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The overarching themes for familial gift-giving seem to have been model trains, bathrobes, and chocolate. I netted a fancy adjustable coffee grinder, chocolate, an assortment of books, a set of 1000-thread-per-inch sheets (mmmmmmmmmmm), Dante's Divine Comedy on audio CD (coming soon to an iPod near me), and various other items. (But no model train equipment -- not on my want list.) Oh, and the aforementioned cross-country skis.
There was more skiing goodness at Colby College yesterday, although a slight thaw/freeze cycle had made the snow rather crusty. I fell a bit more often, but got up a bit more speed as well. Tomorrow there are plans to try the course at the Augusta arboretum. I don't know if we're going to get far enough afield this week to find any still-fresh snow. The Weather Underground web site thinks there's at least some chance of fresh snow Thursday night, though. So far, no storms scheduled for Sunday when us Californians are planning to fly out, but of course that could change.
We continue to work our way through the entire checklist of holiday dinner fare, having completed turkey, ham, Chinese buffet, and still having barbeque and lobster yet to go. Despite it all, I'm having relatively little trouble sticking to the eating plan, which is gratifying.
Slowly working my way through getting caught up with transcribing the current writing project. (That is, the bits written longhand so far.) I'm almost sticking to my plan to transcribe the longhand draft as written so that I can do version tracking on all revisions just as an interesting experiment. Alas, the key scene of the initial chapters had drifted significantly enough by the time I transcribed it that I pretty much had to capture the modified version (but I did take notes on the differences from the original). I'm not entirely sure whether I'll do anything with my draft/revision notes on this project, but since I'm generally fascinated by Process (and since this whole story is an experiment in Process) it seems worth capturing.
I'm also thoroughly geeking out by tracking the distribution of dice rolls for our omnipresent games of Settlers of Cataan. Anecdotal observations so far: specific games do commonly show wildly improbable concentrations of specific numbers; there may be some evidence for die bias (although since I'm not tracking the two dice individually, this is harder to prove); the game-by-game perception of improbable number concentration is muted by the act of observation, although the perception is that observation makes the dice behave better. A full statistical analysis may follow. (Or I may have gotten bored with it by the time I get back to my statistics reference books.)
There was more skiing goodness at Colby College yesterday, although a slight thaw/freeze cycle had made the snow rather crusty. I fell a bit more often, but got up a bit more speed as well. Tomorrow there are plans to try the course at the Augusta arboretum. I don't know if we're going to get far enough afield this week to find any still-fresh snow. The Weather Underground web site thinks there's at least some chance of fresh snow Thursday night, though. So far, no storms scheduled for Sunday when us Californians are planning to fly out, but of course that could change.
We continue to work our way through the entire checklist of holiday dinner fare, having completed turkey, ham, Chinese buffet, and still having barbeque and lobster yet to go. Despite it all, I'm having relatively little trouble sticking to the eating plan, which is gratifying.
Slowly working my way through getting caught up with transcribing the current writing project. (That is, the bits written longhand so far.) I'm almost sticking to my plan to transcribe the longhand draft as written so that I can do version tracking on all revisions just as an interesting experiment. Alas, the key scene of the initial chapters had drifted significantly enough by the time I transcribed it that I pretty much had to capture the modified version (but I did take notes on the differences from the original). I'm not entirely sure whether I'll do anything with my draft/revision notes on this project, but since I'm generally fascinated by Process (and since this whole story is an experiment in Process) it seems worth capturing.
I'm also thoroughly geeking out by tracking the distribution of dice rolls for our omnipresent games of Settlers of Cataan. Anecdotal observations so far: specific games do commonly show wildly improbable concentrations of specific numbers; there may be some evidence for die bias (although since I'm not tracking the two dice individually, this is harder to prove); the game-by-game perception of improbable number concentration is muted by the act of observation, although the perception is that observation makes the dice behave better. A full statistical analysis may follow. (Or I may have gotten bored with it by the time I get back to my statistics reference books.)
