Christmas 2008

As I mentioned before, we drove from Virginia to Kansas for Christmas. One of the highlights was seeing the St. Louis Arch.  I'd seen it once before.  That was 43 years ago.  The arch is the same, so is the Mississippi.  The city seems to have grown up around it, though.  

Another highlight was the snow.  The

 first day in Kansas was slippery.  It 

snowed the night before Christmas. The snow was a little better than ice.  I felt like more like Peggy Fleming with the ice than I would like.  The mutt face on the right is Bailey.  She was my companion in the car.  Katie was in charge of walking her and giving her water and, well, taking care of her.  My job was to pet her.  We became fast friends.  She is now sleeping in my room.  Strange.

Life at the Clancys was great.  Mostly I cooked.  But Cindy was a cookie making storm.  She,

 Carina and Cael are making stained glass cookies.  Cael and his great-grandmother are helping.  


They also made haystacks, fudge and lemon cookies.  There were about 4 people in the house who should really have been allowed to eat any of that, but we ate a lot of them before we left.  The

dogs helped.  May I just say that using Google Chrome is not very compatible with Google's Blogspot?  I had a very cute picture of Carina up there and it kept getting deleted.  She has a lovely smile as well as a nice arm.  You will just have to believe me.

Carina and Sean have a dog named

 Henry who has long enough legs to see every new cookie added and he does not have any sense in knowing that they might be bad for him.  Why should he be different from the rest of us.  This is Henry with Caitlin and Eric.  

Sean's sister and her boyfriend swapped Christmas outfits with them. This is their elf clothes.   

I didn't get any pictures of my favorite thing to do.  Cael wanted to listen to my iPod ear buds, so I played Riki Tiki Tavi for him.  But it is hard for a 2.5 year old to just listen to a book, no pictures.  So I found the book on YouTube and we watched it about 5 times.  He loved that book.  It was more like watching a three part cartoon, but you could hear Kipling in there every now and again.  

Of course, my ear buds were out because I was listening to two books. I read The Private Patient, which was an Adam Dagliesh mystery and American Lion, an Andrew Jackson mystery.   Both were well-written.  I found PD James' writing a little more satisfying than Meacham's.  American Lion seemed a little stuck in the soap opera of the day.  I suppose that's because Jackson was stuck in that soap opera.  One of his cabinet members was with a woman before her husband died.  The women of the capital shunned her, but Jackson was a little sensitive about the topic.  His relationship with his beloved Rachel was probably consummated before her divorce.  Oh well.  We would never get all caught up in irrelevant things today, would we?  It seemed to take a lot of his energy and the focus of the book.  Then there was his unfortunate method of dealing with the Native American "issue."  I really wanted to like this guy, but many of his actions made that difficult.  Much better to like the murdered Private Patient.  She had her scar fixed at a private hospital, but did not live to see a scarless face.  I'm not spoiling anything, this is mentioned from the beginning.  She seemed to be very serene when she died, though.  Maybe if the early America of Andrew Jackson was just a little more serene.