clove's corner

Hey, y'all!  Juniper and I made it to the Capitol just last night.  We've reunited with our better half and are preparing ourselves for a week of pavement and sore feet.

This morning we toured the Capitol building (then got a "behind the scenes" tour after one of our travel mates--the volunteer truck driver of the Capitol Christmas Tree--told our tourguide who we were), popped into the Library of Congress, lunched, then returned to our hotel, mostly to dry out our clothes but more on that in another post.

:: Okay, I wrote that ^ three or four days ago!  A DC post will be coming soon, but for now...    

::     ::     ::     ::     ::

First, the day before Thanksgiving, we left this:

Yep.  About 16" of fresh white.  June bugs watched from the porch as I shoveled my car out, which sounds like back-breaking work but it wasn't: this was the lightest, fluffiest snow I can remember; I barely felt any weight with a shovel full.  Would have loved to be skiing in it, but--sigh--another time.

^Osa found an elk leg just prior to the big dump.^

:: When I first started this blog I kept thinking I'd do some extra special post on how my blog got its name.  But alas, the time has come and I'll be brief.  When my hubs and I were still in the early courtship part of our relationship, I invited him over for dinner.  I made my famous tomato soup with garlic bread and in the process, apparently, used a bit of garlic and ended up giving my future husband heartburn.  From then on out, he called me Clove.  But only, ever, in writing.  At the time, we were working jobs that took us into the wilds for ten days at a time and got in the habit of hiding love notes for each other--in jacket pockets, toilet paper folds, socks, fishing lure boxes... you get the picture.  Well, we've never stopped that habit and anytime we are away from each other, we drop notes.  When I took a "girl's trip" to Italy, he hid one in my umbrella but it never rained for the first part of our trip and I got anxious and finally called him, asking for a hint.

And last January when I first started this blog and asked, What should I call it?  My husband looked to the blank white corner of our computer room and said simply, Clove's Corner.  I liked it.  Not just for the nifty alliteration, or even my written pet name, but for what it represents: all the little nuggety cloves of life whose sum is always more than its parts (a whole head, after all, has leaf stem root and skin holding all those little cloves together).      

So when my husband left with the Capitol Christmas Tree, I knew I'd bump into something.  After several days of Juniper pointing to the fridge asking, Dis?  I finally looked at it, really looked at the fridge, and found my love letter, hidden right there in front of my face.

My last night home as I was washing supper dishes, I turned around to see Juniper tottering all the way across the kitchen floor with a pamphlet in her hand that read, I AM NOT A BABY.  Well, I thought, no you're not.  Since she took those first steps, she has been walking more and more everyday and now pretty much prefers walking over crawling unless we are in a particularly dirty place, like the airport, then she prefers to crawl so she can get to all the nasty goody on the floor.

:: Thanksgiving.  Oh, so much to be thankful for--especially new family when your old family is too far to drive.

My sis-in-law's folks whipped up a fabulous Thanksgiving dinner--many thanks to them for taking us in!

:: A couple days later, we jumped in the car, drove 7 1/2 hours to Montana (stopped to visit family friends along the way), then left Osa with her extended family as J bug and I flew out to our Capitol city.

:: So we are in DC and have been b u s y.  More on that in our next post.  If you are watching for us on TV, it's the Capitol Christmas Tree lighting (not to be confused with the National Christmas Tree lighting) on December 7th, ~5:00 pm EST.  We'll be the small family not wearing black : )