Merry Christmas.

Photo copyright Aji, 2017;
all rights reserved.

Christmas lights; Christmas night. 

We took it relatively easy today, no travel, not much beyond chores and dinner. I don't have much choice in the matter anyway, and to that end, I cooked dinner slowly throughout the day, with mostly stuff that we had on hand. Yes, I did do the duck, although I didn't manage to get a photo of it before someone sneaked a wing. But it was essentially what I promised last night: stuffed herbed roast duck with gravy; stuffing made with wild rice, panko bread crumbs, a little smoked andouille sausage, pecans, dried cranberries, and sea salt, black pepper, and herbs; thin asparagus on a bed of the stuffing; and diced Japanese sweet potatoes and sliced zucchini, herbed, tossed together, and roasted with olive oil. This is how it looked:

Photo copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved.

That's before the gravy, obviously. And yes, it took me all day, because everything does right now. That's fine; on holidays, we always eat late anyway — basically dinner, not lunch.

It was a beautiful day, but with a cold wind at the end. No precipitation of any kind in the forecast for the next two weeks. It's dangerously dry now, and far too warm. We need snow, badly. It's reflected in the tourism levels, or rather, the lack thereof. A few years ago, Christmas Day would've meant an endless stream of cars going by on the highway, to and from the Ski Valley. Today? Next to nothing. Town's been the same all week, too. When you can find parking downtown easily in Christmas week? Even with the closure of one of the few pay lots? Something's terribly, terribly wrong (at least from a tourism revenue standpoint).

And with Christmas essentially over, we have lost our last shot at holiday sales, too. this last week of the year will be hard now, but beyond that, we have no cushion for the rest of the winter (and the weather will change, even if it's only to get really, really cold), much less for the emergency medical expenses of the last six weeks. Forget what remains to be done on the house for now. We need to make some sales. A lot of them. But sales are not just what's going to keep me alive and Wings healthy; it's going to help other folks, too. Given the circumstances, I'm leaving up the donation link, too, and the registries have some new items on then, mostly lower-priced, to replace stuff damaged by the RV or given away when we first moved into it seven years ago. So please share our links:

• Wings's direct PayPal link;
• Wings's site, for sales;
• Wayfair gift cards, to replenish all the furnishings that the RV has destroyed in one way or another.
• Partial registry #1, from Bed, Bath and Beyond. There are new kitchen-y things on it now, stuff that I didn't realize we'd need to replace (either because the RV ruined it or because we gave it away when we had to downsize).
• Partial registry #2, from Wayfair. Still waiting for them to resolve this fulfillment/shipping problem they have with their site. Even so, I've added some things (kitchen/dining room stuff mostly), most of which are comparatively reasonably priced. Now, it's going to be mostly odds and ends that make this place more liveable, because of the sheer volume of stuff destroyed by too many years in the RV (e.g., by the oven and stovetop, by the wiring, by the water, by the mold, etc.), or that we simply gave away seven years ago because we had no room and no place to put them and despaired of ever being able to use them again. A CHANGE ABOUT WAYFAIR:  NO MORE CROWDFUNDING. Their Web site coding is bad, and it will not permit crowdfunded items to ship. Items purchased outright arrive in two business days, but you can't even get the others out of the warehouse. 

As I've also been saying, I am still catching up, and will be now for a while. But this is the holiday season, and the sales/commissions from these few weeks are what keep us alive throughout the whole long winter and spring months (to say nothing of what's in the offing medically), so please continue to share the links. And please refer folks to Wings's site (and if you have an endorsement, too, so much the better). I'll be trying, slowly but, I hope, steadily, to get caught up over the course of this week. We have some massive expenses coming down the pike, and a lot of testing yet to be done before I'm out of the woods. So please keep sharing all our links. For now, I'm just so damn grateful to be alive, to have a healthy heart, to be back home with the love of my life and our dogs, the whole world is beautiful, even in spite of my terrible depression. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it, thanks again, to everybody, and we love you all.

All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2017; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.