cross country skiing and allergy adventures

long ago and far away [high school] i was diagnosed with cold urticaria.  believe me when i say, DO NOT GOOGLE IMAGE THAT SHIT.  basically, i break out in hives if its too cold.  fortunately, multiple allergy pills [every goddamn day] help quell the breakouts and allow me to survive in maine.  polar vortex, record snowfall, and all.  buuuuuuut a friend came to town and we went cross country skiing.  an outdoor pasttime i had been interested in for awhile, but had just never tried.  we ventured out on a gorgeously sunny, clear, 10 degree day, and with windchill it was probably well below that. 

s[nooooooo]w

perhaps you've heard new england is experiencing some blizzards.  and by some i mean somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 feet of snow [as of the 4th] in the portland area, aka moi.

here are some post [first] blizzard pics of the lighthouses of south portland.  only edits have been cropping from cell phone size/ratio.

hdr skies over sopo

my fancy pants new phone shoots oddly proportioned high def pics.  it also has an auto hdr sensor which i may turn off since i feel the pics below are over processed.  they were all taken on a surprisingly cold windy spring day at the former fort preble site on the smcc campus.

snow. forever.

ok i have no idea what is going on here.  i took a picture of the snowy trees.  while it was snowing.  and somehow between downloading the pics off my camera and uploading them to picasa... IT IS SNOWING IN MY PICTURE.  idk if i accidentally added some kind of magical animation in picasa [no idea how] or the internets just knew it should be snowing in this pic.  whatevs. i'm going with it.

decor continued

besides a tree, i have some other tasteful holiday decorations around.  home depot sells a surprising amount of holiday sparkles and i got sucked in.  the perils of working in the electrical department, right next to garden/holiday.

sunny day, chasing the clouds away

it went a whole ...morning without snowing

blizzardy blizzard.

it snowed.  supposedly a record breaking 31.9 inches.  but seriously with 55 mph winds and snow banks over 6' next to bare ground...how do you really know?  and monday it snowed another inch or two.  and then rained. 

s[nooooo]w

and i suppose it is about time.  i am in maine after all.  and its december.  le sigh.  but look how clear the pics are!  swanky camera and all.  thats no flash, automatic settings.  too cold to futz around with anything else.  even frank popped his head out the door and then went running back to the couch

sins part 2: sloth, gluttony, and extreme wrath

nothing quite says fall in maine like pea-soup-thick fog.  no kitty feet though.  sigh.  but sweatpants and soup.  mmm lazy.

zomg fall!

the leaves they are a changin

sebago lake part 3

atleast i think it was the third trip. 

click through for more extra large pics

2 years and counting

welp i missed my 2 year "blog-a-versary" by a few days.  damn.  good thing my mom still reads this.

since florida, i have shoveled a declared shitload of snow  [unofficially 20" in my neighborhood] and searched fruitlessly for a part time job.  doing ANYTHING.

see the antennae?  thats my car.

after some help from neighbors.  note, i had to shovel a path thru the yard just to get across the street to my car.  unpictured-helping elderly neighbor shovel out his 2 cars, my roommate's car and our driveway, and a further car-shaped spot next to our driveway for another roommate's car.  and back pain. 

i also attended a housewarming party with a bunch of particle physicists.  and of course i made cupcakes.

yes that is a radiation symbol.  i was going to make the house look like an atom with electrons circling it.. but my fondant decorating pens were a bit dodgy.

 

neatly arranged in my birthday cupcake tree! needless to say, the radiation cupcakes were readily consumed over the house cupcakes.  and it was explained to me how to actually make a cupcake radioactive using only household materials.  much wine was consumed but the gist was... cannibalize the smoke detector and therein lies some radioactive isotope/element/part.  then schmear it on the cupcake.  voila. 

snowstorm #2

the tree in the front yard

our wimpy looking porch bushes

cool shot of the street