A Newish Year

The beginning of a new year, Christmas specials watched and decorations down and packed away. Mince pies almost all eaten.

Yesterday, we'd been promised a winter storm. Turns out a winter storm can come in many forms - ours was belting rain that came at us for hours on end. The roads here are badly lit, the lines on the roads are painted in some kind of substandard non-luminous paint that doesn't stand out much in the dark in the best of weather, but given the inclemency visited upon us from above, they become almost invisible. That and the severe lack of cats' eyes, and yesterday's weather was a treachery too far.

The year ended for me with a visit to the doctor's. She'd received the results of my blood tests, and numbers were going in the wrong direction, so I have to focus on health - diet and exercise of course, but also a referral to an endocrinologist.

News from England of two deaths of former colleagues - friends, or in one case the shocking and unexpected death of a former colleague's wife. The Fates sometimes visit cruel devastation on lives, robbing us of the ability to make meaning.

Over the Christmas period, both Laurence and Whisky were ill, hacking coughs and runny noses in both cases. Nothing too serious, but always worrying, particularly when it drags on.
We had some clear blue skies and crisp, frosty days, and on one of these, I spotted a female Anna's hummingbird shuttling between a cedar and a bare, ornamental oak tree in front of our house. The hummingbird feeder had been cleaned and put away in mid-August when the Rufous hummingbirds had migrated south. Now it's been filled with sugar solution and re-hung from the balcony's overhang, just beyond the bird feeding house where we get finches and sparrows and on the balcony itself, Towhees scavenging what has been dropped.