12/25/23

Merry Christmas to all from Ugly Christmas Sweater Cat!

Just got Jeff’s new calendar for 2024, and here’s one of the best photos in it — these are Kokanee salmon heading upstream — in the Kootenays, B.C. So beautiful!

Jeff doesn’t sell these calendars, he just takes his best pictures and has them made up into a calendar for friends and I am lucky enough to get one every year. The above is the October photo.

My friends Jeff and Caroline were lighthouse keepers off the coast of Vancouver Island (three miles off coast from Tofino) for many years and had many adventures — they’re now retired and traveling and Jeff free to really work on his photography and Caroline on her children’s books. I’ll never forget the shot he got of a helicopter lifting off a gigantic piece of heavy machinery — an earth-moving thing of some kind — from the island. It was the Lennard Island light station. They were clearing the island of old junk machinery. They both had to do an amazing variety of things, including rescuing foolish people who thought they could paddle out into the North Pacific in plastic boats. I spent a wonderful six days there visiting them.

Here’s the lighthouse in snow, from about 2009 or so.

Very Christmas!

Merry Christmas! To all of you from me, my family and other animals.

We managed to pull off the cantata again this year, despite sicknesses and colds and flu’s and now one case of Covid —- the town is all lit up and several of us musicians are driving down to Sabinal to play for their Methodist church on Christmas Eve and then Christmas day all I want as a present is to be able to sleep in until at least ten in the morning! Won’t make it to San Antonio with Jim and Nadine and the darlings but maybe New Years.

And, despite all the tragedies —

Happy Hannukah…

Elvia is quite the traveler! This is from her South America trip — the presidential palace in Montevideo — she talked Jaime into going with her. Great picture.

And my travels were back to the Missouri Ozarks in October, finally posting pictures — susan and I used to camp out in the snow, sleeping on the ground — that was more than twenty years ago. Now we’re all glamping. This was a commercial KOA campground with authentic looking covered wagons, fully supplied with electricity and bathroom, comfy beds…so time passes and we get hip surgery and we like our warm beds. Also on this trip was Gini Barnett, Megan and Melinda. Fall colors were terrific and that’s me standing on the shore of the St. Francis River, reinvigorating, soaking up vibes from my home place.

Below is Gini Barnett, I opted to not even ride but we rented a golf cart and I drove Gini around the trails as she is recovering from a bad horse-wreck, she broke that left leg in several places and can’t ride, of course, so we explored the trails around Sam. A. Baker state park in comfort.,

Fall colors.