CLH and I were talking about Shadow. She really was not the best behaved of all possible dogs, but she was still the best dog. No dog has ever been 26, I know. She would have liked a basset hound.
Happy birthday, my Shadow puppy.
Blake is singing in his box. My mother once had a dog who could kind of say "Lauuurrrrra," which was not its name; Blake can say both his own names.
And the goose is getting fat.
The 15th is late to get a tree, and this year for the first time we didn't slaughter, tote home, erect, and decorate it all the same day.
Monday I did get the lights on, and arrayed all the ornaments on the couch partly so I could admire them but mostly because I always pack the tree skirt at the bottom of the box. For cushioning, but also because it enables the arraying and admiring. Also I finished wrapping all my sister's stuff.
Tuesday we decorated. I contemplated the ornaments and was sure we didn't have enough. RDC gave me one of my presents early. I love this one. It's on the heavy side, it shades from blue through indigo to violet, and it's traced with silver in a, to me, Tolkieny kind of way. Also I made peanut butter cookies for my father. If they crumble on their way to Florida, I figure they'll still eat well.
I am physically incapable of buying ornaments for others without buying one for myself. Also it's got a perky bill.
A neighbor made this for me when I was about 11. Cardinals always nest at Yuletide. Speaking of, we had our trees trimmed, which was painful for me too, and I had the trimmers leave the bird-feeder branch on the nectarine, but the pine tree is gone and so are the birds. My poor chickadees!
Granny must have taken a Yule crafts class in 1978. This barn that she painted, my Little Drummer Boy little sled, and the plaster ornaments that look like cookie-cutter cookies all say "dew 1978" on their sides. She gave me all those that year, others to CLH, and a thingie saying "Noel" or "Yule" for the front door to my mother.
Others she kept and I inherited. I like this one, besides because she made it, because it looks like an extra from "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." And I like the other one too.
CLH gave me a hedgehog some years ago. I hope all my packages, which I didn't mail until Wednesday, get to Vermont and Albany and waythehell upstate New York and Boston and two places in Connecticut and two places in Florida by Wednesday.
This was in a batch of Granny's ornaments. I used to have a few of these clip-on animules and it seems to be happy there.
I bought this last year or year before. For myself. While ornament-shopping for others. I am not made of stone.
RDC asked me please not to break this one. Damn straight, it took 20 months for its replacement to show up on eBay. I would have got medieval on anyone who outbid me, but luckily I seem to be alone in my dreadful taste so won it handily. I don't care that it's stupid, I love it.
We had enough ornaments. Kinda. It is not slathered, but it's not sparse either. It's a balsam fir so smells delicious, but its branches are so dense and tend toward the vertical so much that some ornaments could not find a home. I was going to try to make diagonal stripes with the wired ribbon but I figured vertical was sufficient.
And so, for the first time, we have a tree by the window. It is gorgeous and tall (I had to hack some off the top to jam the star on) and I suggested to RDC that we could continue to get bigger trees in future years if only we lay them on their sides. We could work up to a 24-foot tree laid diagonally in the living room. Or even bigger, if we moved the dining table and used that room too.