DECEMBER 2020

My second time to see A Christmas Story...I laugh myself
silly.....................ARK, it always makes me laugh over the fragilley lamp...............

My cousins watch that movie several times every year. I think they know every word.
They also watch Christmas Vacation with Chevy Chase, over and over.

I had a very nice dinner with the neighbors. It snowed just enough to make a mess, to go with the 14 degree temperature. Indy probably got a lot more snow.

We do too ELLEN. That's hysterical, too, ELLEN....................

GRAYMARE:
 That is such a funny movie!  One of  my favorite scenes is the blindness caused by soap poisoning, LOL.  
 There was an opinion piece in the NY Times this week talking about the mother on The Christmas Story and how she was never named, never had a hot meal in 15 years,  didn't seem to get a present, and basically was the glue for that family.  She really is a great character!

Our kitten, Feather, has been such a bright spot on a dreary year.  She is either asleep or into everyone's business.   She and ThunderPuff are starting to get along pretty well....



I highly recommend a kitten to cheer up everyone!

Kumquat still isn't too thrilled about her....

We've had some really cold temperatures, but the wind has been strong.  Last night, the wind died down and the lake froze immediately.  It isn't completely frozen, but most of it is.  If the wind kicks up again, it will tear up the ice.  When it freezes that fast, you can hear the ice forming.


Sunday evening:  I had two neighbor couples come for my annual After Christmas Christmas party.  We ate and visited for more than 3 hours.  It was nice to have time to talk and tell silly stories.
If any of you are interested, this was the main food item, among several choices.  It's a winner.
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/sunny-anderson/sunnys-hot-ham-and-cheese-wreath-5505883
She used jalapenos jelly and rings. I used dill pickles on top. Instead of the jalapeno jelly inside, I mixed up half mayo half spicy brown mustard. There are lots of variations that could be done.
It baked really pretty and tasted really good too.

Merry Christmas everyone, a few days late. Christmas morning I woke to about 4 inches of light fluffy snow. Very pretty for Chirstmas. Enough to be there and make things pretty but not enough to have to plow the driveway! And now it's gone, yeah! On the down side, my brother spent a second Christmas in a row in the hospital. No one can visit him and he's on a super restricted diet and in a lot of pain. He went to the neurologist on Friday the 19th and the Dr sent him straight to the hospital from his office and had surgery on Saturday morning and he's been there ever since. He had more surgery on his neck. He could use some good thoughts. He's on the rehab floor now but looks like he will require 24/7 care to be sent home. We'll know more tomorrow.

Oh boy............my friend's horse colicked & died yesterday.........she was boarded at a private facility
and the owner hadn't checked the horses to even see if there was a problem. Oh, am glad I'm not
involved...........The mare was a really nice horse. I don't know the whole story yet.

INDY, hope your brother improves soon.........

2020 isn't good for anyone...................on to the new year fast and hope for the best.

Ohhhh, I'm so sorry about your friend's horse. That's awful.

Almost two weeks ago, Travis and Jamie took Cricket, the cat, to live at their house since he is an older cat now. He's been living outdoors most of the time. He could get in the barn anytime he wanted to. There was always food in there for him too. He'd been there three days and was loving it. He still wanted to go outside to do his business. In the middle of the night he started yowling to get outside. Travis let him out and went back to bed so he wasn't there when Cricket wanted back in. Then, they couldn't find him.
I was sure he would eventually make his way back here. It's only about a mile and a half from there to here. Travis walked the woods and looked everywhere for him, and I was watching around here. Jamie was driving back and forth between the two places. No Cricket.
Jamie reported him missing on a lost and found site. Last evening, I got a call from Travis, which is rare. Cricket had been found! He was more than halfway back here. A person had found him and posted on the website. Travis was in the truck and on the way within seconds. He got him home. Other than being hungry, he is fine.
I suspect that he will be staying in the house for a long time, yowling or not.
A very happy outcome for all of us.

INDYAPP:
I hope your brother's pain goes away and he recovers soon. Poor guy. Christmas in the hospital with no visitors is really awful, too.

ELLEN:
That is a pretty food dish. I could not eat the jalapeno version, though! Donnie would like it.

GRAYMARE:
I am sorry about your friend's mare. Did the mare die before a vet was called? How sad for your friend.... Colic is a cruel illness.

Our snow is starting to melt off today. Hopefully it will all be gone in another day or two. We need to get stall bedding sawdust tomorrow before the ground thaws out. We are down to the last spoonful!

Donnie got me a smart watch for Christmas. I saw it listed on Amazon, so got him one exactly like it without him knowing it. So now we have to prove we are smart enough to figure out how to use the smart watch. So far, it's not going well.... It has a GPS, a heart monitor, email capability, can be used to telephone or text, and even tells time! It's a blank screen right now.

GRAYMARE:  So sorry about your friends mare.  What a terrible thing to happen.

Christmas was quiet here, just me, George & Ace.  Not exactly my idea of a wonderful Christmas Day but ya gotta roll with it and not let things that are going on ruin our lives. After supper Rick came over and we ate Christmas cookies and drank coffee.  Did I sleep after drinking coffee at night???? 
NOOOOO what was I thinking?  Of course, I do have decaf but didn't think to use it.  LOL  

My friend Lynn was taken to the ER on Christmas Eve, she didn't take her meds and the manager of the assisted living high rise was worried about her, she is still in the hospital and in the psych ward, said she had nothing to live for.  So sad for her, she has such depression and the lock down of her building and total isolation for months wore her down.

My girlfriends Bev & Sharon came over yesterday and we had a girl chat with coffee and homemade Christmas cookies.  Rick brought over some cookies he had made and my son brought us cookies he and Bailee had made.  So we had some laughter and a lot of coffee and cookies but it was at 9 AM so no sleeping problems.

Our friend Carol (who was a nurse in Vietnam) told us she never ate a pierogie sooooooooo my son brought us some wonderful pierogies from Fishers Boston Market for Christmas and we are having a pierogie dinner with her and Rick tomorrow.  Stacy brought potato and cheese, cheese steak and Mexican pierogies for us for Christmas.  He brings them every year...the best pierogies in PA.  

Not much else going on around here. Next project take apart the Christmas tree and put the stuff away and back to a boring looking house.

Stay safe & healthy...

GRAYMARE: So sorry for your friends horse. So sorry for your friend.

Thank you all for your good wishes for my brother. He had ex-rays taken Monday and supposedly all looks good. Dr. tells him he had major surgery and the pain is a result of that and they will try to continue to manage it. My brother is a big guy and usually pretty tough, but this has had him in tears. I wish I could do something for him.

ELLEN glad to hear that Cricket was found. My barn kitty has been trying to talk me into letting her become an inside cat, but so far I have resisted. She has nests in the barn, plenty to eat and warm water to drink, but she meets me at the door of the house every morning. I pick her up and cuddle her as I carry her back to the barn where she stays until dinner time when she meets me at the door of the house again and we do it all over.

Yummm home made cookies. I made the comment to one of my co-workers last week that I had a taste for Christmas cookies but was to lazy to make them which was good since I would be the one eating them all. I came in to work a few days later to find a container of various home made Christmas cookies on my desk! I love the people I work with.

Indy, I hope they can get your brother's pain under control so that he will feel better.
Isn't it nice to have little surprises like the cookies? Some of those little things are the things that matter.

Had a bit of an adrenalin dump this morning. I went out to feed breakfast to the horses as usual. Sparkles meet me at the door and I carried / cuddled her out to the feed shed and fed her. Got the horse feed ready and started over to the barn. No horses at the gate. Hmm, unusual but not unheard of. Put the feed in the stalls and opened the barn door to let the horses in and still no horses? Hey Guys!? Where are you? Breakfast! Shine the flashlight around to their normal spots and I see movement coming out of the trees. OK just a little slow this morning. I go back in the barn and wait for them to come in. Sophie? check. Lily? check. Monster? check. Tiberius ? No check. OK close stall doors on the other three and still no Tiberius. NOT normal. Where is he? I pull the little hay wagon out to put out hay and still no Tiberius. Now I'm starting to worry. OK, grab a halter and check the fences. All in good order. Where in the heck is that horse? Still too dark to see anything. I'm wandering around in the woods trying to find him after looking in all the open areas. Starting to imaging horrible things like down with colic, or dead. Maybe someone stole him? I decide to go back to the barn to see if he had passed me in the dark. No horse. I'm 30 minutes into looking for this horse at this point. The other horses have finished their breakfast and are whinnying to be let out. I hear the neighbor in his barn running a saw so I go over there to see if he's over there somehow. Nope. head back into the woods. I'm following the paths that have fresh foot prints. I'm calling and waiving the flashlight around. I get almost to the back of the woods, about a quarter of a mile, and hear something. I figure it's him or I've stumbled on a deer. It's him. The silly horse over slept. he's kind of starting to move around and is looking like, Hey, where'd everyone go? The others had left without him. As soon as he figured that out and saw me he came over to me, saw I had no treats and took off crashing through the woods to get up to the barn for breakfast. By the time I got back to the front and stopped to tell the neighbor horse was found he had finished off his grain and was out of his stall starting to tear apart a bale of hay. I really could have done without the excitement this morning. 2020 it's not over yet!

INDY, horses are funny, for sure...........At least he got right back home. He probably was laughing and you were, by that time, running late.........horses are by far the silliest.

ELLEN, glad Cricket's back.

The rest of the story: The colicky horse had been colicking a long time that night and nobody found it
til morning around 9 A...........they called the vet right away and she was in bad shape when he arrived and recommended her to the hospital..........by the time they had gotten the neighbor (my friend) who had
a truck & trailer, it was around two hours before they got her there.........they got her out of the trailer and got her in
and she died of her own accord about 20 minutes later...........she had been oiled and medicated at
her barn by the vet when he arrived.................sad loss. The owner has had many horses over her younger
years. I don't know if she's up for another or not. Right now she's in Alaska at her folks house.

I wonder if ROSE has her new best friend home yet..........

Meanwhile happy new year's eve..........LOL, think we are going out disco dancing.......more
to follow...........

Happy New Year's Eve!!



We are going to celebrate by reading in bed. We are such party animals!

I don't like to wish my life away, but I have looked forward to the end of 2020 for some time. What a disaster of a year. I hope we all have a much happier, and healthier, 2021.




GRAYMARE:
They still have disco dances?

I think ROSE is going to pick up her new horse on Jan.3. Hopefully she will post pix when she gets him home.

INDYAPP:
I fell over a sleeping black cow in the dark one time. I am not sure which of us was more upset. One good thing about having white horses, I can see them in the dark! I am glad you found that sleepy Tiberius!!

One of Donnie's nicer cousins is sick with Covid. She is a sweet lady. I hope she gets better fast. She has red hair and a granddaughter who is a mini-me look-alike, also with red hair. She isn't hospitalized, but it is in her lungs. I am ready for the vaccine.

OK, the hokey pokey.............



I hope Donnie's cousin gets better soon.............

And, as it said on the news tonight.......Good riddance 2020..............

Prayers for a great 2021 for ALL.............

Time to remove the despicable year!!  

Go to:

https://horsefriends.forumotion.com/t113-january-2021#13172




2020 is over.