I'm dreaming of a healthy Christmas...

Just like so many childhood Christmases where I was marooned on the couch with a box of tissues...I mean, now? Have to get sick now? After a cocktail of Nyquil, I hope to awaken with only a cold, nothing worse.
Bah Humbug...Achoo!

O Christmas Tree

A favorite song of the season and a word from CD.

A moment's pause, O vanishing tree, of which the lower branches are dark to me as yet, and let me look once more! I know there are blank spaces on thy branches, where eyes that I have looked and smiled; from which they are departed...Now the tree is decorated with bright merriment, and song, and dance, and cheerfulness. And they are welcome. Innocent and welcome be they ever held, beneath the branches of the Christmas Tree, which cast no gloomy shadow!

-Charles Dickens, Christmas Stories

Sunday Quote

...At night on snowshoes on the drifting field
He wondered again, for whom had love stirred?
The stars glittered on the snow and nothing answered.
Then the Swan spread her wings, cross of the cold north,
The pattern and mirror of the acts of earth.

-Galway Kinnell, To Christ Our Lord

Holiday Lights, well, sort of

A very slow drive (lots of braking involved) around the neighborhood and clearly some of these were not focused. The unintended result looks so cool. The last one looks like ribbon candy, doesn't it?

Sunday Quote

So feast your eyes now
On mimic star and moon-cold bauble:
Worlds may wither unseen,
But the Christmas Tree is a tree of fable,
A phoenix in evergreen,
And the world cannot change or chill what its mysteries mean
To your hearts and eyes now.

- C.Day Lewis, The Christmas Tree.

The original velvet voices

"Oh you can go to the East, go to the West, someday you'll come
weary at heart back where you started from, you'll find your happiness lies
right under your eyes, back in your own backyard, back in your own backyard..."
I cannot even type these lyrics without singing them, so familiar are they. My Dad loved the (original) Ink Spots. I cannot find them singing "Back in your own Backyard" which I have quoted from, or my childhood favorite from their album: Doughnuts".

It all looks so very cold...

A winter walk last week. Even the photos look chilly. The morning storm blew our neighbor's lovely front yard fir tree down today - all the lights and holiday decorations lit up (a timer, I imagine) by themselves later on, strange looking on a broken tree. I thought it was so sad that they would drive home from work and see all the damage without anyone letting them know, but they are down the road neighbors and I don't even know their names.

Sunday Quote

Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.

-Desiderius Erasmus

I spy with my little eye...

more photos from our Wednesday jaunt, my sweetie browsing, inspired displays, and a silly who would rather take photos than shop (even though I did succumb to a few purchases).

colors and textures and pretty things, oh my

Wandering about one of my favorite stores after lunch at one of our favorite lunch spots near where we lived years ago and still enjoy visiting. They are very patient, these sales people, with my camera clicking ways, as is my youngest who plays chess while his parents shop.

A small Christmas shopping round-up

It doesn't get much better than octopus earrings if you are a fan of our tentacled friends. These earrings are pretty gorgeous as well - love the green. Speaking of green, could not believe someone was selling this - but I guarantee there will be takers - an awful lot of Twihard fans out there! Found this Cryptozoological Play Set at my go to place for silly fun stuff (someone will get this in a stocking, I betcha). On the completely different end of things - here is one of my favorite quotes beautifully illustrated (someday I am going to buy this for myself). Another someday personal purchase will be a print from this artist (we have one already of Jonah and the whale)- this might be a good gift for a mermaid lover. That said, most of my suggestions are probably a bit quirky but I did see some octopus ornaments at Anthropologie today so it seems that I am not alone in my tastes :)

Happy Birthday, Emmy!!!!

My dog, Emily Pajamas, is sixteen years old today! Woot! Woot!

Sunday Quote

He who limps is still walking.

-Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Happy Happy Joy Joy!

Is this over yet?

Watching the fellowship of the rings (first part of Lord of the Rings) for this zillionth time with my daughter this Thanksgiving Eve (I am a LOTR fan from way back)but it is the first time the ten year old has seen it. Lines like Frodo saying: "I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened." and Gandalf replies: "So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” have me in all my nerdy glory sighing with the life wisdom and wonder of it all (and swooning over Aragorn, of course as my 23 year old daughter does same with Legolas) and the ten year old who has been up and down, in and out of the kitchen restless is finally heard to say (near the heart-wrenching end) "Is this over yet?". Sigh.

Chill Hot Chill

It's chilly in the morning and then too hot at work and then at home, cold again. The pattern of the late fall and impending winter, I am sure. But I like the month of November, not just the turkey-stuffing-cranberry-delicious holiday, but so much of it, the husband saying how you can really see the sky with all the leaves down, the sense of change, the shift into a different way of seeing and feeling; I think the part of the soul that craves solitude and going deeper loves November.

Sunday Quote

Neatness was not one of the things he aimed at in life.

- George Selden, The Cricket in Times Square.

In the eye of the beholder

I'm a fool for rust and cracked cement and shadows and angles and the juxtaposition of things and the broken and discarded and the inarticulate and the monuments to some things that refuse to leave but linger on...I love old city brick and abandoned lots and I think there may be nothing more beautiful than a yellow light shining from a dark and foreboding building. I would probably wander around after the apocalypse unspeakly moved by the beauty of the rubble, the way the sun cast light over the broken and rusted girders. That is until the zombies came. Then it wouldn't be any fun at all.

Scrub-a-chugga-chugga

Wonder what this sounded like to the driver going underneath? Noticed this slow-moving train scrubber (a guess - seemed to be scrubbing the tracks) while I was pulled over to the side trying to figure out how to get unlost...

Sunday Quote

God is alive and magic is afoot.

-Leonard Cohen