.



Q reads to T. No kidding, straight-up reading to her. It's a magical time, when one can read and the other can't, and they get along, and you only have to prod them a little bit to get them to do it long enough to take a picture.