Ho, Ho, Meow

I'm pretty sure this will be my holiday card next year.







What is it with cats lying on things? Jake's on a piece of wrapping paper; Murphy's on a bit of black tissue paper and that's Tang in the back on a box.





Still Magda's got the best spot - on Bill's lap as he tries to eat his Christmas morning waffle.

Just In Time

As always, I wish I'd taken daily pictures of the amaryllis as it grew. It grows an inch a day - no kidding - for the first month. My reading chair is right next to the indoor garden and it astonishes me every evening.

The second month the enormous buds start to fatten tantalizingly slowly. Every night I think surely it will bloom by weekend. And yet another week goes by. This one opened on Christmas Eve and I couldn't have been more pleased.

Thanks to Photoshop, there's more fun to be had. Zooming in as far as possible makes individual pixels visible. I imagine this is how Martha Stewart comes up with her fantastic color combinations.

Penguin Pond

I yielded to the temptation of one made-in-China, pink-flamingo type decoration for Christmas this year. Maggy has been drawn to penguins since she could walk. I admit, if she'd been attracted to something less cute, I might not have encouraged it as much as I have.

These little guys are about eight inches tall and that's a string of regular christmas tree lights around them giving the illusion of a skating pond. We definitely got our $10 worth of pleasure from them but I feel guilty about the inappropriate use of plastic.

Delivering the Mail

Bill brings the mail in everyday but yesterday it was more of a challenge than usual. First he had to search for the mailbox.

He found it several yards down the road in the snowbank. The steel is stronger than it looks. He couldn't bend it enough with his hands to get it open. So he brought it to me like this. Notice especially the package inside.

I should mention that the mailbox was mounted on a well designed pipe that's installed about five feet back from the shoulder of the road and extends horizontally far enough for the mailman to reach it. In fact, it's designed to swing aside if it gets hit. And it's survived this way for decades.

For some long forgotten reason, this part of Neimi Road is a county road. In the past, through a shared services agreement, the town has been responsible for plowing it. Maybe that's why the county has neglected to resurface the road for such a long time. This year , for reasons too complex to describe, the county is plowing it and so far I'm not that happy about it. Sigh.

Leslie's ...!

Let's just say she's celebrating another one of those birthdays ending in "0."

We're always grateful to her for leading the way into the next decade.

Clothespins

I don't know why B finds this laugh-out-loud funny. But she does. This cleaning cloth has been on the clothesline for weeks. (Yes, I use cleaning cloths and yes, I wash them and hang them to dry.

Walking by it on my way back from other outdoors errands I thought I might as well bring it in. It occurred to me that we're not using the clothesline much in this weather, so I might as well bring in the clothespins.

B says, "Why didn't you just drop the pins into the cloth?" In my own defense, I had other stuff in my left hand and it didn't occur to me to make a pouch out of the cloth.