Thanksgiving ....

Right at the moment, I'm thankful for Thanksgiving, for friends and family and for being safe at home after a wonderful visit.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll have pictures for you -- not of the family, unfortunately (forgot to take pictures while we were there WITH people) but I do have some wonderful stormy cloud pictures from our return trip.

The Tehachapis (one of the mountain passes from the west side of the sierra's to the east just south east of Bakersfield) got their first dusting of snow (nope, we weren't able to get out and throw snowballs at each other -- not because we didn't want to, but because the snow was WAY up and not anywhere near where we were... and with the six hour trip, we didn't really fancy adding another half an hour or more wending our way through back roads for an up-close glimpse of snow.)

We will get up close and personal with Snow sometime soon.  We Promise.

In the meantime, we spent time with my husband's family, got to take a couple of days off from the world and get away.

(BUT - not without book hunting.... and I FOUND stuff too! That's for another post).

Now it's clean up after visiting, throw the last few boxes of books into the newly cleaned van (it WILL be clean by Thursday.... It WILL!) and get ready for another four-day wonder trip.

Hopefully the trip over the Grapevine (the mountain pass that divides Southern California from Northern California) will be as hassle free as this trip over the Tehachapis. I did see some snow on the mountain tops there as we traveled, but in a week's time, who knows what will happen. No matter what, I'm on my way.

AND -- I finally feel like I have GOOD STUFF to take along.

I'll mention a few of the fun things I just found (or traded), etc. this week before I go (hopefully).

By the way -- did I mention that I actually WON a computer?

It's a fun little (and I do mean LITTLE) Dell Mini (approximately 10" across and about 3 pounds in weight).  Back in September, I saw a flyer for a contest at the grocery store -- at the time, I was grumbling because we needed at least one more computer in the house (and three would be REALLY nice) so I thought, sure, what the heck, I'll enter....

I did enter.

Then completely forgot about it.

In October I got a letter from SaveMart Corp and Kelloggs that I MIGHT be a winner.... fill out this.... notarize that.... blah, blah, blah.

So I did.

Then waited. And waited. And waited.

Until I figured that I wasn't the winner.

Then, this last Tuesday, just before we were supposed to leave for our Thanksgiving weekend, a big box that needed a signature arrived.

And it was the computer!

COOLNESS!

I'll have to take a picture of it too.

So now I can't say I've haven't ever won anything. Because I have.

And I'm Thankful for it too.

Wednesday... s'posed to be a work day, Lucy....

Yeah.

Work.

Except that I had to get the computer to AGREE that work was good. 

Updated my Booktrakker program (by the way, the program ROCKS for the most part, but there are times when I want to bang my head on the monitor.... programmers think differently than I do and some days it shows)

So updated.

Then tried something fancy.

Had to reboot

Tried it again (because, of course, the first time was just a fluke, right)

Crashed it again.

Third time, got smart & tried something else.

So, in between that, I spent email time figuring some things out, asking questions, following up on stuff.

Mostly, just waited for the computer to reboot.

Now it's time to pack books.

Soon it will be time to pick up kids and do the whole mom thing for the afternoon.

Maybe TOMORROW I'll work.

Sigh....


Oh, and as I don't have a book today, I'll pick one from yesterday when I DID get a bit of work done.

At the Sacto book fair, I picked this up as it was too cheap to pass up.

It's an early trade reprint edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with illustrations (in color) by Edmund Dulac.

Cool pictures.

Great introduction about Fitzgerald

AND

a neat bit biographical bit on Omar Khayyam as well.