Geese are so entertaining and funny. They think they are the most regal of birds on land, strutting as they do. The ones that come into the business park where I work and walk are wild, and do not take kindly to approaching humans, which is fine with me. Tame geese are mean. These geese keep a respectful distance and a wary eye on us.

This gaggle took to the water when we strolled by. (I love the reflection.)

Goose in retreat.

Blue goose retreating.

That’s my husband, Don, myself, and our friends, Kathy & Eric.

We were all at a surprise birthday party for another friend, Lisa. I conned someone into using my camera and taking this photo, but then I set my camera down and didn’t take another photo all night. Which is too bad, because we go way back. Not just Eric & Kathy, but the party girl herself.

These are friends that I can go for months without seeing or talking to, but when we do happen to get together, we pick right up where we left off, as if that period of absence never happened.

Here’s my confession: I am the absent party. Kathy & Lisa are always in the same place. I am the one who wandered off. I don’t know if that makes me a bad friend or a friend who had changes come into her life that make her an absent friend. (I know what Lisa & Kathy would say: they’d say it’s the latter. That’s how wonderful they are.)

Friends are such an important part of our lives. Old ones, new ones, long-lost ones and new-found ones. Real life friends and cyber-friends we’ve never met and pen pals.I hope I do not take my friendships for granted, but I am afraid that I get wrapped up in my own little world and neglect my friendships, real-life and otherwise. I hope you forgive me when I do, like Lisa and Kathy forgive me every time we get together.

I love all of you, my very dear friends. “Make new friends but keep the old; for one is silver and the other is gold.”

We went to church today (and the building did not cave in nor did lightning strike). Actually, we went to two churches today, but I will post about the second church tomorrow. That was our old church.

Today, we went to Sam & Arwen’s church, Hope Community Church in Lake Oswego. Today was Christmas Pageant Day and Javan, our middle grandson, had the starring role.

Such as it was.

First, there was a choir production by the Adult Sunday School class (all six members). Then the Youth Ministry performed an original Rap-style Christmas song (our son-in-law played the drums and helped compose). (Standing ovation from part of the congregation). The other part was not sure what the lyrics were. (No, really: it was a beautiful song. The performers were a little nervous. Except Sam. He loves it.)

Last, the children performed.

The children should have performed first because they were getting really tired of the whole Christmas Pageant thing and they’d just performed this same thing at the tail-end of the early service. But that’s wisdom in hindsight.

Zephan was a sheep. They had these cute little knit hats with grey ears and little black eyes & noses. But the real costume was the T-Shirt with the obvious wording printed on them: SHEEP. They all had little bells and Zephan posed for me with the bell, but he was not having anything to do with the bell after that. We actually gave the bell to Javan.

I had a front row seat to the action until the kids went up to perform. then all these proud parents ran forward with their digital cameras and blocked me. That’s OK, because Zephan was not really up front for most of the program. He played with the microphone through the first song.

By the end of the first song, he was beginning to wander. In moments, he was behind the angels and into the drum set.  Another sheep wandered off behind the Christmas tree.

One little sheep stayed right where he was planted.

Oh! Did you notice the baby in the manger there? The one staring at the Virgin Mary while the poor Joseph looks down in awe? That baby flinging his arms about?

See the calm look of that Baby Jesus now?

That is moments before he decided to arch his back and attempt to fling himself out of the “manger” much to the Virgin Mary’s horror.

His real mom had to step up onto the stage and abduct him before he did something really embarrassing, like act like a baby.

Way to go, Javan.

Yeah. My grandsons. The wandering sheep and the protesting Baby Jesus.

It was hysterical.

I don’t know about you, but I think you have to appreciate the mixed-race parentage of Baby Jesus here. Virgin Mary had her eyes closed in silent worship. Joseph looks shell-shocked. Baby Jesus has Zephan the Sheep’s bell in his hand. And he’s looking up at “His” mother in stunned awe.

