Christmas With The Family

the kids came over christmas eve and we watched arthur's christmas and spirited away.  they were super psyched and seriously energized for the most of the night.

not quite under the christmas tree, but gifts are gifts.

i got to run the lights up the christmas lights this year.  i am officially getting old.

movie night.  everybody took their places.  spirited away is a bit of a scary movie and the kids ended up clustered around georgia and i.  eleftheria wasn't much help as she fell asleep.

on christmas morning everyone ran up the stairs to grab their gifts.

i am a huge proponent of the novelist murakami, so eleftheria and i grabbed a good one for georgia.

all of eleftheria's hard work, gone in seconds at the hands of children.  i suppose that is how it goes.

the girls really loved the beads, it was cool to see them figure out how to create their ideas.  they quickly made gifts for their moms and for kristina's name-day.

i love buying stuff that i know is going to work.  eleftheria and i bought a nice hose and spray nozzle.  it was really cool.  eleftheria's dad said that gifts were only for kids.  i hope that we were able to change his mind. 

the aftermath

i did well with eleftheria.  i was super excited this year.  i had a bunch of really good ideas. a new cookbook, a new murakami read, and, best of all, an awsome new piece of art that she has been eying. 

me reading eleftheria's new cookbook on a strangely warm christmas day.

we ate . . . a lot.

and then slept.

on the day after christmas we went with a load of the family on a 3 hour hike up in the mountains behind petralona.  even though the weather wasn't great, it was still a lot of fun. 

well, i gotta say, it was not the same christmas, but it was a fun christams.  i hope that you all had a chance to meet with family and friends.  make sure you take your time as the year ends to make sure that you're ready for the next. 

Love you all,
Merry Christmas,
Happy New Year To Come,

Ian

The Holidays

 look carefully.  new cups and some fantastic compote.  Thanks keith and sarah.

 i am not a big necklace guy, so i took the head-band.  again thanks keith and sarah

 we didn't have any wrapping paper, so i had to get creative with the aluminum foil. 

 eleftheria did a bit better, she went crazy with the wrapping this year.  after checking out an etsy video, she started crating these great bottle wrappings. 

different is good.  this will be my first christmas in greece.  it is not to be compared, but i am really excited to spend it with this half of my family. 

Happy Holidays,
To a wonderful wedding shower,
And another eventful new year,

peace love happiness
ian

Trying To Escape

we stayed in a beautiful little room with a great, and highly effective fire-place.  we started sweating and finally had to shut the flue in order to cool off.

i really enjoy taking pictures of water; i like the affect that it creates and the lack of control that the photographer has.

it was chilly and there was snow on the ground from the tops of the mountains to the streets of the village that we stayed in.

i would love to have had a wet suit and the chance to wade back into the river, the narrow canyon was cut beautifully.

Color

this is us by the car where we had just changed into our bathrobes to run to the hot spring.

the hot-springs were pretty built up, much more so than those down by the colorado river, where i had been when i visited vegas.  Still, the falls and the ice cold river right next to it made for a wonderful setting.  eleftheria and i both enjoyed standing bellow the cold falls, then jumping back into the hot water to feel the blood tingle through our bodies.

the system was really crazy, no sulfur smell, really fresh, and the hot water spilled out of the left river-bank straight into the cold stream.

I absolutely love the evolutionary traits that seeds have adopted to achieve better dispersal.

eleftheria named this one the atlas tree.  it really did look like tree was holding up the entire rock.

wonderful rock formations abound in the area; however, the quality was not, great and i am pretty sure that the climbing present in the area would be pretty dicey.

in an attempt to escape for a weekend, eleftheria and i borrowed a car and headed about an hour and a half north-west to an area just outside of vergina called loutra pozar.  a natural hotspring has made for a favorite destination for greeks from around the country.  it was the first time eleftheria and i had traveled just the two of us, since before the wedding; needless to say it was a wonderful weekend.  

Cool

cool stuff.  thought i would share.

I found these cards on boredpanda.com; there are a load of them.  i though that i would keep it pg for the blog, but there are some really good ones with a bit more language.  

i have really been enjoying this guy recently.  it doesn't really fall into my usual tastes, but I am enamored with the idea of looping and how he layers his music.

I really enjoy drawing pictures during class; unfortunately, I am a horrible artist.  We were working on A Farewell to Arms

It is very interesting the kinds of mistakes second language learners make that we take for granted.  In this case we were talking about to, in, at and on.

Olives, Olives, and More Olives (And A Crazy Wasp)

 the olive harvesting season is dragging on a bit longer than usual.  eleftheria and i have spent a number of our weekends out in the village working with eleftheria's mom and dad.  this year, because of the size and quantity of the olives, a lot oil is being made.  currently i think that there is something like 1 metric tonne, which is about 1162 liter, sooo . . . 307 gallons, or a lot.  eleftheria snapped some action this weekend, so all props go to her, except the last one.

 i love this one. 

our hard work is often rewarded with food.  evagelia made some κολοκυθόπιτα (pumpkin pita) for adam and keith, but since it is difficult to package, she told me to eat it while i was thinking of them.  so, here's to you guys. 

that red is crazy.  nature is insane.  i just watched this nature documentary about a butterfly who's larva disguises itself as an ant larva to trick the ants into taking care of it, and a wasp that lays its egg inside the body of that butterfly larva, so that when the chrysalis finally breaks open it is not a butterfly that emerges, but a wasp instead.  crazy?!  i feel bad for the ants; imagine you were expecting a normal looking child (in this case, small black, six legs, so on and so forth) and then, BAM!!! a huge flying thing with a stinger appears  that hijacked your child's carcass that wasn't even yours to begin with. 

 

anyways, katerina and christos were the happy recipients of two new puppies, super cute and hopefully not hijacked by some crazy dog wasp (it really was crazy).  their names are Hercules and Alex; i'll let you guess who's is who's. 

it was a beautiful weekend, and after a week of late working nights, it was nice not to do any thinking.