So last weekend, in preparation for the Giant Snow That Wasn't, I decided to fill the house with firewood, which is what one does when an impending snowstorm makes one's nesting instinct go all haywire. All in all, I probably moved about a half a cord of wood, resulting in about a month's worth of firewood on the porch and in the house. Yay me.

Now that I am old and decrepit, instead of just muscling through the job like a tough young stupid thing I instead take several breaks, as befits a tough old stupid thing. And my method of taking a break means just plopping down where I happen to be and enjoying the yard while I give various appendages and core components a brief rest. Since the ground was totally frozen hard as a rock, my plopping down is actually kneeling and plopping down on my folded legs, sort of Japanese style, so that I am sitting on my calves and shoes instead of putting my delicate feminine butt directly on the sub-zero earth.

THIS is my all-time best-selling Christmas card. Which can only possibly mean ONE THING. That there is an inordinate amount of rather sick people in the world.

Nonetheless I rather enjoy Zazzle's attempt to class it up, what with the marble counter and the poofy dried flowers behind it.

...without Christmas Squid.

I suppose I should just come right out and say it: I'm not a HUUUUUGE Harry Potter fan. I don't HATE it, and people who like it--or LUUUUUV it--are just aces in my book, or at least have earned no demerits. And speaking of books, yes, I've read them all, and I've seen all the movies. Like many fantasy titles, it's just Not Really My Thing. If it turns out it *IS* your thing, that's cool. I'm not one of THOSE jerks. Fanboy or fangirl away, friend. I have no beef with you over that, nor with HP himself.

I found the books initially charming, and then increasingly depressing as the saga unfolded. Enough to kinda turn me off of any rabid fandom. Plus I was never in the core demographic in the first place, so there's that. The depressive aspects of the books were reflected, I felt, in the movies. By the time HP4 or 5 came out, I was pretty much done with it. But then that ol' sunk cost fallacy popped its sunken head up--the sort of illogical reasoning that figures hell, I've already spent THIS MANY HOURS of my life watching this series, so I might as well finish watching ALL of them.

So one reason why Mojo never gets lonely even if no one will be her friend is because she already has several enlightening and engaging conversations going on among her own several warring personalities hidden therein. For example:

(DOE-EYED NAIVE MOJO happens to catch something moving out of the corner of her eye as she passes a window.)

So last Saturday evening, the Favorite Husband and I were lounging around on the couch, watching an old movie (Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc; I maintain The Passion of Joan of Arc made some thirty years earlier is much better), when my attention was drawn to the good-sized picture window to the right of the television. It was still light out, a little before actual twilight, and, near as I could tell, someone was driving a BUS across our yard, about ten feet from the window. It took a while for context and words to coalesce properly in my brain. While this HUGE THING is driving by I engaged in a rather fruitlessly stupid finger pointing and uttering things like "Ub... buh... ehh..." until the proper word found itself a good ten or fifteen seconds later. "Moose."