Teleidoscope

Fri, Aug 15, 2008

Rain, Finally

Posted at 8:32 am MDT to Weather

We are having a rainy day for the first time in months. This is good. The radio said we are 5 inches below normal for the year.

Normal precipitation for the Denver area is only 15.81 inches per year, so this is a serious drought.

The high temperature is predicted to be 56 F, which is about 30 degrees lower than it was a couple of days ago. I switched the HVAC from AC to heat to take the edge off the dampness.

They are predicting snow for the high country.

I'm going to take it easy today: no walking on the treadmill. I'll do my PT exercises and maybe some yoga instead. I spent a day and half in the office using Shawn's desk and chair (he was at a customer site) and I think the ergonomic mismatch pulled my bad hip out of line. The hip feels off, and the skin on my left heel went leathery and split again, which seems to be a sign that the circulation is off in that leg.

I'm going to take it a little easy on the computer work, too. I figured out that because of working until midnight on Monday and Tuesday I had already done more than 40 hours of work related stuff by noon yesterday, and I haven't been sleeping well. I really don't need to run myself into a wall and wreck my health again.

One advantage of doing billable work is that the contract puts a limit on the hours of tight Focused work I do each day: I need to relearn to pace myself when I don't have that external limit. Though I was never good at doing that -- probably one reason I've done well as a contractor and consultant.

Paying attention to that bad leg may give me an indicator of when I'm pushing things too much.

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Wed, Aug 06, 2008

Monsoon

Posted at 7:12 pm MDT to Weather

After a record-breaking streak of hot dry weather, it looks like the southwestern monsoon is finally arriving.

This is the second day in a row that I've gotten a little precipitation and a storm cell has gone by that was dense enough to block my TV satellite signal. The cells are still small: Nanette got no rain yesterday and the farm is only 15 minutes away.

At least this indicates that the weather pattern is starting the change.

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Sat, Jun 21, 2008

Midsummer 2008

Posted at 8:08 pm MDT to Weather

The summer solstice was historically called Midsummer because the solstices and equinoxes used to be considered the middles of the seasons, not the beginnings of them. May Day was the old beginning of summer.

Today was a slow day at the Farmers' Market, but the weather was beautiful.

Nanette's strawberries were in, for the first time this season. Store strawberries taste like plastic by comparison, even the organic ones. I think the store ones must be picked too early so they will survive shipping.

I asked the people at the Laudisio booth if they could make me a dairy-free pizza, and they were really nice about it. They loaded it with veggies and some sausage, making sure I could have everything before they added it. The flavor was a little strange without cheese, and stuff tended to fall off the crust without cheese to glue it on, but the pizza was delicious. It's hard to beat pizza crust baked in a wood-fired brick oven.

I may be begining to recover some balance... I'm beginning to be able to watch cooking shows again.

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Thu, Jun 19, 2008

Sunset

Posted at 8:00 pm MDT to Weather

Sunset today is supposed to be at 8:33 pm. It will actually be a little earlier here: weather.com doesn't take mountains on the western horizon into account.

This is important because I need to get up at 4:30 for a 5am to 1 pm work shift and I doubt I will be able to get to sleep before sunset.

According to the schedule I was originally given, there are five weeks left on the contract after tomorrow, but the customer has decided they want a break for a while after next week (I'm very productive and they are running out of things for me to do).

I'm not sure what they expect to do with four weeks of my time sometime in the indefinite future. On past experience it takes them a month, after an interruption, to get me set up with working logins and such so that I'm actually doing useful work. I'm not sure I care, either.

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Mon, Jun 09, 2008

Summer Cold

Posted at 4:26 pm MDT to Weather

It was chilly and windy all weekend -- on Saturday at market I only shed the outermost layer of what I was wearing from 7am to 2 pm, and yesterday I left the heat on in the house all day and never switched the system over to A/C.

