Rosemary Kirstein

According to the Canada geese on the pond, that is.

Christmas Eve:

Swimming weather!

And Christmas Day:

Walking weather

Better have some cleats on your Wellies.

But how lovely to spend the holidays up in our unofficial New Hampshire vacation home (translation: cat-sitting for friends while they travel).

Plus: quite close to Boston, allowing a visit with Genrette Laurie J. Marks, and her wife Deb Mensinger.

Deb is the friend who had a liver transplant, last January — and some of you participated in the auction to raise money for medical expenses, for which Deb and everyone who knows her are very grateful.

Look, here’s a porch that she sanded and painted and everything:

All painted up and pretty.

Other people did the rest of the house, but Deb did the porch, she tells me, sanding and staining.

Here’s another view.

Very xmassy

The whole house looks so pretty, after years of being at the bottom of the list of priorities, with Deb’s illness. It’s a happy place now.

Xmas dinner was excellent, and the tree gorgeous. And I was happy to meet Laurie’s niece Anna, and see Eddy Martinez again, and his mother Anita.

For New Years I CANCELLED EVERYTHING and stayed home all by my self and it was so very lovely. I needed to decompress from the DayJob That Ate Manhattan. Didn’t need extra hours in travel, and more sleeping in guest-beds. I sent the presents up north with Sabine. Instead, I watched birds, wrote, and slept, and planned my escape I mean, ways to convince superiors at work that this much overtime is not a good idea, and yes, I could go on but I shall not.

But in other news, I have two weeks vacation coming up. In other other news, they wouldn’t let me take them back-to-back, but I’ve got one in January (quite soon!!) and the other in February. Wherein Writing Shall Occur.

More later…