Grandma's tree and a neverending book marathon

I'm alone in the house this morning, trying to think of every excuse not to go to the gym before work. The excuses are working, especially since ice on the roads is more than an inch thick. I'm lounging in front of the sheer white curtain over the wintry landscape of our backyard. It makes the cold look fragile. A thin dusting of snow covers every railing, every frozen rose and tip of grass. The curtain even softens the darkest branches to a light grey.

Next to me is Grandma Joy's artificial Christmas tree that we decorated with some of her gold and cream-colored ornaments, along with some of our own decorations, including a pair of moose holding up a sign that says "Lake Tahoe." We bought it almost a year ago on our "honeymoon." Because I grew up 30 minutes from Lake Tahoe, I consider it more of a weekend getaway. Sometimes, I look at the tree and think about it in Dalton's grandma's house, and feel honored that we get to keep it and remember her like she is one beautiful Christmas decoration pointing to the sky. Astonishingly, there are 20-30 gifts under the tree wrapped in a green paper with cardinals, a pattern of snowmen, or plopped in shiny bags. From the look of it, we could actually afford a nice Christmas. I think I've watched almost every classic Christmas movie this past weekend, I even watched The Year Without a Santa Clause last night so I could sing the Heat Miser and Snow Miser songs.

Dalton left for the day an hour ago, and since it's finals week and a work day, I won't see him again until he pulls into the garage just before he's ready to crash into his pillow. Luckily, we have a good habbit of always eating dinner together, even if that isn't until 10 p.m., so we can catch up on what we weren't texting each other about. If anyone ever thought life gets less hectic when you graduate, I'm sorry you were fooled. I guarantee it will stay hectic if you have someone else to care and worry about all day. It is nice, though, to get two mornings a week that I get to catch up on me--whether "me" means doing laundry, dusting, scrubbing the counters or reading. I finally got a Pleasant Grove library card. I have a goal to get through the 100 books to read before you die list in the next 2 years. I've read nearly 20 of them already so I have a head start. The current book I'm reading is Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler.

 

I'm only 60 pages into it, but so far I'm enjoying it. I love any books where the characters are so multi-dimensional, you wonder when the dimensions will ever stop. Their complexity is enough to keep my entertained for hours. Dalton likes books, he just doens't like reading them. That's where I come in. I read about 150 pages on the way to Reno, but I think he got tired of the book and wished Dan Brown was in the car reading ot him. We have very different taste in just about ... everything. He thinks I listen to hipster music, I think he listens to whiny-teenage-boy music. However, there is also a genre or type we can agree on in most topics. That's the best part about us, though, we will always stay independently ourselves, but work so darn well together.

Books at bat are: 1.) The Lazarus Project  2.) Cranford and 3.) Cold Comfort Farm