Nine

I baked enough raspberry mini-cheesecakes that we can invite nine people to Sunday dinner. Maybe we will have visitors at church today...

Amanda

Amanda and I spent Thursday afternoon at the Flint Institute of the Art.

Winter bloom

Northern lights

January 5

9:04 PM

Northern Lights, or aurora borealis, are one of the benefits of enduring the darkness of winter in the Northern Hemisphere. Orangish light spread across the northern sky, as if the sun were rising or setting, Monday and Tuesday nights. Northern lights are fairly uncommon this far south, and they broke the monotony of fifteen hour-long nights.

Portrait

For Christmas Betsy and Naomi pooled their money and bought me a light stand complete with a professional-looking white umbrella. With the backdrop stand Betsy constructed for me last year, I have my own "studio." And I have no excuse for not updating the portraits that Mom hangs on the living-room wall.

Pizza-game night

Judith sprinkled mozzarella cheese on four pizza, Logan bought three liter bottles of pop and Betsy contributed "smart pills" for our pizza-game night during Christmas vacation. Pizza-game nights originated with Grandpa and Aunt Carolyn inviting four of us at a time to Grandpa's house to eat pizza and play games.

With neither Grandpa nor Aunt Carolyn available, we planned our own pizza-game night. Judith baked pizzas and tossed salad. Then after dinner we cleared the table, set up card tables and whisked Kaelyn off to bed.

The first game was one Logan and Naomi remember playing at Grandpa's. It's a simple game. You set a ping-pong ball in the middle of the table and then everyone huffs and puffs and blows and tries to keep the ball from rolling off the table.

From there our games became more sophisticated. We played Phase Ten, Ninety-nine, Jenga, Uno Flash and Dutch Blitz. Betsy taught her friend Lauren, who joined us for the day, the strategy of Ninety-Nine while Brian and Joel tried to beat Libby at Dutch Blitz. They almost succeeded when Joel sneaked some of his cards to the bottom of Libby's pile. Meanwhile Dad and I stuck with Phase Ten for all ten phases while other players switched in and out of the game. Finally, when the "smart pills" and Skittles were gone, and after Brian completed the tenth phase and the Jenga tower crashed, pizza-game night came to an end.

"smart pills"

Cold

"Want to fly south to a warm beach?" Amanda asked me Sunday morning. According to Dad's thermometer it was -8F during the night. The temperature managed to climb to the other side of zero by the time we left for church in the morning, but it was still cold enough that I grabbed an extra sweater.