Bring on the Nog!

Brandon asked me this morning if it felt like Christmas to me, yet.  It really does.  Yesterday was our office Christmas lunch, and funny gift giving and stealing game, and last Saturday was our family tree decorating party.  I'm firmly in the holiday spirit.  Bring on the nog, I'm ready!  

I took a day off work last Friday, wrapped all my gifts, and spent the evening with my parents preparing for the family to gather the next day.  I tricked my mother into vacuuming all the flies from the windows (Merry Christmas to me!), and we decorated with my collection of holiday bling.  I even wrapped a long red ribbon around one of the posts in the living room.  It doesn't look like a stripper pole, either...

The mantel shelf behind the dinning room table was decked out with cedar boughs and all the trimmings. The stockings were hung with care.  Santa has already filled Brandon's stocking, but mine is suspiciously empty.  

I had to throw the card board box that holds the artificial and pre-lighted tree in the trash, because it was stored on top of the goat shed, and a chicken used it as her nightly perch.  Thankfully the tree was fine once I shook off a few chicken droppings!  I had the tree set up and ready for my nieces and nephew to decorate.  It's become an annual tradition, to come to our house and decorate the tree while the adults enjoy a cup of cheer.  We popped some popcorn and made long strands of popcorn and cranberry garland.  This year my nephew was tall enough to reach the top of the tree!   

Mom was inspired to make some of these three dimensional paper snowflakes.  So pretty! 

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

A Dog in the Pantry

A friend of mine has a new puppy.  It's adorable, with big eyes and ears tiny little baby teeth.  And it is so young it still has that cute puppy breath smell.  Unlike Puck, who has that old-dog breath smell!

Puck was trained to sleep in a crate when he was a puppy.  It wasn't long before he out grew his crate, and because he was so reliable (except for that time he chewed up Brandon's glasses!) we didn't worry about leaving him alone in the house when we were gone.  But, he was hooked on sleeping in a small space, and when he couldn't use his crate, he took over the bedroom closet and then the bathroom.  Now that we live at the little farm house, he has claimed the pantry as his room.  I resisted for a while, but eventually accepted it, and moved his bed to his favorite spot.  Now it's normal for me to stand on a fluffy dog bed with my feet on either side of a grumpy old dog while I'm searching for my ingredients.  My nephew told me that having a dog sleep in the pantry was "sort of unsanitary, but okay."  Ha!  

It's finally cold enough to have a real fire burning all evening long.  I appreciate the warmth almost as much as my senior pets! 

Max the cat is going to be twenty years old, which is ninety-six human years, according to an on-line source.  Puck is working on year fifteen, so he's nearly seventy-six in human years.   

Max and Puck both agree, at their age, they get to sleep where ever they want!  

Pleasant

We were discussing our birth months and our astrological signs with some friends, and someone said to me, "You're a Libra? That must be why you are so pleasant."   

I take this as the compliment it was meant to be, but I have thought about this label several times lately.  Pleasant isn't the most dashing moniker!  If you only know me from this blog, would you describe me as pleasant?  I was told by a friend that she likes to read this blog, in part, because the subject matter is light.  Especially when the news headlines are most often dark or stressful.  

It's nice to think of my words and pictures as a source of pleasantness, or light.

Another friend of mine told me that she was usually stressed by what was reported to be happening in the world before she even made it to the office.  She was angry or disturbed every day, during the solitude of her commute.  The morning headlines where enough to make her feel the weight of the world even before she took on the stresses of her daily job.  

I don't follow the news.  I've stopped paying attention to things outside my sphere of influence, as a matter of self preservation.  Selfish?  Sure, but who will protect my pleasant thoughts if not me?  Stuff seeps in, through conversation, so you don't have to worry that I will live blissfully unaware of the worlds big events, because trust me, someone always takes the time to fill me in.  Bombings, shootings, tsunamis, wildfires, sex scandals - all that stuff finds it's way to me, but I don't seek it out, and I try not to let it in passively.  I like to control my own message.

I might not be able to hold up my end of the dinner party conversation with out turning the talk to the challenges of goat breeding, but otherwise, being uninformed isn't a problem.  It's actually kind of pleasant.  

Donkey Drainage

What a terrible title for a blog post, right?  Don't worry, nothing is draining from the donkeys!  At least nothing that isn't pretty normal. Ha!

The drainage I'm talking about is in the donkey yard/pen.  When it rains a lot, like it has this fall, water flows from the roof of the chicken coop and from the grassy area in front of my corn crib barn, and flows directly under the gate to the donkey yard, down the slight slope, and pools at the fence line and at the entrance to the donkey shed.  The donkeys tramp through the mud, obliterating any little channels I try to excavate to move the water away from their stall.  It turns into a muddy mess, and the donkeys get their feet dirty every time they step out of their room.  

I've pondered different solutions to this.  Some of the engineering solutions, such as drain pipes, ditches, and site re-grading, would work wonders, I'm sure, but in practice, I don't have any equipment for jobs like that.  I think my best idea so far is to dump a giant load of sand in the yard.  I think this would at least keep the donkeys from sinking to their ankles in the mud, because the sand would pack down hard, and they could walk on it even when it was wet.  But, I don't have a load of sand either!  My temporary solution is to cover the mud with old hay.  

All that old hay helps the mud situation, for sure, but it doesn't last that long, and makes the drainage worse.  Organic matter is building up along the fence line and flattening the grade, which prevents the site from draining even more.  Plus, it's not a small job to cart in enough hay to keep two heavy animals from sinking.  If drainage elves were real, like I wish, they would come and remove about four inches of perfectly mixed garden soil from the downhill side of the pen, improving the drainage, and then they would cover the ground with loads of course sand.  Then they would put gutters and rain barrels on the roof of the chicken coop.  They might even build a roof over the donkey yard, so the donkeys and I could stand out of the rain.  I would leave cookies for the drainage elves, if only I could coax some in.  

Rufus doesn't see what the big deal is.  It's just a little mud.