Musings just before Christmas

December weather.

December 20, 2017

Snowing steadily.  Fire in stove glowing coals orange.  Gunther asleep, his back legs scissoring.  Got off phone with Clara in San Diego.  She promised to send an essay young George wrote about Gunther for the Portable Wall.  Jon is making up the pages for the first PW issue in a long time.  Clara asked what I planned to do today.  A puzzle?  Read?  I planned to sit here looking at the fire.  Then I considered writing for the first time in about a month.

P. and I haven’t dressed up the house much for Christmas.  Oh, there’s a wreath near the front door and a festive light bouquet, and indoors a candle on the dining room table.  But that’s it.  Some bells on the back doorknob.  A pint of whiskey in the cupboard.  Christmas preparations. A few gifts on the clavichord.  Preparations.

Is this going to be a Christmas letter?  What’s happened during 2017?  We paid taxes and our CPA retired.  He was overly religious, we thought, so I found a new one without such extreme views about Christianity.

P. and I still work part time.  That’s a good thing because I often nap on days I’m not working.  Those naps wouldn’t be any fun without the work days.

Her work is more fun than mine, although I get what pleasure I can from being a pharmacist.  Damn!  I still don’t know what a pharmacist does and I’m almost retired from being one.  For a while I defined my job as helping people get the most from their prescriptions.  That job description worked well for me when I worked for the Indian Health Service and I had time and opportunity to sit down with people and talk about their meds.  I dreamt about working there just a couple days ago.

People talk about their health and the health of their loved ones in a Christmas letter.  I’ll probably skip that in mine.

We did some traveling, but I’ll probably skip that too.  Right now I can’t remember where all we went.  Christmas day P. and I plan to drive to Duluth with Gunther.  What an adventure that is likely to be!

I spend too much time on Facebook.  P. avidly works crossword puzzles.  Every now and again someone will approach me and announce that we are friends on Facebook.  This is always a bit awkward, but it’s always nice to know a real human being is out there in computer-land.

What to do for supper tonight?  Last night we shared a pork loin with potatoes, gravy, and salad.  Seems like I ought to come up with an idea, but those ideas are the hardest part.  I used to make a killer vegetable pie, just right for this cold snowy weather.  But that would mean a trip to the store for peppers, onions, mushrooms, cheese.  Hey.  Why not?  Other than the risk to life and limb.

Gunther has shifted.  I poke him with my foot.  He looks at me, like “WTF?”  He migrated to his crate.  He yipped for no apparent reason, then crawled up on the back of my chair.