We’ve been very unsure about our New Year’s Day Open House this year because of our driveway, aka The Canyon Of Slime. However, it’s dried out enough that we’re having no trouble getting up and down with the minivan, and it’s not supposed to rain until Sunday, so we’re saying heck with it—–let’s do it. So….

Saturday, January 1st, 2005, at the farm. This is not a potluck—-we’ll have Blackeyed Peas, Collards, Biscuits, and DH’s home-cured Country Ham. However, do bring any leftover Christmas goodies that you’d like to get out of the house, and we’ll put them on the dessert table. Anytime from 2 or 3pm on. Hope to see you!

We have nieces and nephews visiting for a few days—it’s been really hectic and really fun. They’re such sweet kids, ages eight, ten, and twelve, and they seem to be finding our lifestyle somewhat shocking, as I’m sure we’d find theirs. Today they learned to milk goats (and did very well at it, I might add), drag firewood down off the mountain with DH, and chop kindling (our nerves could only take that for a very short time). They all drank and enjoyed goat milk, though the oldest liked it the most, and drank an entire half gallon by himself! They’re only here until Thursday evening, so we’re trying to make the most of it.

Tomorrow is a longish day at work: 6-ish am until 4 pm. I need the work—Ron the landlord left a message today, wanting us to cough up some money, and since we’re desperately needing to buy a car right now, things are tight! I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a couple of nice big jobs for DH this winter. Especially since we have a little business scheme that we need to raise a bit of startup capital for….more details on that later.

Well, Christmas was lovely—fairly quiet and peaceful. I have to give myself some credit: I managed to avoid getting completely stressed out this year, and that helped a lot with the peaceful part. The girls love their dollhouses, which, I have to admit, are awfully cute. I want one of my own, since I can tell that the girls aren’t going to share theirs with me as much as I think they should.

We did not get our foot of Christmas snow, and there’s none in the forecast as far as I can see. We did get quite a bit of Christmas frost, however.

ED seems to have a stomach bug—she’s been throwing up since 4 o’clock this morning. Actually, I think she stopped this afternoon sometime, but that was pretty much all day! Poor baby. There is an evil stomach virus-type-thing going around Hot Springs right now, and while we’re hating that ED got it (or something), DH and I are praying really, really hard that we don’t get it!

I’ve been working all day, housekeeping and then innkeeping at the Mag. I started at10:30 this morning, and will probably be here til 10 tonight. It’s a good thing: we are needing to buy a new Subaru, as there seems to be some difficulty in finding a new engine for ours. And getting around in the last couple of weather messes made us realize that we can’t live here without a Subaru or some equivalent 4WD.

Hope y’all all had a Christmas as laid back as ours!

What a night! It is so intense out there: very strong winds, rain, 50 weird degrees. We went to my dad’s tonight for supper and a visit with cousins. Had a great time; over-ate as usual (moderation doesn’t seem to be a family trait), opened gifts. Left there late-ish, like maybe 10:30, stopped at the grocery store, and started home over the mountain in the pouring rain. It was a slow ride home, and when we got to our driveway, DH was feeling a little tense, because he had predicted that we wouldn’t be able to make it up the driveway because of the mud. And he was right. We made it about halfway up, hit the grand canyon that is the middle of our road, and it was all we could do to back down. Bernard was freaking out, even though we tried to assure her that we weren’t in any danger (we really weren’t—-it was just a pain), but finally we got the minivan ina good place to leave it for the night. So then we’re gathering our groceries and stuff, and we hear a tree fall somewhere not too far away. When we got home (at midnight), after a wild hike up the hill in the driving rain and howling wind, our neighbor called to tell us that a big dead locust had fallen across the road right after we tried to get home—we’re guessing it was the one we heard. So now the road is impassable. It feels really good to be in our warm little house.

Hey! My dad and mom and sister and BIL got me a Cuisinart food processor for Christmas! How sweet is that? I can’t wait to shred something!

We are aiming for a foot of snow for Christmas. We’re trying to stay focused on this—if y’all want to put a little energy towards it, we’d sure appreciate it.

crazy jay blue)

demon laughshriek

ing at me

your scorn of easily

hatred of timid

& loathing for(dull all

regular righteous

comfortable)unworlds

thief crook cynic

(swimfloatdrifting

fragment of heaven)

trickstervillain

raucous rogue &

vivid voltaire

you beautiful anarchist

(i salute thee

Tonight was the Solstice party at the D*’s, and it was lovely to see everybody. The food was great, too.