Today is nice, but I have either caught a cold or I'm having an allergic attack from hell. Sore throat. Major sneezing. Watery eyes. Congested and draining sinuses with a sort of seeping nose bleed (I think the sneezing ruptured some capillaries) that makes everything smell and taste like blood.

At least I'm not coughing. Much. And swallowing seems to be working, not that I have much appetite.

I hope this is a cold, actually. It would be depressing to totally disrupt my eating patterns to avoid food allergies and immediately get hammered by hay fever. It feels more like a cold: the sore throat hit first, which isn't a hay fever pattern.

Now I need to find something Ican eat that will cut through the sludge enough to be appetizing.

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Tue, May 13, 2008

Shivering Lilacs

Posted at 6:38 am MDT to Weather

Today is May 13, and they were predicting that we would have an inch of snow on the ground this morning. It didn't happen: the temperatures here didn't get much below freezing over night, so my yard is just just cold and wet.

I am so tired of this teasing weather with alternating days of 70s and snow. I am ready for spring to actually stay.

My poor lilac bush has lots of buds on it this year, but we have had so many late freezes that I am afraid I will not see many blooms. I looked out this morning and its leaves looked sort of clenched and shivering.

I wonder how the orchards are doing. Last year was a bad year for fruit because the buds froze. This year the winter was warmer, but dry, but the spring has been obnoxious.

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Sat, May 10, 2008

Boxty

Posted at 6:50 pm MDT to Weather

Farmers' Market today was cold and windy and it snowed at us. Not flakes, but little white lumps, as if it couldn't quite make up its mind whether to be snow or hail. Despite the weather, we had a good day and sold out by 12:30, so we loaded everything back into the truck, locked it, and walked over into downtown Boulder to find lunch somewhere warm.

Nanette had a coupon for Conor O'Neills Traditional Irish Pub and Restaurant, which is two blocks from the market, so we went there.

I ordered the lunch boxty plate with chicken filling, which turned out to be very like an Irish burrito: meat, veggies and sauce wrapped in a flat tortilla shaped thing, garnished with bits of tomato and green onion, and served with sour cream on the side. The 'tortilla' was the boxty, a sort of fine potato pancake, almost a crepe. The filling in my meal was tender chicken, big chunks of mushrooms and peas in a sherry cream and tomato sauce that was mildly but wonderfully seasoned.

I made a good choice I think. I loved the boxty. Nanette had the "Shepherd's Pie" (which would have been my alternate choice) and we swapped tastes of our meals. The Shepherd's Pie was spicier than I would have preferred.

Their on-line menu indicates that the fillings with beef, salmon, and veggies have different kinds of sauces. It would be interesting to try them. I don't eat out very often when I am in Boulder, but Conor O'Neills is going on my short list of places to go when I do eat out.

I just had a toasted cheese sandwich for supper: the boxty was a big meal, and for breakfast, after setting up our market tables, we had "Mediterranean Breakfasts" from the Greek place in the market Food Court. Eggs scrambled with spinach, served on a pita bed with gyro bits (lamb for us), cheese (feta for me, cheddar for Nanette) and a little cucumber dressing. Market days, for me, tend to mean good eating as well as work and fresh veggies to take home.

I'm not going to make a pound cake this weekend after all... rhubarb is in, so I'm going to make an apple/rhubarb cake, like the ones I made last year. I'm feeling hungry for fruit, anyway.

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Wed, May 07, 2008

Sun/Rain

Posted at 10:28 pm MDT to Weather

After work I went over to Costco to buy a few things. It was sunny, with blue sky over head, though there were clouds in the area, and I heard thunder once while I was in the store.

It still managed to rain on me. The upper winds must have been blowing pretty fiercely.

There are more lines of showers moving in from the west: we are definitely out of the winter weather pattern.

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Night Thunder

Posted at 6:38 am MDT to Weather

It look like we have finally shifted out of the winter weather pattern that gave us snow on May Day.

Spring/Summer weather patterns here include thunderstorms, usually in the afternoons.

