Holy cats. I thought I had lost a finger to frost bite this morning. Six degrees in the barn, horses covered with frost, tiny icicles hanging in their hair like silver tips at the end of corn rows. I was wearing these black neoprene-looking gloves I thought were supposed to be insulated.
Evidently, I was wrong about that.
So today, as I raged around trying to gather last minute Christmas secrets and fretting over what to do with Miko (the rejected book) next, I went to the farmer store and bought two pair of gloves I KNOW are insulated. Elk skin with fuzzy stuff inside. And my hands still nearly froze off tonight. Try picking up a seventy pound bale of hay by the twine with ice fingers. Just another reason never to get horses—if you don’t have to. Which I did. Have to.
But you don’t care about this – what you care about is:
WHO WON THE RAINBOW FLUTED FANTASMIC GIVEAWAY STAR????
And there were more than three entries (the puppies appreciated that), and the comments – which I meant to answer today, and did not, but will tomorrow, because I am never going outside again – were really beautiful. So I made up the numbers and threw them in a basket and asked Tucker to choose one, which he did. Then I looked over all the other now damp number slips, trying to figure out which one was actually missing, and it was:
#10
The lovely and gracious and pure hearted and adventurous
(sound of swords clashing against shields, bells, trumpets – and birds singing in the dawnlight)
I do have to say that the entries all made me want to make another fifteen of those things and send them out, so some day I might do it, when the house is clean after Christmas and Miko has a publisher and the puppies can be put outside in the yard with no danger of their becoming pupcicles, which is, at the moment, undeniably imminent.
Tomorrow, my plan is, as it has been for about five weeks, to finished the accounting, then read every blog of every person I love and answer every comment, and find a new printer with a driver that will actually work with Snow Leopard, and put the last beaded draped garland up in the den.
Which is more, I’m afraid, than you ever wanted to know.
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