Thursday

Last year I was more into Christmas than usual. I got a small, but real, tree and put it up on the center island in the kitchen. I baked many, many dozens of cookies. I even put up our old family house lights on the dog yard shed and I left them on until the spring equinox to brighten up the long winter nights. 

This year, no tree, fewer cookies, and I hadn't turned the lights on even though I left them up from last year. When I plugged them in late this afternoon only about a third of them came on, making a sad but  perfect representation of how I am feeling about Christmas this year. I worked most of the day on Thursday before realizing that both Thursday and Friday were company holidays this year. I resumed work Thursday evening because I had nothing better to do and I didn't want to be scrambling to catch up next week. It may have been productive but it didn't do anything for my generally bad attitude. 

But the day wasn't all as gloomy as my attitude. The sun was shining, and I did get the dogs out to the pasture for a run. River seems to have passed the foreign object he ate; his digestive tract is apparently back to normal, and he hasn't pooped indoors at night for the past two nights. Best of all, the folks who came to meet Hugo yesterday have decided that they do want to adopt him. We'll probably do that someday next week I'm guessing. In the meantime, he and I had a really good disc throwing session in the pasture today.

Della and Declan

Declan the goat, jumping, all four feet off the ground.

Max and River

I hope that with his digestion back to normal River will start packing on some weight.

I had trouble even getting River to come out to the pasture today. It may have been Hugo's presence, or maybe just the fact that because River was raised to be meat he never really knew the joy of dogging around in an open field. And isn't that just rather sad.