greetings from the land of no snowplows

since the recipe for candied orange peel that i'm following is trying to coerce me to be patient (the peels are supposed to become translucent-looking after about an hour of soaking in syrup, and it's been two hours and then some), it seems as though i have a few minutes to write, even though the house is in disarray due to the marathon gift wrapping anne and i just did.

here is our child looking a little weary after traveling from the car to the front doorstep. even though anne shoveled, adah is still stunned by how deep the snow is. "remember when it snowed last year?" she asked earlier, and we informed her that that was nothin' compared to this. our bamboo and eucalyptus trees are stretched to the ground, poor things.

cousin kai and uncle darren made it just in time, before the snow had a chance to settle. the day after they arrived, adah had her first sledding adventure, and when grandma bonnie emails me pictures, i'll post them right away because they're to-die-for cute. she was a little horrified for the first 15 minutes, and then she wanted to sled entirely by herself while grinning. how two!

we braved errands today to avoid cabin fever, but throughout the past few days we've been drawing our own board games, playing restaurant, experimenting with glue, looking around the house for purple dragons, baking bread and cookies, and waiting for the won tons in our soup to rise. we also spent some time in nearby coffee shops, just to get out of the house. we brought a stack of books with us and left with chocolate mustaches.

i smell burning.

i swear to god, in the time it took me to write this, i just burned the orange peels and they are now crusted to the bottom of the pan. there goes one of my brother's christmas gifts. mesquite candied orange peels dipped in chocolate, anyone? so much for that culinary adventure! off to scrape

the pan...