our greatest gift is the thunder of silence

    It's beginning to look a lot less like Christmas - indoors, anyway. I'm taking down my decorations. It's a surprisingly complication process, given that I don't really seem to have decorated too wildly. There's just so much of it: two trees now, plus the lights on Bob's bar stool. Ornaments on nearly all of the plants (or their pots, if the plants themselves didn't want to hold them). It's also obvious that I had help taking all those things out of the tiny boxes, bags, and packages where I store them, but am putting it all back on my own. It's still nice, and I love all these things and the memories they hold, and I still mostly love Christmas, too. I'm just...tired.
     And it'll be good to have my place back to normal. Just in time for the real winter to start. As much as I've enjoyed this false spring we've had since autumn ended, winter's coming tomorrow night, hard. Good for the guys who make their extra money plowing snow, I guess. And good for those of us to whom they owe that money.

[title quotation by Joel Goldsmith]