“Hey. Mom. I’m about to flip out of this car seat made up to look like a manger, OK? So don’t look. Good moms DO NOT LOOK. You’re a good mom. Love you. Jesus.”

Don & I have a tradition: every Christmas season, we drive into Portland and up to the “Nob Hill” area of NW 23rd Street. We park blocks away because there is no parking anywhere near the area and we stroll past historic old homes now converted into boarding houses. NW 23rd is an old narrow street with parallel parking, numerous unique stores and eateries. West Burnside borders the south and Good Samaritan Hospital is the border of the north.

We walk until our feet hurt, toss coins to the street musicians when there are some, and we browse antiques, collectibles we can’t afford, collectibles we can afford, Christmas tree ornaments, toys, trinkets, baubles and dozens of practical items. We dodge old beater Volkswagens, brand new Lexuses, Tri-Met buses and the Trolley as we cross the many streets.

We shop stores like Urbana, Three Monkeys, the Kite Shop, Smith & Hawken, Dazzle, Twist, Rejuvenation Hardware, Zucari’s, and Christmas At the Zoo. There’s a crowded little toy store on one end, World Market (Cost Plus) on another end, Urban Outfitters, Noah’s New York Bagles, Kornblatt’s, the Laurelwood Public House and Rose’s. Sometimes we stop at Starbucks half-way.

Last year, we did not get to NW 23rd at all: we headed out, but the snow started falling. We made it five miles, to the nearest Toys-R-Us. By the time we came out of that store, it was obvious that Portland was going to shut down: five inches of snow and still coming. One place you do not want to drive when there is that kind of snow fall is the narrow hilly streets of NW Portland. We turned around and drove back up the hill to Oregon City. In the end, we had 19″ of snow over the weekend and Portland fell silent. The Christmas season that promised so much produced so little for the small shop owners.

This year: no snow! The east coast got the storm this year.

We started out by stopping in Lake Oswego which is where I took the only photographs I took the entire shopping trip. And I had such great plans of taking photos. Oh well, you can use your imagination.

The strange sculpture along the banks of Lake O reinforced my anticipation of a day of eclectic shopping (and window shopping).

Except Smith & Hawken’s is gone. Zucaris changed tack when they moved from a basement store to a high rent street-level store and is no longer fun to go into. Urbana is gone. Three Monkeys consolidated and has half the inventory as before. The Kite Shop gave up a couple years ago. Many of the unique little antique stores were gone this year, as well as some of the artsy places.

And Noah’s Bagels is gone from that location! We were so sad! It was always a challenge to get in and out of there, find a seat, and enjoy a Kosher lunch while staring down at the street where the stilt walkers were ambling along.

No stilt walkers or street musicians this year, either.

The atmosphere has changed and it isn’t good. The economy and the three weeks of being snowed in last winter took its toll. The dachsund antique store was gone. (She sold everything dachsund and a good lot of it was antique or antiqued.)

We settled for lunch at the Laurelwood (great service, great food, good atmosphere). After lunch, we talked briefly with one of the lovely employees there. He’s watched the changes first hand and doesn’t like them, either. “It’s pretty much all chain stores now,” he said: Urban Outfitters, World Market, Pottery Barn, Kitchen Kaboodle, and even Rejuvenation Hardware (which used to be over-filled with cheap goodies and interesting toys) has gone up-scale and sells more bedding and decorating items than hardware.

We’re not sure we’ll do this again next year. But the toy store is still there and Christmas at the Zoo, so possibly we will. Lunch at the Laurelwood Pub sounds good for next year.

While we did find everything we were looking for, our shopping date felt a little like this scene along the shore of Lake Oswego. Urban mallards, swimming around artificially placed rocks and artificial cattails. Yes, those cattails around the rocks are sculptures. Not real at all.

At least we know that Noah’s Bagels still exists in other locations around town. I’d be really sad if the chain went away.

(If I counted right)

Just the bubbles that form on the pond next to where I work. They are created by the little water falls.

