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It took me a lot of time to get around to decorating the tree. Last weekend Ears was sick (and he still is). That was super distressing and I couldn't finish the tree. Procrastination ensued in other forms.
Yesterday I finally got around to finishing the tree. I had really picked out a weird one, whose branches pointed in all kinds of directions. This made doing the lights super chore-ish. And then my usual Christmas music failed me.
As I've mentioned in previous years I have some downright lugubrious music I like to listen to while decorating my tree. This is all well and good, but I have observed that it's been a rather cruddy year and recreational ennui isn't as fun when you feel an abundance of the real thing. Another observation: whoever sequenced The Raspberries' Greatest Hits is a genius. But even that made me feel blue. This called for soaring violins, over-the-top arrangements, twangy guitar and occasionally inappropriate application of zither. It was Judy Time. And time for the Blue Comets' greatest hits and I'm sorry, Ava, the band from Samoa, you are going back to Hawaii to resell at the record store.
They must have hit something beautiful:
Ears is his papa's special boy. And after the struggle we had at first getting him and his little friend strong and bug-free he's been the strongest fellow ever. Strong like a horse, faithful like a dog. He got sick the other day, then sicker. The vet thinks it's bronchitis or asthma. It's hard to see him sick.
Here he is in stony lonesome, at the vet.
Not shown: I looked through the window from our exam room into the surgery. I noticed that it took four people to draw blood. Three to hold him down and one to do the deed. He never scratches or bites, but he's SO STRONG.
Today he's back on the couch. I'm about to make him a Christmas tree, and then get him some antibiotics.
Good times.
Yesterday I began the Christmas season by getting my mom what may have been the most beautiful Christmas tree ever. I delivered it to her, and then middlesis and I put it in the stand. Mission accomplished! The two of them decorated it today.
Meanwhile, back on the ranch, I went back to Home Depot today to get our own tree. As I suspected, Mom's tree was, in fact, the most beautiful tree ever. But I found a funky one I liked, and tried my luck at finding a red Christmas cactus in the garden shop. Nope! But my search took me past the garden ornaments and the whim took me. My initial plan was to hang them in our maple trees, but when I looked at ornaments and trees together I realized that my vision wasn't going to work. The mugo pine, however, would be the perfect candidate for decoration.
It's a topiary tree, and before we owned this house someone had spent years lovingly crafting it into three puffballs on chubby branches. It's kinda weird, kinda adorable.
When we redid the front yard last month I couldn't say goodbye to it. I
wanted to work around it, because when the previous owners redid the
front yard they left it in place. This I know from Google Street View. So we've committed to the mugo pine and I am going to celebrate him.
I festooned him with the Home Depot ornaments, as well as plastic vegetables, my plastic woodpecker from the 1980s, a plastic lobster and the action figure of librarian Nancy Pearl. This is still a work in progress, but I'm loving it. Business in the front, party in the back.
