New car!

Yay! I bought a new car today! Merry Christmas to me! It's a 2004 Subaru Legacy SE. It's their 35th anniversary edition Legacy. Pretty fancy. It almost feels TOO nice. My last car was a 1984 Volvo (RIP Old Blue) with 215000 miles.Faux woodgrain. OoOOOooO.
Power Moonroof. *little hearts*

Yay! So happy! There's a cd player but no aux jack for my iPod so I might go see about getting a new stereo installed sometime this week. I don't want to drive to Illinois and back without my iPod. Time to go for a drive!

Buttons, candy and snow!

This was a busy "makin' stuff weekend". Of course, none of the stuff I made was for Christmas presents. I'm still only half-way through making my Christmas cards... finishing those is on the agenda for tonight. Unless I get distracted making Dorset buttons! I just found out about these yesterday and they're totally addictive! I want to make buttons, pins, earrings, everything! out of them. Here are the four I made since last night.

So watch out, they might be coming your way this Christmas because I can't stop making them.

And I made this painting of a brick wall. I can't say more about that just yet.


Last night Howie and I got a gingerbread house. It was the messiest thing ever. The frosting came dry in a bag and had to be mixed. Well, I don't have an electric mixer and it felt too thick doing it by hand so I added a little extra water. Yeah.. it pretty much melted everywhere. Baubles slid down window panes, the doorknob fell to the ground and the door tried to melt off the face of the house. I'm not even going to mention the avalanche of roof "snow"... yeah. It was everywhere. But I think it turned out pretty decent. I just had to keep pushing things back into place until the frosting hardened. But, trust me, you don't want to see the back of the house. I had a lot of extra candy bits and just stuck them all back there. It looks like a candy monster threw up all over. I'm totally looking forward to eating it, though.


Speaking of snow, we had a HUGE snowstorm here about a week ago. Here is a picture of our neighbor's car, just to give you a little taste of Wisconsin in December.

Tour of Altoona (and Beyond!)

I've been wanting to go around and take pictures of town, but it's been cloudy for 2 months. The sun actually can out today so here you go. This is for everyone who hasn't been up here yet. First I had to bundle up against the cold, Wisconsin weather. Hurray for knitwear!
Here is the ever popular Altoona Family Restaurant. Even the seagulls have to wait in line.Then there is the Just Local Foods Co-op:And Tangled Up in Hue (they sell art and handmade stuff, yay!) and Yellow Dog Knitting.

The antique shop and the budget theater.

The bookstore, which has a really nice little sitting area upstairs, and Infinitea Teahouse.

The river and some randomness:Then we went to Chippewa Falls to see the Christmas lights. It was pretty cool. The pictures didn't really work. You'd have to see for yourself. Come visit! You know you want to!

Festivize!

It does not feel like Christmastime. The stores have had the Christmas decorations out since before Thanksgiving (so wrong!) but it just doesn't feel right. Maybe it's the lack of snow or because they just don't really know how to decorate up here, I don't know. I put the Christmas XM station on tv and dug my decorations out of the stinky basement.
Since we've moved to a bigger apartment, it seems like I have a totally inadequate amount of decorations. And I'm too cheap to buy more. Mostly I just put up my tree. It's barely over 6 feet, but I put 1250 lights on it. I think it could still use more near the top but ma says it's a fire hazard.

My tree isn't exactly uh... traditional... Here are some ornament highlights:

And then there's the tree-topper, which is a dog angel wearing red velvet and leopard. Oh yeah!