Mice are coming in to the house on a regular basis.  There have been four huge  ones this week.  Basically, both Schwartzie and Willow do the hunting.  Willow does as Xena taught her [I remember when Willow was about four or five months old, seeing Xena actually teaching her] by breaking their necks. She never plays with mice but simply dispatching them.  Schwartzie used to try to rescue them and contemplate them and carry them about.  They would always get away from him.  But somehow he discovered they taste good. Now he is no longer the pacifist that Mingus still is.  He waits till willow has killed the mouse and brings it to a spot to display it to  us or try to give it go me. He grabs it, carries it to the bathtub and eats most of it.  Poor woody has to clean the bathtub.  Still we are happy that he is no longer releasing them back into the house.  We have no desire to be infected by mice the way we were when I had only two elderly cats who could no longer hunt.

Today is our friend Tash’s birthday.  She is making dumplings and we’re celebrating with her this evening.  She is back here in their family house in Wellfleet, on vacation from the university where she teaches moleculture biology.  Tashe loves to cook and is good at it.

I miss daylight.  It feels as if the days are so short.  It would be worse if the gardens hadn’t been put to sleep.  There’s so little time to do anything outside after we stop work.

The tree is all trimmed, our usual gaudy tree with more than half the ornaments animals or vegetables –cats, lions, tigers, all manner of sea creatures from dolphins to fish, camels, horses, many birds, and then a cucumber, of course, and corn, eggplant, garlic, fruits of all kinds.  I would never have a plastic tree.  I love the scent of balsam fir.  The cats especially Willow, love the tree.  She likes to nap under it.  On New Year’s Day, we take it down and put it in the woods to go back to nature.  After all, we live I the woods.

This coming week is going to be super busy.  Friday is our annual holiday party.  I have an appointment with my osteopath. I still have presents to wrap, recipes to find and print out and decide on.  Manuscript submissions are coming in every day for my June juried intensive poetry workshop.  I have three booklength mss. I am supposed to read and comment on and/or blurb.  And my assistant Dale is on vacation.  He and his partner Stephen will come back for the party but are gone till then.