Kind of a Starry Night effect in black-and-white.

I dressed it up in photoshop. I think this is called “fire” effect.

OK, so I had nothing important to write and you can now go back to whatever you were doing. Me, I have a big weekend ahead. I’ll try to blog as I go… So have a good weekend, stay safe & warm and “be good. But if you can’t be good, be interesting.”

(quote from Deanna Piercy, my friend at Tea With Dee.)

I have not painted much in the past couple years. I would love to be able to pull out the oil paints, but with a crowded house and babies and a big dog that eats anything, painting is not going to happen in the near future. I did not paint with oils for several years while the kids were little, either.

A few years ago, I had the time, inclination, space and privacy. (I need privacy to paint. Just something about being all alone and making a mess that fuels the muse.) I thought I would share with you one of my experiments with oil paints.

I discovered painting in bold, loose strokes. Prior to 2003, my oils consisted of tight, careful strokes.

I lose track of time when I have a brush in my hand.

I was having so much fun with the bold strokes that I got a little carried away with the antlers.

I confess: I copied it from a photograph I saw in a magazine of a big buck in the early morning light. I wasn’t being concerned with detail as much as I just wanted to capture the lighting.

And it makes me ache for the room to paint. Love having my kidlets here, but I am aching to be able to put brush to canvas. I have so much room for improvement and it is such great therapy!

Winter is where I part company with “true” Oregonians (specifically: those Oregonians from west of the Oregon Cascades). The puddled appearance of objects outside my window is novel for half an hour.

The muted greys, greens and blues of winter are fascinating for a couple of hours.

But it gets old after that.

It isn’t the wet and the rain so much, but the overcast. No- it is the rain. And the overcast. It just goes on and on and on. If I get depressed by it, I wonder how Noah and his family felt?

Come to think about it, my little house is probably close to how cramped that ark was (without the ammonia and animal smells: can you imagine?).

No, I am not comparing my life to Noah’s. That was just a silly thought that popped into my head, looking out at all that rain. I do not know how much rain fell today (probably some average amount for the middle of December in the lower Willamette Valley). It was just wet and dark and miserable to drive in.

Did you notice I said “lower Willamette Valley”? This always amuses me: I live in the very northern end of the Willamette Valley, but it is the lower end of the Valley because the Willamette River flows north. So the upper end of the Valley is where the headwaters are, far to the south of us, SE of Eugene. We go “up” to Eugene, not “down” because the water is flowing north. Weird bit of trivia.

In the winter, the water just flows from the clouds to the earth, from the puddles to the storm drains to the creeks and the streams and on into the rivers. All the rivers eventually flow into the Columbia River, which flows on out to the Pacific Ocean. Then the water on the surface of the Pacific Ocean condenses and rises and becomes part of a new cloud system and…

I used to imagine the whole journey of a single drop of water falling from the Heavens all the way to the ocean and back again. Does it show?

It’s just wet. Chinese water torture. This won’t pause until after the Rose Festival, half-way through the month of June next year.

Rain. That’s what it does in the Willamette Valley.

This is what rain looks like out my window if I “solarize” it.

I need a warm fireplace, a fleece blanket and a cup of hot Chai tea. And a good book. Any recommendations?

There are a lot of reasons to like Christmas. Nativity sets, light displays, carols, finding the perfect gift for someone, Christmas cards, and memories.

As I wrote that, I was reminded of the Christmas my grandfather Wilcox died. My dad had to make the trip to Idaho to take care of the details and for the funeral. Dad wasn’t due to be home until late on Christmas day. My brother, my sister and I all decided to wait for him. So the stockings hung and the presents stayed wrapped until Dad drove up late in the afternoon.

He would never admit it, but I think Dad was touched that we wanted to have Christmas together as a family, and that we understood he’d just buried his own father so the connection was that much more poignant.

