So Hungry I could Eat A...

Ooops! Sorry Maggie; only kidding! (She doesn't look amused at my lame joke!) I am happy to report
 that- just in time for consuming loads and loads of Christmas goodies (and baddies) I am cured and feel fine. My appetite has returned, along with my usual high spirits. It was a weird "bug" and I subsisted on a diet of (boxed) mashed potatoes and white meat chicken, and a bit of Bob's bread and apple sauce; you will notice the entirely beige complexion of the food I ingested. But whatever! It worked and I am anticipating our trip to Byron and Dan's for a lovely Christmas Eve celebration.
Last year, Byron and Dan regaled us with a multi-course epicurean escapade with fish and cheese and fruit and wine and cordials and nuts and roots and tubers and berries and things in bowls and on trays. It was really wonderful. Fortunately, we didn't embarrass ourselves badly enough that they saw fit to invite others to dine in our stead... Good friends for the holidays!
Now I am off to my studio to try and complete a collage, again about financial mayhem in our present peering over that dang-nabbed cliff. I say give them a good push!
Then I must prepare for tonight's repast. I will probably wear my new leggings:

I got so excited! I loved this print and they had them in the grey in my size, which I bought. The red was equally fabulous, but only in large and extra large. So I contacted my sister Beatrice and she scored them for me at her local (get this) KMart... and they were on sale! The things we worry about in the holiday season. God bless us, everyone!

In Which The World Does Not End and I Take Sick

So I begin to experience symptoms that I first attribute to the consumption of too much cookie dough while preparing greasy lumps of sugar for the Cookie Exchange at work. And as a true Lover of All Kinds of Cookies, you can only imagine my despair at being unable to attend and swap out my Ornamented Sugar Cookies with Colored Sugar and Creme de Menthe Chocolate Chip Cookies for equally elaborate and delightful extravagances. (I must be very ill indeed; I'm playing with needless formatting!)
Anyway, the feelings that I was feeling did not abate after a reasonable time, but worsened. I became seriously nauseous and started getting chills. Bob and Jules and I attempted to watch a movie, but I bagged and simply lay in bed freezing and wishing for the deliverance that a mighty hurl would bring.
We slept for hours, and upon awakening, I felt no better, nay worse. My head is killing me and I continue shivering and dizzy. I forced myself to consume a piece of Bob's bread simply to enable my ingesting Ibuprofen in an effort to rein in the thundering headache.
It doesn't help that the weather is abominable- worthy of the end of the Mayan calendar. It is pouring rain, driving wind and general unpleasantness. As with the hurricane last year, the odd direction of the wind has forced rain backwards through the door in my studio and there is a major puddle on the floor beneath our Christmas tree. Even poor Jules, despondent that we are unable to take our daily walk, seems less than enthusiastic about a trip outside.
Bob has been dispatched to our local supermarket to procure provisions should I live. I figured some external corroboration that the world had indeed not ended was in order. Although I did call in sick to work and someone who sounded remarkably like my co-worker Erica (and not a Mayan deity) answered. Alas! All those lovely cookies beyond my grasp!

The Two Things of Christmas, Maybe Three

Okay, repeat after me (I sound like a broken record), "The two things that make me feel anything remotely Xmas-y are the 1.) Christmas Cookies, and 2.) The Tree." As you can see, the first batch of Christmas Thing #1 is pictured above. I have now consumed so much dough that I feel vaguely bilious, but that's a good thing! There's a second batch on the way.
And look! What to my wondering eye should appear:

Away in a corner, surrounded by Tibetan prayer flags, no less! So now I do (kinda) feel a bit Christmas-y. And I'm finishing up our Annual Christmas Card Extravaganza. That takes time and energy as we still insist on hand-making all the cards. But they're all small creations and that's a good thing to send off into the universe. I believe that the influence exerted by making and sending something carefully hand made is priceless (like those credit card ads!). I really (mostly) enjoy making the cards; maybe once every five years or so, we grumble and "take a vacation" and purchase a box of pre-mades. This was definitely not one
of those years!
Tomorrow is the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, and, apparently, the last day of life on earth. Or the end of the world... something big! We'll see! Our friend Joe is coming by to celebrate darkness and doom with us. At least we'll go out in style!

Cheer Me Up, Batman

Yes, this is supposed to be a happy time of year. Various holidays occur, we are permitted to overindulge and there are pretty lights and even some presents. But what with things like mass shootings and general craziness, sometimes it's hard to feel good.
Silliness is an important antidote. Jules is supremely good at silliness. Witness these (sorta out of focus) pictures (well, he wouldn't hold still and was showing off!).

Jules is very jealous now that Maggie the Horse is here. He knows I like her, even though I point out that she has to live outside and he comes in and sleeps in the bedroom with us. So every time I go to the store to buy horsey food, I come home with another bag of tennis balls for Jules. The back yard is riddled with them, as is the house. He guards them like a little dragon, that's why he's rolling around.

