Pat thank you so much for the Holiday wishes. Going right back for you also and the gorgeous pictures. I LOVE IT!!! Hope you have a wonderful 2010 and that we can share many great moments with our love to brugs, together. Lucy

Belated Merry Christmas to all. Especially to Triciae, who was on my mind a lot this holiday and will be during future holidays. Dear Wonder Woman, I hope you are doing well, where ever you are. Thank you for showing me what courage and strength and kindness are. We drove down to the Bay Area for the holidays. Christmas Eve we had dinner with our good friends in Berkeley, raw oysters with mignonette, cracked crab, and the traditional Buche de Noel. Last night we had dinner with other good friends in Richmond, tenderloin, mashed potatoes and a warm cauliflower-brussel sprout salad. I made half of the tenderloin, cut pieces 1" thick and tied them into rounds, pan cooked, with a sauce of reduced white balsamic vinegar, Muscat wine, shallots and garlic, butter, sauteed mushroom stems, blended smooth, then simmered over whole mushroom caps. No recipe, just made it up. Our hostess roasted the rest of the tenderloin with a red wine and shallot reduction. We were supervised by a friend who is a head chef at a large hotel and, for the first time in many years, didn't have to work on Christmas day, but was nonetheless pressed into service which he did with good humour. I've been negotiating a stressful matter at work for the past few weeks. As of Dec 24, we were uncertain whether our little business unit would be shut down and I had prepared myself to be jobless come Jan 1st. That all got resolved satisfactorily at noon on Christmas Eve, final document review pending, so for the first time in a month, I was able to relax and unclench. It was nice.

Christmas Day Ricky Ginsburg - Christmas, any year you'd like Nearly eight thousand miles south of the northern tip of the globe, yet only a few milliseconds flight by sleigh (nine deer-power, greased rails), on an island not much larger than your neighborhood, a content and well-fed deliveryman sat on the trunk of a fallen palm tree and peeled a banana. At the other end of an invisible eight thousand mile-long-string, a black woman with perfectly straightened hair and considerable girth lay naked on a bed of fresh goose feathers and straw, waiting for the driver of said sleigh, just as she'd done for centuries. Only this year, he wasn't coming home. Click to read the rest...

Merry Christmas to all. Julia, too have spent my fall vigorously working to recover from the time off. It is still not finished, but I will try to post a couple of photos to show the mess that the back was in. and here is a more recent photo: still not finished but much of it is done...spring will be another work and I am getting very much along in years too. I have cut down and hauled over over a hundred little saplings. mostly oak or Mimosa but a maple or two and one magnolia tree. (courtesy of the birds.) The stumps are all painted with Remedy so they will not return. In Alabama, and I am sure it happens in other southern states as well, weeds, grass, trees, etc will grow very thickly if not managed constantly. My husband can no longer do any yard work other than grass cutting where the land is clear, so I had better stay well this year. Anyway, this is what I have been doing in November and early December. kay