(Late) Holiday Miscellany.

Pictured here we have Lexie’s Christmas cactus which bloomed beautifully and prolifically right on time, and has the honor of being one of our longest-lived houseplants.

Lacking a real live Christmas tree since neither of us were actually going to be here for the actual day, we festooned our then-dormant wood stove with lights and used it as “the Christmas stove.” It’s pretty steadily burning wood these days, and has been relieved of its tree duties.

Lastly, Sküti von Buns, the Christmas bunny. She’s gotten pretty big, but the only reason she let me get this close with the camera is because I was down on the floor where she could keep an eye on me, where it didn’t seem like I could do any serious looming and threatening.

Good golly Ma, it’s a fire!?

For anybody who’s been following the continuing saga of our not being able to get the wood stove installed for one reason or another... it’s finally over! After one missing part, then another, all finally came together. Our guy came over and put it in last week on Friday, the only sunny and over 40 day we looked to be having for a while.

There’s a whole subculture to fire-building. Everyone has their own tips, preferences, etc. I was walking down the street past a neighbor’s house the other day after only a few days of keeping the home fires burning, and thought, “Man, that fence sure would make some nice kindling!” You start to look at everything wooden in terms of how well (or whether) it would burn.

We have a guy bringing a big load of wood soon. Meantime, we’ve borrowed what we have now from Tom & Caroline’s stash. They came by and helped us build the inaugural fire Saturday morning, and Caroline took this picture for us. (and Terri brought some more wood by to us yesterday!).

In the words of the old song:
The weather outside is frightful,
but the fire is so delightful!