my Christmas

My Christmas break was filled with baking,




little ones,




and playing games.


All while surrounded by family.

Spring is Here!

The first day of Spring in Seattle was beautiful. I think the mercury reached 68 degrees or so. I spent the Equinox with my husband and some good friends. We started the day off at the University District Farmer's Market. Most of the offerings were still winter-fare, with many root vegetables and squash. That was to be expected. I left the market with a loaf of sourdough bread and a small strawberry plant.

Then we went to Bad Woman Yarn to buy yarn for a sweater project I've been dying to start. My friend and I checked out every ball, skein and shank of yarn in the store before I finally decided on the perfect yarn. More about that later.

The evening was filled with food, friends and games. Our friends brought over Settlers of Catan, a game we had heard much about but hadn't had the chance to play yet. We played two games before my friends had to head home, and then we played another before we went to bed. I had a blast.

I had such a good time that day, in fact, that I completely forgot to take any pictures. And so I leave you with a picture from yesterday of one of my cats enjoying the Spring sunshine in my little nook.

a new card game

Have you ever heard of Quiddler?



My in-laws gave us the game for Christmas and we just opened it yesterday. It's a short card game that reminds me of Scrabble. The point is to make one or more words out of the cards in your hand. Once you can use all of your cards to make words, you go out, and hopefully your letter points are more than your opponent's. You can't build on other words like Scrabble, because you hold all your cards until someone is ready to go out, and then everyone puts all of their cards on the table. There are a few combo cards, like TH, IN, QU and CL (Joe and I are pretty confused about the CL card. I mean, wouldn't LY make more sense?).



There are eight rounds to a game. In the first round, everyone gets three cards. For each additional round you add one card, so by round eight you have ten cards in your hand. We started playing yesterday evening, but ran out of time to finish (I go to bed early during the week so I can fit in some exercise in the morning before work). We decided that instead of keeping track of scores for each round, we'd just remember who won each round (so, electoral votes instead of popular votes). As you can see in the first photo, we used M&Ms to keep score. The red ones are Joe's, and the green ones are mine.



The pictures on each card are inspired by images from the Book of Kells and other manuscripts from that time period. It's a beautiful deck.

We also have SET, but we don't play that one as much. I think Quiddler is vying for my favorite card game. Watch out Canasta!