Friday bullets, Dec. 4, 2020

I am feeling much more relaxed today than earlier in the week. We've had two good days in a row and two nights without nightmares. Hallelujah! Even if she regresses, we've at least had a break and enter the next round refreshed.

I made a happy discovery today. While we were doing our schoolwork this morning, I spent some time looking at the school schedule I made in the summer. I knew we were a couple of weeks behind because of everyone just sitting on a couch sick with Covid earlier in November. I was resigned (as were the children) to going a bit later than we usually do in the spring to get through everything. Well, it seems when I was making the schedule this summer, I accidentally skipped a week in December, going from Dec. 4 to Dec. 14. We are not nearly as behind in our schedule as I thought. Buoyed by this discovery, I did some tweaking and we will be squeezing everything in before Christmas break so that we will be back on course come January. Normally, I would just change the schedule to accommodate reality, but everyone is enjoying what we are learning this year, so I didn't want to have to skip anything. There was great rejoicing at this news when I told everyone.
Apollo really is the very nicest kitten. He now has the run of the house and even sent Nefertiti running this morning. He is very happy to be carted around by one child after another. The only downside to the kitten is the near perpetual arguments about who gets to hold him next. Here is how he spends most of his days.

The other day while we were doing school, I happened to look up and out the window see a hawk sitting in the pine tree right outside the window. The hawk was enjoying a recently acquired meal, but thankfully the tree is just far enough away that it was difficult to see. We all spent quite a while watching the hawk as we don't see them so close very often.
On Tuesday morning, Emmy decided that Java was her worst enemy (not an unusual occurrence) and decided to kick a board down between their dry lots. This is also not terribly uncommon. The difference was her getting her leg stuck in the fence. She managed to get it out before help arrived, but she did slice the hair and a top layer of skin off the front of one of her rear legs. It was a fairly odd injury and no one (me, W., the vet looking at pictures) could tell if it needed stitches or not, so the vet came out to double check. Thankfully no stitches and Emmy is healing well. It certainly put a crimp in our morning plans, though.
One last bit of animal news. When we rearranged our room and moved J.'s desk, we also unearthed Kenzie's dog bed which hadn't been out in a while. He is so happy to have his dog bed back!

He spends much of his time curled up like this. That is unless Nefertiti has decided she will be sleeping in it or if Kenzie's gingerbread man toy accidentally ends up in it. In both cases, Kenzie won't try to move them, instead he curls up next to his bed and just stares longingly at it.

Much to everyone's delight, I finally made a new batch of cocoa mix. This is what is the beverage of choice for tea time.
B. came out yesterday and planted my spring bulbs for me. I'm so happy to have that done and it wasn't looking as though I was going to get to it.
Today we got out the Christmas books. To do so, it meant I needed to put the current picture books away. Those would be the summer books. Yes, we completely missed fall with the picture books this year. (I long ago divided up all of our many picture books into four groups loosely based on the seasons. In theory, every three months, we put one set away and get the new set out. this keeps them fresh and means that I only have to figure out how to display one-fourth of our collection. It does not always work as it is supposed to.)
It looks as though P. will be home for four or five days over Christmas. I'm thrilled that we will have that much time with her since I had no idea what to expect.
I have finally started to sort out Christmas. This is the latest I have begun this project since in the past I have made a concerted effort to be done by Thanksgiving. I'm not panicked yet. We do far fewer gifts per person than we used to (1-2 verses 5 when I had a few children or 3 when I had more), we just don't need more stuff. It will all work out. It will.
Chickens are mean. They're not mean to us, but they can be really horrid to each other. We lost another hen yesterday, having been executed by the rest of the flock. Poor H. was the one to find it, and it took a while to help her calm down. I'm beginning to think that Shirley Jackson owned hens when she wrote "The Lottery". The plots are eerily similar. Ducks do not do this.
I love fried okra. (It was part of dinner tonight.) I think I am going to have to grow more okra in the garden so that I have sufficient okra for the winter.
A. does not love okra and went elsewhere for dinner.
A. received good news today. She and a friend had visited and applied for an apartment nearby earlier in the week. They got news today that their application was approved! She is very excited. The pictures of the apartment look very nice and it is pretty close to us.
Christmas cards are starting to arrive, which I love. I have no idea when ours will be going out since we don't have a family picture yet. They could be going out very, very late.
I've discovered a new mystery series! It's set in Provence and the detectives are Antoine Verlaque and Marine Bonnet. Having read book 8, I'm all set to go back to the beginning and read from the start. I didn't mean to read them out of order. It's something I very rarely do as I dislike having the over arching thread of the characters be out of order. But this series has a Christmas title and I started reading it before I realized it was part of a series. It will be a nice New Year's treat to have a new mystery series to read.

And with that, I'm going to call it a night. Have a good weekend!