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Last weekend I got the holiday decorations placed and got our Christmas tree up and decorated. This year the tree is the skinny 7′ one that fits in a corner of the living room instead of the 9′ one that takes up the far end of the family room.  Since I started collecting glass ornaments in the late 1970’s, I have a large enough collection to cover both trees.  The 9′ tree has the larger portion of ornaments — birds, flowers, fruits, and geometric shapes.  The rest, probably about 350 ornaments include the santas, snowmen, musical instruments and everything else and are assigned to the 7′ tree.  Doing the tree was an all day task.  It should have been less than that, but at 3 months post shoulder joint replacement surgery, I still lack enough each and stamina to work as in past years.

It has been a bit over two months since I fractured my arm, seven weeks since the shoulder joint replacement surgery to repair the damage and one week since my right arm was freed from the sling.

So it has been over two months since I was last faceting or gardening or doing routine household chores.

And it will be a while before I am back to doing all those things again as I lack strength and have limited range of motion in the arm. I have been told that most likely it will be another six weeks to get the range of motion, then time to rebuild strength.

Day by day I can do a little bit more. I am hoping that in another week or so I will be able to try faceting again. I need to be able to reach the point where I can inspect the stone, not just work with the machine.

Normally this time of year I would be thinking of what to do about holiday gifts and making plans for Tucson gem shows. Like everything else since the end of August, those making those plans has also been postponed.

The days will be getting a bit longer now.  Spaceship Earth completes another circuit around Sol and in a few day according to our calendars. Likewise, I will mark another year of my personal history between now and then.

The 2023 flight seemed to be a bumpy ride at times.   Many of us will be gathering in the remainder of the year with friends and family among lights and holiday decorations to counteract the cold and gloom.

May the warmth of that fellowship continue to grow into the new year and spread as goodwill to all our fellow passengers on planet Earth.

The holidays are here, some decent rainfall in the past few weeks has resulted in the hillsides turning green again, and Christmas decorations are in place.

For the past two years because the COVID pandemic put a damper on holidays, we set up a smaller tree in the living room instead of our traditional 9 footer in the family room.  A new red rug was added this year in hopes of reducing breakage of ornaments in the event they slipped off the branches.

Having the lights pre-wired on the tree is a great time saver so it only took a few minutes to assemble the tree.

Then time for the ornaments.  I have been collecting glass ornaments for many years.  We have some really nice fabric covered boxes for storing the collection.

At this point I do not use all the ornaments on the tree.  I have decided on bird, flower and geometric ornaments for this tree.  (The Santas, snowmen, clowns, animals, musical instruments, toys and other random items worked out nicely for the smaller tree used the past two years.  )

It took a lot of trips up a ladder to decorate the top part of the tree.  Then the rest is easy.

Ready for Santa.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

No, the colors were not photoshopped.  This is what happens when there is a wildfire near enough to color the sky.