And Suddenly It's December!

Physical therapy three times a week is a big time obligation, including the commute.  Thanksgiving zipped right by us and winter seems to have arrived in earnest.  The quail, junkos, sparrows and some of the finches winter over, thankful for Ian's birdfeeders.  It's been a very dry year so far and it's cold - 27 degrees at 3:00 this afternoon.

The tradition has been to go up into the Sierras the day after Thanksgiving and everyone cut Christmas trees.  I'm still not up to riding on rough roads so Ian went up into the Sierras above Frenchman's Lake and cut this Forest Service permitted tree on Wednesday.  We had our traditional Thanksgiving family dinner on Thursday, but the change was that Friday Ian and I had breakfast here about 9ish.

With the old traditional, we'd go to breakfast after cutting our trees.  It was always fun but crowded and loud in a restaurant.  Josh's suggestion of breakfast and Bloody Marys at our house was the perfect replacement tradition. Most of our family lives out of the state so relished the time to visit without presents and meal preparations. Five of the cousins enjoyed both days and stay in touch online in between visits.

I finished great granddaughter Olivia's hat and mitts and got them in the mail on Wednesday.

I couldn't believe how fast the package went.  John took this picture of Olivia and Shannon and sent it yesterday!  

Madeline doesn't get much socialization and so hides when people come to the house.  We were worried over Thanksgiving weekend when we had a house full.  When we didn't see her for hours on end, we became concerned that she had slipped out of doors into the wilds.  Not so.  She created her own safe house which we didn't discover until I nearly sat on her.  Do you see the kitty in this picture??

I decided not to fill my Etsy store and removed the link from my blog.  I sell by word of mouth and am just glad to have the pressure off of me to get things done.  When I was removing the link I noticed that the link I used to have to The Library Thing was gone.  While I did pay for the "lifetime membership" I haven't updated it since moving to Good Reads.  Still, I would preferred to have elected to remove the link.

Also, NeoWORX the "hit"counter that I subscribed to for the last seven years just emailed me that he could no longer could afford to compete against free counters and was closing his business.  I'm disappointed as it was fun to see where people visited from.  I'll miss that counter.  It's a reminder too that when we entrust data to a provider, there's no guarantee that it will be there in the future.  I hear a lot of talk about "cloud" storage, but this is the very reason I'm not ready to jump on board.