I haven't walked in this part of the yard for a few days but something has. Some serious digging has taken place around the compost heap.

Hey, more and more I'm liking Lucky's market. After a several year boycott, I was lured into the store last summer by their cheap! produce prices and realized that some - just some - of their stuff is actually affordably priced. I avoid some of the Sunflower brands that are imported since that defeats my purpose of buying local as much as possible. The seaweed salad and asian slaw are bringing me back for seconds. (The reason I boycotted is no longer in the picture.)

The farthest northmost full moon of the season (called the Cold Moon)as seen at 7 am on Christmas Eve. The sun is moving back north and the moon is heading south and soon the ground will be soft enough to dig again.

Lately Puppygirl has taken to waking me up at 6am with the alarm set to 'whimper'. Thank you, dear, for showing me some stunning morning skies.

The first day she did that I saw a blazing blue-white falling star in the dark western sky.The Geminids, I found out later. There is some planet up there - Mars, I suppose, since it's a little orangy. Over in the east, what I thought was Saturn is Venus incandescing in a huge way. The last few days, the bare trees have entertained.

More snow is expected this weekend but we have a few days to enjoy the December thaw.

Seasonal Affective Disorder. Though I don't believe it's a p$ychiatric condition, I do get have some reality on the Colorado winter letdown.

My take on it is: during the warmer months there is so much invitation from Life to join in, appreciate, feel, move, participate, breathe fresh air. Somewhat like a gracious and enthusiastic hostess making sure that all her guests are welcomed and satiated with all the stimuli that Life has to offer.

Come winter, the party is over; the hostess has gone home and it's up to me to provide my entertainment. To invite myself to go outside and get sunshine on my eyelids, to get plenty of fresh air, to make sure the birds are fed and heard. It's not easy being a summer girl in the winter but keeping summer alive becomes a game in itself.

It's been snowing off and on since a couple of days after my return home - even when it wasn't supposed to (like now). It would be knee-high if the first several inches had not melted into the warmish earth. It's all white now and I can't talk about gardening, so I'm just posting a mention of my new favorite blog. She posts great pictures like this one from flickr (posted by macdermotte there).

I'm home again and it's snowing which is fine with me. If I'm going to be in a cold state for the winter, better white than brown. I got a chance to refill the compost heap with bags of leaves that Sugar collected for me and he was able to finish the last bit of our new flagstone walkway before the weather changed.

My trip home on Amtrak was likely my last since they changed the connection point a few hours further down the line. The conversation on this trip was especially notable for me. I talked to 2 different parents who had lost a child, two widows who had lost spouses, a Katrina 'displaced person' and a young man who had just been released from prison after 12 years. The latter made the biggest impression on me. I saw him board at the Flagstaff bus station during the 8 hour connection ride from Albuquerque to Denver. The uniformed escorts didn't have guns, still I wondered if he was going to try to take us a hostages. At a snack stop before Raton, he originated to me that he had just been released and this was his first look at the outside since he was 17 years old. He was delighted to be able to open doors for himself. He was anxious about how his mom would accept him, hoping she would still consider him her little boy. I could tell he was nervous just being outside. When the bus broke down from an oil leak, I met the blind woman who needed to use my cell phone to call her children to come get her. Amazingly, she had to spend some time talking them into coming.

The last two months have shown me a gratifying expanse of humanity and now I'm back in Boulder with the 'most diverse bunch of middle class white people' you'll ever see. The struggles here are mostly internal.

Tom's Tavern is closing. Eating establishments come and go in Boulder but Tom's was there before I married my husband and after, during two pregnancies and as my children were becoming adults. What a legacy. Tom gave us all an authentic sense of belonging and attachment.

Coincident with finishing a major action here, my attention has shifted back to my garden and my dogs. I love this view of Griffith Observatory that twinkles every night plus the palm trees and all the flowers and birds but it isn't mine. And I don't want to make it mine. I thought I did for a while, working out the trips and the living aspect, but I'm happy now to just have it on loan on occasion.
I'll find out soon if the winter pansies I planted have survived the first few snows.
Meanwhile, there is a Los Feliz Christmas festival tonight on Vermont that should be entertaining.