The Holiday Report

With work and the holidays, I have not had any time for the last month or so – so no updates. Not that we aren’t here, and not that things haven’t been happening. So here is a partial summary of what’s been going on for the last month or so.

The Women of Wessyngton Road met at Lynsley’s and then walked up to Caramba Café for the traditional celebration of the Winter Solstice (that would be drinking Margaritas).

Another house on Wessyngton Road has been leveled, next to the Large House that is Architecturally Different from Adjacent Houses (LHADAH) that has been completed and on the market for the last several months. They had had a notice up that one or more trees were going to be removed, and sometime before Christmas a huge bile of magnolia branches appeared at the curb. Some were salvaged by neighbors, no doubt for holiday decorations - I would have done so myself if I were organized enough. Now, if another LHADAH is built on this lot, then there will be three of them in a row - this one, the one that is already finished, and the one that is still under construction. Does that mean that technically the one in the middle will no longer be an LHADAH?

Christmas morning started with cooking, then present-opening at Kathy and Steve's with Angela, and then later in the morning at our house. Tom got me a radar gun, which is a totally fabulous Christmas present. We went out later in the day looking for moving cars to point it out but it being Christmas Day, there weren't many of them. So we went to Haygood with a load of corrogated cardboard for recycling and took the gun with us. A little kid with a new bike was already in the parking lot there. I did get to clock a couple of cars on East Rock Springs, no doubt to the puzzlement of a couple of drivers who wondered about the crazy woman standing on the curb with the hairdryer. But they did slow down.

We ended up with more people for Christmas dinner than for Thanksgiving. Fred made it for Christmas dinner, as did Angela's former mother-in-law and a friend of Angela's, as well as Angela herself. Fewer leftovers than at Thanksgiving, as I had a better idea of how much 8 or 9 or 10 people would actually eat. We did have gingerbread people, who had what Caroline described as "scary" chocolate-chip eyes.

We went the Washington, D.C., the week after Christmas, and while we were gone one of the rats made a break for it. This would be one of Sarah's pet rats that lives in the cage in an upstairs bathroom, not an unwelcome visiting-from-outdoors kind of rat. This particular rat had escaped once before and had several exciting days living behind the washing machine before being recaptured and returned to the cage. There were many sightings over the several days following our return home - it would emerge from the space between the washing machine and the dryer, only to retreat if we made a move for it - but eventually we were able to recapture it when we found it on top of the cage, presumably updating its former cage mates about life on the run. (That's often how fugitives are caught - they just can't stay away from family and friends.)

During the month of December, a fair amount of effort was expended to make Christmas cards. Several years ago I got a silkscreen kit for Christmas that has since been used to make several different kinds of T-shirts but we never had tried the photoemulsion technique. So Tom worked on that - we did manage to get a usable screen for the drawing for the front (two different designs, one from each daughter) but the screen for the printing inside didn't come out as well, despite a couple of efforts. So we have blank cards. I did print them, but they are still sitting in a pile on the dining room table (which, by the way, still has the extra leaves we put in it for Christmas dinner). My rule is if you get the cards out by Martin Luther King's birthday, they aren't really late. But that would be this weekend, so I guess I need to get started.