Last night, after I retired (early) (I mean, ‘I went to bed’ — the next year is going to entail tricky use of the word ‘retire’), Margaret asked whether I had noticed anything odd about Flora. I answered that she’s stayed unusually close to me while I was cleaning the kitchen at the end of the day. She (Margaret) noted that she (Flora) was shivering and had climbed up into Margaret’s aarms in an atypical way. I noted that there had been fireworks going off; maybe she had been disturbed by them. The ladies have not shown any particular concern about fireworks in the past, and Margaret and I have appreciated having one fwer thing to worry about — but it appears that this year they’ve changed, or something about New Year’s fireworks bothers them more than summer fireworks or Guy Fawkes fireworks. Who knows? But Flora insisted on getting into our bed with us. Margaret took her down to the day bed in the living room so that I could sleep (and so that Flora wouldn’t get the idea that she could climb into our bedroom bed), but Flora ran back upstairs and jumped up into bed, shivering, so I figured that we could allow her a scary night of explosions and just hugged her till her shivering subsided. Later, Margaret came back upstairs, and Minke climbed into bed, too. All seems normal this morning. We’ll see how that goes.
Another cold morning run, this one markedly slower, to start the new year. Listened to a BBC report on the making of The Muppet Show (I hadn’t realised that it was produced here in the UK), coffee, fruit, reading and thinking about Chris Corrigan’s gracious response to my response, coffee, toast (with Christmas gift jam), cleaned up, and now I’m blogging.
Happy New Year, and may heaven permit us a much better year than 2025. It may take another three years of making America trashy before things turn for the better, though.