But that isn’t where I was going. I was going to tell you about cookies. Because cookies are an integral part of Christmas. Cookies, fudge, candy, bread, pies: anything that makes you gain five pounds just by looking at it.

Some of my favorite memories are centered around cookies. I especially loved the tradition of rolled sugar cookies with powdered sugar frosting.

I use the Butter Cooky recipe from the classic Betty Crocker cook-book:

Mix together thoroughly:

1 cup butter, softened

1/2 cup sugar

1 egg

stir in:

3 tsp vanilla

sift together & stir in (will have to knead some):

3 cups flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

Wrap in plastic and refrigerate at least an hour.

These bake at 425 degrees (F) for 5 minutes and before I take you to the next step, I think it is fair to warn you that it is best if you have several cooky tins ready to go and then concentrate only on the baking. Because at 5-6 minutes, these babies are prime. At 8 minutes and they’re turning brown. Ten minutes and they’re burnt. Crisp.

My mom would roll them out when we were at school and she’d artistically paint them with egg yolk paint tinted with a little food coloring: 1 egg yolk + 2 T water. As we got older and wanted to help decorate them, she abandoned the artistic end of things and went with powdered sugar frosting.

So the dough is chilled through. Take one-fourth of it and roll it out very thin (1/16″). Cut with cooky cutters and put on ungreased cooky tins. Don’t try to keep rolling & cutting while baking, tho – you’ll lose track of time and you’ll burn a batch. I promise.

Right as the edges begin to brown, remove from the oven and slide cookies carefully onto a kitchen towel to cool. Do several batches this way before you think about decorating or cleaning up or… Because the minute you look away from that oven… SMOKE!

I rolled out 7 dozen cookies on Sunday and lost one dozen (yep, I started doing something and wasn’t watching that clock…).

To decorate: a little milk, a tsp of vanilla and powdered sugar, mixed thick. A couple drops of food coloring. One the frosting hardens, you can stack these cookies.

As you can see, I started out being very artistic. The cookies are sweet by themselves and don’t need much frosting – just enough to make them lively.

I got to this point after everyone came home on Sunday. Arwen leaned over my shoulder and looked at that evil-looking teddy bear in the lower right and said, “Grandma’s getting tired.”

I ate that teddy bear, by the way. Wouldn’t want my grandson to see it and be traumatized.

I collect cooky cutters. So I have a nice variety of shapes. I decided I need a camel. I think my mom had a camel. {Aside: Terry (that’s my brother and he reads my blog): I get Mom’s cooky cutters. At least the camel.}

These are very thin, very addicting and very yummy. The ingredient label (if there was one) would be: butter, sugar, powdered sugar, flour, vanilla, egg, baking powder. Lots of butter & sugar. Real health food.

But, hey, it’s Christmas.

Don’t forget the sprinkles.

My friend, Deanna, had this on her blog, Tea With Dee, &  invited me to use it. Since tonight I am just tired and have nothing useful to say, I’m borrowing it. Just for fun.

1.) Have you started your Christmas shopping? Well, it is halfway through December… Yes, but I am by no means done.

2.) Tell me about one of your special traditions.  Christmas stockings. We don’t really have any traditions that have been passed on from generation to generation except for the filling of stockings. Funny, but my husband’s family apparently did not do this. I made his forst stocking when we got married. He loved the idea, though, and the tradition has carried on down through our children.

3.) When do you put up your tree? The day after Thanksgiving (or that weekend).

4.) Are you a Black Friday shopper? Only for a Christmas tree and we try to go toward the mountains (away from malls & stores) to do that.

5.) Do you travel at Christmas or stay home? Now that the kids are grown: we stay home. In our youth, we traveled over the mountains every Christmas for the family spread in eastern Oregon. Ice, snow, freezing rain, and black ice. Yeah. Fun. (Family was fun, the travel was NOT.)

