DPP Day 7: O! (or Yo!) Tree

Today my most excellent spouse, as a treat, bought me American cookies, and I enjoyed them.

I also stacked them on the piano to take a photograph, which is not exactly my usual response to cookies. However, they were delicious. Mint oreo cookies may actually be a fair trade for dark chocolate digestive biscuits.

[Belated] DPP Day 6: Q are you?

I wasn't going to post for yesterday, because although I took a lot of photographs, they all had small children in them, and I don't like to post photographs of other people's children on the internet.

Looking over my photographs, however, I found a crop that would preserve privacy while still allowing my blog viewers to enjoy the a fragment of the charm.

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending the annual Wedding of Q and U. It is one of the major events on our school's calendar in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and featured a small kindergartner in the tiniest tuxedo ever seen playing Q opposite a beautiful small kindergartner playing U. U was walked down the entire hallway of the school by her father, the other kindergartners served as attendants, and the letters were joined under a flowered archway.

Here's Q's black tie and boutonniere:

Our headmaster read the vows, which included, of course, a quirky collection of relevant vocabulary words. No one from Qatar was invited.

DPP Day 5: Light Path to Laughter

I was so weary last night. We arrived home at 5 p.m. and I sat and waited for my evening event, which was a Womens' Fellowship dinner at church. I very seriously considered skipping the fellowship in favour of going to bed early, but I went.

The path to the Fellowship Hall was lined with candles in large jars (not quite luminaria, but they looked the same from a distance). At first I thought the tealights were taped to the tops of the jars, but they actually just put a single taper candle into each jar and let them burn down over the course of the evening.

In all our travels, I. and I. have been particularly blessed by God's providence in giving us numerous and wonderful church homes, and our current church is no exception. A night of laughter and prayer was exactly what I needed last night.

God is good. (Also, Lutherans do White Elephant exchanges like none I have ever before seen. Fascinating).

DPP Day 4: Reading and Weeding

Our school library is pretty small, and currently filled more with donations from well-meaning parents than classics that children could read. Lately I've been making small ripples that might have long-term benefits, such as convincing the librarians that we don't actually need to keep books on being a good Christian wife in the Young Adults section.

This week, in anticipation of soome new acquisitions, I took photographs of our current stock. There's nothing especially signficant about this pile, except that it looked pretty (and colourful!) and I am actually very pleased that, of all the editions of The Hobbit available, we have The Annotated Hobbit in our school library.

DPP Day 3: Two Pretty Things

For all the other ways in which I am sometimes frustrated by life here, we have been very fortunate to have a place to live--both broadly and specifically--that is very pretty, especially at sunset.

Here's a small fraction of tonight's sunset:

Recently I've been discovering tricks of Spotify, which I thought had an absurdly low number of foreign-language songs until I discovered how to search for them.

Zbigniew Preisner has long been one of my favourite musicians (I deeply love his Requiem for my Friend album), but I've just found his Christmas album Moje Koledy, and his version of the "Koleda dla Piotr" ("Carol for Peter") is breathtaking. (Also, foreign-melody Christmas music feels so much less trite than the American tunes that have been blaring in stores since All Saints' Day).

DPP Day 2: Shifting into the Season

A long-awaited treat from Britain arrived today in the mail:

Though I very much enjoyed Wool, the first [five] book[s] in the series [collected into one volume], I am reminded by my excellent spouse that there is abundant profanity in the collection, and there are two scenes of adult nature.

DPP Day 1: Not Much to Show

Though Tennessee does have some very lovely outdoor features, today I was stuck indoors with the last of my Thanksgiving cold. I rested a great deal and graded a little, but I had energy for almost nothing that required effort or creativity, hence I present this rather helf-hearted attempt at a first photo:

I'm now off to sleep off the last of my sniffles.