A few weekends ago, we went to Las Vegas. We saw three shows and ate at three really great restaurants. On Saturday morning we went to the Hoover Dam. It is huge and a marvel of engineering.

These are the turbines that spin while water rushes through them to make the electricity.

It's hard to get the whole thing in the picture it's so big.

I got a haircut before I went. I love it.

We stayed at the Bellagio, where they have the Chihuly ceiling. It's pretty spectacular.

 

Las Vegas was fun, but it's not somewhere I'm dying to go back to. They allow smoking in the casino, and to get to your room, you have to walk through it. So I ended up smelling like smoke the whole time. Ick! Plus the room was allegedly non-smoking, but it still stunk. I did enjoy the shopping, and the food. We gambled a little bit - won $50 on the Patriots and then promptly lost it in the slot machines. I'm just not a Las Vegas kind of girl. It's up too late and too glitzy for me. 

Happy New Year! This new year finds me once again cleaning up my bead room. It had fast become a repository of all things bead, with no organization. I took an hour today and organized it; got the junk off my table, sent some things to recycling and put away the clutter. I joined an online crochet project and I'm eager to get started, but am waiting for beads to arrive in the mail. I have smaller sized beads, but I'd like to make the project with the large size, so I'm waiting it out. I can catch up easily enough.

I also joined another project, this time a photography project on the woofboard. You post one picture per week on a certain theme. This week's theme is New Beginnings. I'm still trying to decide what to take a picture of. Maybe I'll take a picture of my newly-neatened bead room. That's a new beginning.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas can never be perfect again, because my father is not here. Yesterday Robert made a mince pie from scratch, which made the house smell like Christmas. My father loved mince pie, and I was listening to the Messiah and Bach Christmas Oratorio and I just missed him like crazy. Oh my God. I can't even write this without getting teary. We'll have good Christmases and bad Christmases but they will always be incomplete.

Sorry Martha

Last night we had a strange visitor to our bird feeder. I was sitting in the kitchen and something outside caught my eye. The bird feeder was swinging, but it wasn't windy out. So I watched for a few seconds and saw this very odd little creature run down the tree, over to the pole, shimmy up the pole and take a few seeds. He would then leap from the feeder back to the tree and scurry up it. A few seconds later, long enough to eat the seeds I presume, he would repeat the process. It was too small to be a gray or red squirrel. It was about the size of a chipmunk but didn't have the same stripes; this guy's stripes were different. Plus it was out at night, when most squirrels I know are in bed. So I looked it up and it's a northern flying squirrel. We took a couple of movies of his funny little antics and grabbed this screen shot off one of them. It turns out that they are a huge prey animal for owls, which explains his nervousness.

I saw this license plate on the way to school this morning. I wanted to share it with my niece, because we like to say naughty words to each other. Usually the words are around the calibre of "bum" but since she's been going to 1st grade, she's come out with a few words a lot naughtier than "bum". Eek.

We did our presentation this morning. It was great. It was also fun watching the other students' presentations. Robert got his quiz back and got a 115. We also signed up for Italian II next semester today. It's fun.

Tutta la giornata noi abbiamo lavorato su la nostra presentazione in italiano. Sono stanca.

So we survived Thanksgiving. The turkey, which was a locally-raised heritage bird, was awesome. I think it was the best yet, in terms of flavor. The dark meat was a little tough, but that could also be how we cooked it. I used my Burano tablecloth on the table; it was so pretty.

My birthday present came and it came broken! :(  I'm so sad and Robert is really sad. It was a beautiful piece by Lucio Bubacco. Such a shame. We haven't even unpacked it all the way. Here is Leda and the Swan, broken by FedEx.

This is what it's supposed to look like: