Against my better judgement, I looked at the NWS forecast this morning, lol, and our chance for Monday precip has gone from 70% to 80%. I would love snow on any day but Monday. If we can just have the Christmas Parade in town that evening and have it safely, then it can snow every day after that and I won't complain. At the parade, we collect a lot of food and donations for our local food bank, so we need to have decent weather so we'll have a large turnout. I actually think a lighted parade, Santa's arrival and the lighting of the Christmas Tree on the courthouse lawn would be beautiful in snow (not sleet or freezing rain!) but the snow also could hurt the size of the crowd and/or make travel difficult. Jeanie, I know we all are ingrates. No matter what weather we have, we seem to want something else. I am dreading a long, cold winter like last year's and was hoping it wouldn't start up until January, but it looks like it is starting early. Actually, for the OK Panhandle and for Jay's part of Kansas, the cold weather already has brought them some snow. We're all stocked up on groceries now for winter. I keep the pantry really full because the nearest grocery store I like is 30 miles away. There's a small one in town, but I don't care much for it and won't go there if I can avoid it. I do need to start stockpiling deer corn and wild bird seed for the really cold weather because we feed a lot of 'visitors' in the cold months. Jeff, I know that early snowfall fits right in with everything else this crazy year. I was looking at the video footage of all the damage in California from the Santa Ana winds yesterday and thinking to myself "at least we don't have those here". Paula, I agree with you on the shaking and the quaking. I am sure it was felt much more strongly at your place than ours, but even though y'all have had a lot of quakes in central OK, I never, ever expected to feel one way down here and I don't like that feeling at all. My plan for the spring garden is to plant less cool season stuff because it takes up so much space for so long, and instead try to get warm-season crops in the ground as early as possible with the use of low tunnels of floating row covers. Then, if I can get the warm season crops to produce before the dreaded heat arrives, I'll be happy. I won't spend endless $$$$ watering all summer long either. I'll stop watering the big garden at the end of June, and then everything can sink or swim on its own. When we first moved here, an older gentleman I met had his own planting strategy, developed from long battles with the intense summers and late cold springs. He planted on April 1st. He stopped watering at the end of June. Then, in September, he planted spinach and other hardy winter crops. He didn't have to deal with the recurring freezes in spring. He didn't spend money on irrigation in July and August. He got pretty good harvests most years, and great ones some years when rain actually fell in adequate amounts in the summer, without letting the weather drive him crazy. The longer I live here, the more I see the genius in his plan. I know we are better gardeners for having experienced all the extremes, but I sure would like to have a nice, quiet year when the weather is mild and mellow. It's not likely to happen, is it? Dawn

I got to the line about the cat on the picture frame and burst out laiughing. Don't taze me, bro! This is especially funny because I actually DID something like this to myself. Many years ago we lived in a sketchy part of the city and there had been some serious personal crimes all around us. My husband gave me a tear gas pen for protection. It was the size and shape of a large fountain pen and had a cylinder of tear gas on the end. Of course this new toy was very tantalizing and we were very curious about it. We decided to open the window a little, stick the pen outside and shoot it. What we forgot was that in the dead of winter, the cold outside air was rushing in with a vengeance. The tear gas blew back in the apartment and nearly blinded us both. It was awful! Boy did we get educated in a hurry!

Your poor mom--she sounds like a hoot, though. Guess the only funny thing was my sister's adopted dd who kept asking to see my other niece's ring. This ring was among my mom's things when we were cleaning out her apt after she died on Thanksgiving. It was beautiful, and obviously a 'good' ring (diamond set in a beautiful filigree of white 18 gold), so we gave it to my one niece who was the closest to her. So anyway, the other niece kept saying stuff like, "Oh, I saw you wearing that at the funeral. It's so beautiful. I just love that ring. I always remember Mom Mom wearing it and loved seeing her in it" and so forth and so on. Here's the funny part--NO ONE in the family had EVER seen this ring before we found it among mom's stuff. Mom only wore yellow or preferably rose gold, never white gold. And the really funny part of this story? The ring is a size 4.75 (and fits my dainty niece perfectly) but my mom's ring finger was a size NINE--she couldn't have put this ring on with a shoe horn and a jack hammer--LOL! Well, fortunately, the niece wearing it, didn't take the bait, and kept it on her finger. She's the one who was truly the closest to my mom and deserved this beautiful antique ring. I actually had it checked out and cleaned before I gave it to her. It's an antique setting, the diamond is a specific cut that had to be done either the late 1800's or the very first few years of 1900. The setting, I was told, would have been made in the 1910's, definitely before 1920. Our best guess is it probably belonged to mom's mother--who, from all reports, was a tiny little thing. Anyway, that was about as funny as it got yesterday--unless you count the moment when I unwrapped a present that looked like a sculpture made of driftwood, and didn't realize that it was a birdhouse. Think I hurt my sister's feelings, but the opening for the birds to use was so well hidden, that it was hard to figure that out. Hope the birds can find how to get into it.

Such a great list! I can't wait to have time to read. Best wishes to your friend, I don't have much more to offer, though I did love Hyperbole and a Half. The Chet and Bernie books were written by an author here on the Cape, very fun. I loved the early Janet Evanovich, but after so many they are predictable. Blogs and shows are great distractions, especially if you are taking painkillers. Post ACL surgery I watched hours of HGTV while hooked to that machine that makes your knee move...For my hysterectomy I watched all the seasons of Arrested Development. SO ridiculous and funny, I watched it all twice.