It was touch and go whether we were going to be able to go to the party at all. We decided at least twice during the day that we couldn’t possibly make it—our driveway was a sheet of ice (at a forty-five degree angle), and the morning’s freezing rain didn’t help matters. But finally it warmed up enough to start the thawing process, and our neighbor very kindly loaned us his car with the studded snow tires, and we took our challah and our baked macaroni and cheese and our dandelion wine and ventured out for the first time in several days. It felt really good.

It’s 36° right now—it feels practically tropical—and the house is deliciously comfortably warm, and we’re probably not even going to have to feed the fire tonight. Oh, heaven.

It’s 3° and windy. We got about 7 inches of snow today, which is being blown against the windows right now. The house is surprisingly warm, due in no small part to the plastic on all the windows, which I finally finished today. The very drafty window over my computer desk was the last to get done; I was procrastinating because it is so hard to get to, requiring moving a whole lot of junk. But when I sat down tonight to play on the computer it was cold! So I really felt I had no choice. I like to wash the windows before I put the plastic on, but when I sprayed this one, the windex froze into a solid sheet. It looks OK now, but then it’s dark. We’ll see in the morning.

DH and I started the girls’ Christmas project today. Finally. Do y’all remember that it was supposed to be DH’s project? Well, now it’s both of ours. I’ve been nagging encouraging him to begin the project for, oh, about a month now. I prepared an attic workshop. I made a list of materials, and made sure we had everything we needed. And finally, today, he decided to take a look at the instructions. And promptly freaked out, saying there was no way he could get this done—-it would take a month for each one! Good grief. So I judiciously applied a bit of alcohol, and took over the project, reading the instuctions and barking orders at DH, who was feeling much more easy-going after the alcohol application, and we managed to get one nearly completed today. So, since we are snowed in without our Subaru, we should be able to finish the other tomorrow, assuming there’s any rum left.

The girls are the Hot Rock Brigade lately. We keep several smooth, round river rocks in the oven of the wood cookstove, and just before bed the girls wrap them in towels and put them in all the beds, down around where our feet go. It makes it a whole lot easier to climb in those cold sheets! Which I’m going to go do right now. Good night!

We did end up going into Asheville yesterday afternoon, with a long list of things to do and places to go, of which we managed to do about half. Four people=four agendas. But we did go see The Polar Express, and really enjoyed it. I had read reviews saying it was dark and creepy, and it kinda was. But that’s OK: the season of winter solstice is dark and a little creepy—that’s the whole point of the huge celebration this time of year. The days are short, the nights long; the weather ranges from uncomfortable to life-threatening; life can get a little cramped and dark. The solstice is the bottom—it’s up from here. It seems to me that we forget the dark and frightening race memories that we carry about this season, and that’s when Christmas becomes saccharine and meaningless. It is a bitter-sweet time; bitter because the winter has only just begun, and there’s a long, bleak stretch out ahead of us. Sweet because in the darkness is the seed of light; the year has renewed itself, and we enter the half of the year in which the sun is waxing, the days are growing. It will be spring again.

This is the only time of year that Christian mythology works for me. The early church so obviously co-opted the earlier pagan midwinter rituals, but I like the way they work for this season: Mary/the Goddess giving virgin birth/parthenogenesis to the son/sun from the stable/darkness.

Anyway—the movie.

I thought they did a good job of capturing the spirit of the book—the train was big and dark and rumbling and awe-inspiring; the North Pole was sort of strange and slavic, sitting up there on the top of the world; the elves were odd little people, just as you imagine they would be. The animation was fabulous, except for the faces of the people in the movie, which I found to be a little creepy and very distracting—-I was thinking about the animation the whole time, which shouldn’t have been the case. We all enjoyed it, however.

Bernard woke up in a panic with croup at 3:00 this morning. Poor thing. I took her in the bathroom (the cold, cold bathroom) and turned on the shower and let her breathe the steam. I also gave her a homeopathic remedy: Spongia. Indicated for croupy, barking coughs, especially when the patient is panicky. I keep that and Drosera around just for croup. Drosera seems to be indicated more for a whooping cough kind of cough, with long coughing spells during which the patient can’t catch her breath, and coughing spells that lead to vomiting (that would be ED). Drosera is also for coughs that are brought on by hot rooms. That was not us last night; it was 12° outside, and above freezing in the back of the house, but not by much. Anyway, she ended up sleeping with us after two doses of Spongia five minutes apart, and she didn’t cough any more. My sweetie.