At Long Last...What?

In case you were wondering, I hadn’t succumbed to one of those adventures I’ve often recounted; haven’t fallen out of the apple tree or slipped on the roof moss… No, aside from my typical run-ins with gravity (birdseed should have a warning label), I just seem to be busier and busier with the effort of keeping up house and yard, and working from home, and trying to be creative in whatever hours (minutes) I have left. I travelled for half of November, but since some of my favorite bloggers seem to carry on their daily analysis of national crises while apparently hiking in the Mohave Desert or Arches national wilderness, that’s no excuse, I know. I have added a little wingnut thingie (okay, widget - just as idiotic a name) so that you can get alerted to my increasingly random postings… I don’t want to give up completely, but I accept that I am not a daily blogger… I’m not a daily anything! My lack of consistency is part of my charm (except in most circumstances).

Anyway, to catch up: the house is snug against the fall/winter rains and I love that smug feeling (oh - I mean snug, really I do…). I even decorated the new front porch for the holidays, since I was no longer calling attention to a chipped concrete step with an embedded steel waterpipe handrail. No, this year it looked like the back end of a caboose when tricked out in lights… hadn’t noticed that before… Of course, like all my adventures, this one almost self-destructed. I found last year’ lights - I’d never put them away w/the Xmas stuff, so it was a true Xmas miracle - but they were too few to do the new outlining job. The additional lights I’d picked up at the thrift for a buck only lit halfway along their strand so I bought yet another cheap strand and doubled that segment - almost… I now have a lovely door/porch outline except for one foot of blackout - and I just don’t have time to change that! Since no one comes to my house and it’s not really visible from the road, it’s not a big deal… and if folks want fancy Xmas lights, the guy around the bend has literally a half-acre display of moving scenes, inflatable creatures of Christian and pagan persuasion - it glows for a hundred feet above his house every night this season.

The garden has been abandoned for the year; I would like to say “put to bed” but my energy gave out before all the leaves and weeds - and there are no handymen who use rakes anymore… but it worked out, because the two inches of dead leaves were very insulating against the hard freeze last week… and hopefully the bugs will have eaten the weeds down to nubs by spring…

I’m still living in a town where a bumpsticker “Just Say No to Crack” refers to plumbers, and the new Chinese restaurant in town is called “Double Chen” -- their attempt at wordplay defeated by poor spelling… it’s a restful place. The guy at the gas station wore a Santa hat for Christmas; it was camoflage-colored but I suppose hunters just can’t bring themselves to wear red? The town’s lightposts displayed Cowboy Christmas decorations - boot and hat silhouettes with rakish poinsettas. I wonder what the Chinese who create these things think?

Anyway, I will try to get back to this at least every two weeks… just sign yourself up to be notified, and you won’t miss a thing…