Ship's Log, Day One, Year 2013

The fascist condo board wants me to take my tree out by Jan. 4,  Friday, in order to have it carted away for free. Never mind that Christmas ends on Jan. 6,  I am SO traditional,  and that I (like most working persons) have planned that weekend, 5/6, (or maybe the next, or the next) to put all the ornaments and such back in my storage locker (which I have to call condo security to open for me).

And a lovely tree it has been, with new memories, including scaring the catshit out of the Yellow Emperor with the beautiful glass ornament that looks just like his head. (Really, he looked at it and went into hiding.)  Never mind that he's also been hiding under the bed since last night's fireworks. Bad holiday for Lao Hu.

I think you could call this spooky

Not to be mocking me!

New Year's Day is when I start to clean up after the festivities, put the presents away, purify myself with sauerkraut and kielbasa.  (Although that tree stays till the Sixth!)  Among the presents, my very creative and clever and thematically inclined Santa gifted me with these:

The earrings are a little young for my taste, but very kawaii, and the book...also Japanese in origin...is hilarious, but I hope never to have the time (or desire) to make finger puppets out of cat fleece. I brush Fifi, la plus belle chatte de la maison,  regularly, and she is prolific (and grateful), but this is more than I care to do. (Although there was a period in my Appalachian back-to-the-land era I collected enough dryer lint to make a substantial bed rest pillow.  I wish I still had that. Cat hair finger puppets?  I could have made a lint scarecrow.)

The Sylvester flash drive however is pretty cool: who would have thought, in the heady days of  Univac, I could put a 4 GB plastic pussycat on my keychain.

Year of Snake is coming on fast; it feels a little like Tiger to me.  But, Lao Hu, your time was three years ago.

And this has nothing to do really with anything above, except that it is a cat...from a carousel I watched during my November Oregon holiday.  I loved this particular critter.  I would have hung it on the tree too, if I could have.