Art trade, housewarming, and raincloud

Our housewarming party was last night, and it was fabulous. We don't know that many folks in town yet, so it was small. Not all of our friends know each other, but everyone mixed and mingled really well. The house feels properly warmed, and we're looking forward to the future plans we made with folks last night, like culture crawls and dog walks and dinner parties. I meant to take photos - I even charged my camera battery - but I got caught up in chatting and completely forgot! Next party.

The weather is getting wintery, and there's been lots of in-house projecting time. I finished Erika's fingerless gloves. I'm happy with how they turned out. I'm making Douglas a pair, and maybe I'll make myself a pair, too.



I really liked trading with Erika, so I suggested to Susannah (a talented painter and artist friend) that we should trade, too. She doesn't knit much, and I don't paint at all, so that's what we're trading. I'm going to knit her some felted mittens in return for watercolors. She brought over two miniature paintings as a housewarming gift last night:



I love them! I can't wait to see what she makes in trade for the mittens. I like the water theme; very appropriate for a welcome to Vancouver gift.

Speaking of rain, we've realized that we have our own personal raincloud over our neighbourhood. It is *always* raining at our house, but it stops as soon as we leave our neighbourhood. Our house is right on the Burrard Inlet, and the rainclouds seem to funnel up the inlet, get stuck on the North Shore mountains, and then empty themselves on our house. This has been a really good realization, actually, because it means that it doesn't matter what the weather is doing at our house - there are probably clearer skies just a few blocks away.

Getting ready for our party, we did lots of house organizing, and part of that involved finding our digital collection of music. We keep all of our music on a NAS (network accessible storage drive), and play it from our computer. Before we left for our trip to Latin America, we tried to copy all of our music onto the laptop we were taking with us. Of course it was a last-minute effort, and we set up the file copy the night before we were leaving, hoping it would work overnight with no hitches.

We forgot that we had a bunch of movies on the NAS, and in the middle of the night the copying got to the movies, and never got past them. The last music that got copied was the Mountain Goats. I hate the Mountain Goats, and I still think they killed the file copy....

This meant that our music selection for the past 9 months has been only A-M. Now that we've set up our NAS again, we have all of our music back!! The playlist is all N-Z, of course.