It's beginning to look a lot

like it's finally Christmas. Yesterday I busted my bottom cleaning up the front yard and putting up colored lights in the tallest pine tree in the driveway. Much of the busting involved moving lots of lumber from the front of the porch to the side, where it will hibernate under a tarp till spring. My limits? I have found them with that damnable aviary. It's too big for me to build myself, and with the days so short and rainy it is difficult to get Charlie to help me except on the weekends. Being a person who works on a computer all day (and sits in an office without a window, no less) he loves that it is dark for much of the day. It isn't very conducive to construction however. So the turkeys are free-ranging during the day and closed in the chicken coop at night. They are getting big enough that they can't flap around in the coop, and I don't want to imitate factory farming here on my own land.

And what did they do tonight? When I got home after dark, I saw two white blobs loitering in the yard approximately 20 feet from the coop. I half expected one of them to furtively scrub out a cigarette and pop a piece of gum to cover up the smell of alcohol. They were like two rebellious teenagers 20 feet from where they were supposed to be, but defiant till the end. I had to herd them into the coop and lock them in. I told them a bedtime story about enormous drooling bears but don't think it will make a difference.

We got a christmas tree today when Charlie got home from work and I had great fun decorating it. I had the bright idea to use my little tripod to take a photo of it all lit up and pretty, and for some reason the camera decided to make it look like a Totally Alien Christmas Hedge of Craziness. I am not even going to bother to try to fix it in photoshop. Take my word that it appropriately pine-colored in real life.

Bah, our internet connection is freaky and it doesn't like me uploading photos. I'll get that in tomorrow I hope!