Baldur

comfortable -e +y =comfortably

Baldur

Other gifts?
Baldur would love a good hardcover (preferably older) English/Latin Latin/English dictionary

Baldur

Ditto for German, French, Spanish, Italian

Baldur

If it's midwinter and somebody came to visit bearing a couple beautiful perfectly ripe red tomatoes, I would be overjoyed.
I cannot bring myself to pay what the markets ask for them, and downright refuse to buy the cheaper nasty waxen pink ones.
For half the year the only tomatoes I eat are canned, and I do love fresh ones

sheftali52

Sheftali shares Baldur's love of fresh, ripe tomatoes. There are a few tomatoes from my garden sitting in the garden window above my kitchen sink. They were picked before the first frost could get to them, and they are ripening nicely. As I eat each one, I long for next summer's batch. Sheftali would also love to have a ripe, luscious mango. Grew up eating those fruits, and got spoiled by the tree in our family's yard that yielded really big mangoes.

Baldur

I remember my first encounter with a perfectly ripe papaya. It was the most delicious thing I'd ever eaten

sheftali52

Oh Baldur--you are making Sheftali homesick! I believe a perfectly ripe papaya is a tasty treat. Once in awhile, Sheftali's family home in Hawaii had a producing papaya tree, and we'd enjoy half a papaya for breakfast. The papaya trees were always plagued with bugs and disease, though, so it was a challenge to keep them healthy. Most of the time, my mom bought papayas at the local market. They always tasted best with a little freshly-squeezed lemon. We'd put the papaya rinds out on the lawn, and the birds would peck happily on them.

GOLDIEGIRL8

YOU lived in Hawaii? That's where I live NOW!

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Baldur! There's a picture of you just leaving Belladonnis' house!

maddyjean08

Ok, you guys, I have to tell you about some absolutely loony Christmas lights. (by the way, thanks for the Dreamhouse advice, Baldur) This guy's neighbor had these spectacular Christmas lights he knew he couldn't top, so you know what he did? He used his lights to spell out the word "Ditto" and an arrow pointing to the neighbor across his house. It's just soo funny!

Baldur

Baldur just returned from a brief Christmas shopping jaunt, the stores are not crowded.
This is a bad sign for retailers but a great sign for people finally developing common.
Or at least I hope so.
Christmas tends to get ridiculously commercial. The mountains of gifts get somewhat out of hand.
My budget has been getting chopped each year, my list of people getting very small indeed.
It was with some trepidation that Baldur approached some of his friends several years ago and sounded them out on stopping our gift exchanges.
No one I know has that much disposable income that they can buy everyone they know gifts.
Everyone I asked was quite happy and somewhat relieved when the topic came up.

Baldur

+gifts is

Baldur

Likewise I've asked my parents and siblings to stop.
My parents did not stop, but they have severely scaled back which in itself is a victory.
Especially since they never buy me anything I would wear or use.
Lately they'll give me an ugly shirt, jacket or worse yet a sweater (jumper in the UK) made of acrylic yarn.
Baldur absolutely cannot stand they way thay acrylic knits smell.
(Perhaps this should go in the 'Dry Sockets and Fluorescent Lights' thread).
Any clothing they might give me gets thanked for and then given to Matthew of Shrewsbury.

Baldur

But back to my Christmas shopping trip. Baldur bought his god-daughter Kathryn a couple crafts kits.
One is a paint by number kit of a Victorian garden scene.
The other is a make your own mummy kit.
This is quite cool. They given you a plastic (8" tall or so) skeleton and the type of gauze imprenated with plaster that used to be used in making casts to heal broken bones.
There is also a cardboard pyramid to assemble and paint.
It's messy and fun, what more could a child ask for?

Baldur

Being naughty I also purchased a couple hanks of odd glass beads in weird milky iridescent green tones.
When the mostly amber beads dwindle a bit more Baldur is going to add the red beads that are currently in hiding. When the red starts to run out it will be green beads.
I love how the palette changes over time.

Baldur

Most likely I will add some tiny copper beads in with the green.

Baldur

I wish they would segregate the beads by what they are made of when hanging them in the craft store.
Often Baldur was see a glorious strand and touch it only to find they are plastic. My beads here are predominately glass though a few here and there are stone ot metal.
I find the tooled metal beads made in India to be quite beautiful.

Dragon

Dragon could have used a sleigh and some reindeer this morning. I knew it was not a good start to the day when I had trouble backing out of my parking spot and had a real time of just getting out of our parking lot. I then had to break my way through the 3-4 foot snow drift to try to get onto the street (thank goodness for winter tires!) the trip to work this morning was horrendous, the roads had clearly been plowed at some point as there were windrows on the side but the wind and snow had obviously found it's way right back in and the major 3 lane roads in town were down to 1 very snowy lane. Fortunatly not many people were on the road and it was not as bad a commute as it could have been. Upon getting to work I could not get into our parking lot in back due to a huge snow drift higher than the hood of my car laying directly across the opening to the lot. I had to park in the lot at the gym across the way and slog through the drifts to get into the clinic. Thank goodness the plows and sanders have been running all day and our snow removal people have cleared the parking lot. I'm so looking forward to not going anywhere tomorrow, our high temp for sunday is supposed to be -17 C. Not sure what that is in F but it's pretty damn cold once the wind chill figures in.

Dragon

I must sympathize with Baldur on the topic of beads. The other day I was in Micheals buying some Christmas gifts and they had all their beads on sale, normally their stuff is so expensive that I look elsewhere but this was a darn good sale and I decided to try my hand at glass bead strands. The one in my window is very lonely and very much wants me to give it some company. I decided I'd like to stick to glass beads too as I like the way the sun shine through glass better than plastic (plus plastic tends to discolour I've found). There really was no rhyme or reason to the way they were presented. It was also very hard to decide when to stop filling my basket up!

maddyjean08

*Sigh* My computer's acting up.