Last night we had rain -- with special effects -- instead of snow, which is a refreshing change. It was noisy enough to wake me a couple of times. But the worst of the storms seem to have been south of Denver: reports say that the morning rush is being complicated by parts of the interstates that are flooded out.

We need the moisture -- March and April, which are usually our wettest months, set records for dryness. This is not exactly a drought, though, because even though we were dry, the mountains got buried in snow, and most of our water comes from runoff from the snowmelt.

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Sat, Apr 19, 2008

Another Short Market

Posted at 7:18 pm MDT to Weather

The weather was gorgeous today, if occasionally breezy, and the Farmers' Market was very crowded. It was nearly 9 o'clock before we got signs on the veggie bins because we were too buy selling, and by then we were already sold out of chard and spinach, and didn't need all of the signs.

I think we are getting spoiled. This is the third week in a row that we sold out of fresh produce well before the official end of market. We packed up the truck at 12:30 and I took Nanette home to the farm. where we had a cup of tea and a chat.

After 2, when the road used for the market reopens, I drove her back to the market so she could drive the truck home.

Next week we are going to bring our tarot decks, in case we run out of things to sell before the last customers with preorders arrive to pick up their veggies. (This week we were down to a few bunches of onions, one bunch of beet greens and the dried herbs and chiles before the last preorder.) We'll set up on an empty table at the back of the booth while we wait.

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Thu, Apr 10, 2008

Magic Trick

Posted at 9:10 pm MDT to Weather

This snow storm was like a magic trick. It snowed and snowed and snowed, but there was never more than an inch on the ground here. It was cold enough that it was usually snow falling rather than rain, but warm enough that it melted almost as fast as it fell.

They are predicting highs of 50s for tomorrow, 60s for the weekend (so market should be comfortable) and 70s for most of next week. There's no guarantee that we won't still have more snow this season (one of the nastiest blizzards I can remember in the Denver area was in late April) but really cold weather is getting less and less likely.

Tomorrow is kind of a good news/bad news joke.

The good news is, the new laptop should be delivered some time tomorrow.

The bad news is that I have a conference call with the VP in charge at my current project, who tends to be a micromanager and a bully. Our sales manager will be sitting in on the call, which is probably prudent. The temptation for me to suggest an obvious solution if they are unhappy with my progress is going to be very strong.

I'm sure they are unhappy with my progress -- I am very unhappy with my progress. I seem to spend more time doing re-work than doing actual tasks, so nothing actually gets finished. I state what I am going to be doing verbally in conference calls, and also in emails, in detail, and get what appears to be buy-in from the the people I am working with. But somehow what I have done is never right, never what they really wanted, and I end up having to re-do things.

I do not feel up for this conference: I need plenty of sleep tonight and plenty of herbs tomorrow so I'll be coherent during the call. Of course, it doesn't need a lot of coherence to say, "OK then, I quit." This is why it is good that our sales manager is sitting in: the company can't really afford to have me on the bench between assignments just now.

But it is not a good sign that I know exactly how many billable hours there are between now and the end of the contract. There are 592 hours left on this contract. By the time of the conference call it will be 588.

I will never work for these people again.

I usually get deliveries late in the day, because I am out away from business centers, but I'd be willing to bet that the laptop will arrive (and need to be signed for) between noon and one during the conference call.

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Wed, Apr 09, 2008

Threats

Posted at 10:11 pm MDT to Weather

The forecasters are predicting 3 to 5 inches of snow for tonight. The high country is already getting hammered. Snow for Denver is about 20 inches below normal for the season, but it is way above average in the mountains. The transportation department is way over budget for plowing for the year.

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Mon, Apr 07, 2008

April Snow

Posted at 9:52 pm MDT to Weather

I woke up this morning to a white world: fog, and just an inch or so of snow to make the moutains pretty and the roads ugly for the commute. All of the tree branches and power lines were coated.

It continued to precipitate occasionally into early afternoon, but some of what feel was rain (more or less), and by sunset so much of the snow had melted that even most of the grass was bare.