Just look at him! Making a selection or counting them. And believe me, that's a pathetic fraction of the thirty plus balls he now has. I should take a detail of the ones that Jules has deconstructed.
They look like dinosaur eggs, gathered together into a nest.

At least he's cheerful and he keeps our spirits up. Don't tell Jules, but I got him more balls for Christmas!

Future Xmas Trees

We still have no Christmas tree! As I've mentioned several hundred times, there are only two requirements for me to be assured of a holly, jolly Christmas: cookies (and lots of them, carefully decorated) and a tree. I'm beginning to work on Phase 1 (cookies) as we're having a cookie exchange at work and I need an assortment for giving and eating. (All that dough! A bizarre gift to myself!)
As far a Phase 2, I wandered the property yesterday late morning potentially thinking maybe I'd stumble upon the perfect- yet easily sacrificed- tree. All I found were ones like above, or below:

Like perfect for a hundred years from now! So Bob is going to try and fell a tall tree that's dead all the way up until five or six feet from the top. That way we get fence posts AND a Christmas tree. Believe me, we won't miss the tree in question; it's sort of hidden in a bunch of other scraggly spruces.
In the meantime, here's a pretty picture of our small pond, freezing over in the chilly morning.

Hard to think of such things now, but due to the generosity of a few friends, there are irises planted in the "mucka" (Bob's word) at the edge of the pond. Next spring should be very pretty!

A Long Way Down

Here's what it looks like if you're lucky enough (or crazy enough!) to get on a horse. Maggie is listening to me as I had to take the camera out of the case and change the settings and then take a picture. But she's very good! Really quiet and sane... not like certain other equines whose name we will not mention. Ahem.
And on that note, I had what no doubt would have been a major disaster had I not been riding a real good little horse like Maggie. As I mosey-ed up the driveway, our neighbor's enthusiastic LARGE chocolate Lab spotted me and Maggie and decided that we were too weird to pass up and he came bounding through the hole in the fence barking vociferously. A less experienced horse would (possibly) have freaked but Maggie stood her ground, not liking Chops the Dog's attentions particularly, but not (over) reacting. What a good girl; she earned her carrots!
I am making my way back to the position that riding is really fun. Crispin (Oops! Don't think I was naming names) was a tad spooky (I'm being polite). I got scared a few two many times by his spookiness and began anticipating... which does not make for relaxed riding.  After my eye injury, I was told by one of my surgeons that I'd be crazy to ever ride again but Hell! I can't go around avoiding things I love. It worked out in terms of a good reason to avoid the riding of a horse that shied at everything; that would have been just looking for trouble! So trading seems an inspired answer. I'm still waiting for a vet check (this Thursday) of Maggie to make sure everything's in the right place and working correctly. Until then, despite the chilly wet weather I'm having a really good time!
And yes, even on a small horse, the ground looks like a long way down!

Artist's Rendering

Here is an artist's rendering of our new horse, Maggie. I pointed to my beloved Bob that he probably never expected to have even one horse in his life time, and here he is, onto a second horse! And for someone who never thought to have dogs, Bob is well onto what? his fourth dog. (That doesn't count Archie who was my dog in college and beyond and accompanied us to Bridgewater. He died there, after a year at age 16 or 17!)
So Bob is becoming quite the animal expert; next thing, he'll be begging us to get a cat. Or chickens. Or that alpaca...
So until that vet check on the 12th of December, I'm happy with Maggie. I am trusting the vet does not turn up any really awful unanticipated surprises. I was told she was around 15, but I suspect she's a but older, which is okay. I did some research on the web and here's an interesting fact about determining a horse's age by their teeth. Of course, I've always heard that was a semi-reliable way to tell but I thought there was a bit of voodoo or something involved, in which horse whisperers and other sages were able to read teeth like tea leaves. But there is actually a formation called Galvyne's Groove that helps to give a somewhat accurate read. (Boy I love the Internet!) This groove appears on the side of a horse's teeth at about age ten. By 15, the groove is half way down the tooth. At about age 20, the groove is all the way down. After 20, the top line of the tooth is clear and the groove is only present in the lower half of the tooth. In very advanced old age, the groove disappears entirely. Now you can impress all your friend's with a morsel of horse knowledge. So I'm guess-timating that Maggie is about 17 or 18 by the length of her Galvyne's Groove. (She wasn't super cooperative about my looking in her mouth but I managed!)
Maggie is great fun to ride but she isn't the easiest horse to catch! She's smart and on to my tricks. If I get the saddle and bridle out, she walks very purposefully away, down into the field and will allow you to approach- but not too close. She has this figured out. So I tried a bucket (empty) a carrot extended. Boy did she stretch and reach for that carrot, but I couldn't get the lead rope over her neck. Finally, I pretended to lose interest and I got the wheelbarrow and started cleaning up the field. The she got all nosy; she never suspected that I had the halter in the wheelbarrow! And she's fine about tacking up after you get her, and even seems to enjoy the ride. I'm certain we'll come to an understanding.