6.) What is your funniest Christmas memory? So many. We always had a good time at Christmas. A few: the year the snow slid off the roof in a pattern that made it look just like Santa’s sleigh really had landed there (and my brother told us that Santa really did – God bless big brothers). Playing Aggravation until I laughed so hard (because I was losing) that I peed my pants. Meeting my future sister-in-law Julie for the first time and hitting it off so well that we got a tad bit too snockered together… The year Levi got “air head replacement” in his stocking (he wasn’t impressed but the rest of us thought it was funny). Just so many!!

7.) What is your favorite Christmas movie of all time? Mine? Not sure I have one. Don loves It’s a Wonderful Life and Arwen loves Elf.

8.) Do you do your own Christmas baking? Absolutely. My favorite is probably the rolled sugar cookies with frosting & decorations. I spent hours on them yesterday (is that insane??)…

9.) Fake or real tree? REAL. We had a fake tree for years when I was a kid and it was never the same. There was no hunting for the perfect tree. And you have to have a  funny, flawed Charlie Brown tree to dress up with ornaments. It’s a tradition to go find the BEST tree (and DON always gets to choose. He’s like a little kid.)

10.) What day (as a mom) does the actual panic set in to get it all done? I do not panic. HAHAHA – right after the deadline for any snail mail to actually get to its destination by 12/24 and I still haven’t mailed Christmas cards. That’s when.

11.) Are you still wrapping presents on Christmas Eve? Yes.

12.) What is your favorite family fun time at Christmas? All of it.

13.) What Christmas craft do you like the best? Making the wreath. I refuse to buy a wreath.

14.) Christmas music? Already answered this: yes. I like the old stand-bys, but my favorite has been posted already: Snoopy’s Christmas.

15.) When do you plan to finish all your shopping? 12/24

Any blogger is welcome to participate in this meme, even if you haven’t been tagged yet. Just simply copy and paste the questions into your blog, and then answer them.

When you post your blog, please spread some Christmas cheer, and leave a link back to Heather’s Top Ten Christmas Blog, and the blog that you were tagged by.

Woke up this morning to frozen rain drops. It was not a heavy rain, but just enough to coat the world in slippery ice and leave drops suspended on the tips of the camelia leaves.

I had a busy weekend running errands and baking Christmas cookies, but I still had time to look out my front window and count the different birds at our bird feeder. I even tried taking photos of them, but not with any great success. If I open the front door and try to step out onto the steps, the birds are gone. If I try to slip around the back and through the gate, the birds see me and fly. So I try to photograph them through the picture window.

Only five band-tailed pigeons came to the feeder and as soon as they saw me at the window with the camera, they were off. They’re so shy!

The bushtits were no better.

At one time, there were 27 bushtits in and around the feeders. They were not all on the suet feeder at once (only half of them), but they were flitting in and out of the rhododendrons, the seed feeder, and the suet feeder. I counted 27, but there were more: you try to count dozens of tiny little birds moving fast.

I counted as many as 14 dark-eyed juncos on the grass, too.

I tried slipping out the front door to get a photo of them and they all took off.

I snapped wildly, but…

I got the obvious birds in my lens: one dark-eyed junco on the eave and a bushtit in the rhododendron.

When I uploaded the photo, however, I discovered two more bushtits in the rhododendron:

You can see how much smaller the bushtit is than the junco. While it isn’t a quality photo, it is a good size-comparison photo. The junco (which is farther away, slightly) looks twice the size of the bushtit.

There really is a bird inside that circle. A little grey fluff of feathers.

Bushtits are such cool little birds, almost as tiny as hummingbirds, and just as busy, flitting from tree to tree. They just happen to like flying in crowds, so you never see less than ten of them at a time. 27 is not unusual (and there were probably more).

The birds I did not get photos of were:

2 northern flickers (male & female)

1 varied thrush

2 Townsend’s warbler

Those are some pretty birds and I am sad I could not capture them on film. I need one of those remote digital computer cameras set up to photograph all the wildlife in our feeders.

But, all in all, it was good weather for birdfeeding and counting the birds that have come to count on us. Pun intended.