I'm sure the plants appreciated the moisture. We just finished the third driest March on record, and I noticed over the weekend that even the sprinkling of rain we got last week was enough to turn the grass green.

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Sat, Apr 05, 2008

Piranhas

Posted at 3:32 pm MDT to Weather

The weather was wonderful for today's initial Farmers' Market. It was mostly sunny, 60 degrees F, and a little breezy. The customers came out in droves. And they weren't just enjoying the nice weather: they wanted to buy.

The market opened at 8 am, and we were getting very low on fresh vegetables by 10. Rowan (Nanette's oldest daughter who is mostly running the farm with Nanette these days) went back to the farm to do some more picking.

People mobbed us each time we got restock. It was a good thing that Rowan's friend Erin was helping with the selling. We needed three people during the feeding frenzies.

By noon we had re-stocked twice, there was nothing left at the farm that was close to being ready to pick this week, and we had nothing left on the tables but some dried chile peppers, packets of dried herbs from last season, and some bunches of green garlic.

After the other fresh veggies sold out for the third time, people who came to our booth continued to buy the garlic bunches. I'm convinced some of them didn't even really want garlic, they just wanted to buy stuff.

We packed everything up at noon (with one solitary unsold bundle of garlic, plus the dried stuff) even though the market doesn't close until 2 pm. Then Nanette and Rowan and I walked a couple of blocks to Rowan's favorite bar for lunch. (The truck couldn't be moved until the market closed, so Nanette couldn't just go home.)

This was a very nice introduction to this year's market. We didn't freeze or bake or get rained or snowed on. We had good sales. We certainly weren't bored. And we had a shorter workday than expected.

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Sun, Mar 23, 2008

White Easter

Posted at 11:35 am MDT to Weather

It started snowing about sunset yesterday. I think there was an inch or so on the ground early this morning, so everything was white and pretty in the sunshine.

Now it is melting off pretty quickly, which is what you want snow to do at this time of year. Places where the snow was on dirt or roadbase are already bare. There is just a little snow left on the grass.

I'm ready for green plants and flowers, but that is still a few weeks away here. I should visit Nanette's greenhouse in the meant time.

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Sun, Mar 16, 2008

Mist Again

Posted at 3:45 pm MDT to Weather

This mornign was misty again. Today it did not burn off. It sort of lifted up and got threatening. About 2 drops of actual rain hit my windshield as i was coming home from the grocery store. So I think we are actually going to get some moisture.

It's annoying that neither the supermarket nor the local Whole Foods that used to be Wild Oats seem to carry the brand of St. John's Wort that I trust. Naturemade/Nature'sResource is a national brand, and the supermarket has a lot of their other herbs. I'll try a different supermarket after my acupunture appointment tomorrow, and maybe Walgreen's or Vitamin Cottage. If I still can't find it, there is always the option of internet ordering. Sometimes it is good to live in the 21st Century

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Sat, Mar 15, 2008

Mist

Posted at 7:38 pm MDT to Weather

This morning the clouds were walking. I could see my neighbors' houses a few hundred feet away, but not much farther. It burned off by early afternoon.

There were predictions of snow for this weekend: I'll gladly take mist instead. Actually, I wouldn't mind a little rain, while the weather has decided to be warmish. Better an inch of rain than a foot of snow, and March which is supposed to be one of our wet months, has been dry so far.

I have more energy this weekend than I did last week (I think I've got the St. John's Wort dosage about right) but I'm taking it easy, and not thinking about work today if I can avoid it. Tomorrow I need to shop, for veggies to go with my corned beef on Monday and also for some fresh duct tape for my dryer vent duct (which has pulled apart) so I can do some laundry.

Today I shopped online. I finally ordered the additional spice tins I've been needing for a few weeks. And I put in a big order at Republic of Tea because I was out of my three favorites of their decaf and non-caf teas and low on a couple of others. I ordered a couple of new varieties, too. One was Decaf Pomegranate/Green Tea, which should be great, and better for me than Blue Sky Pomegranate/White Tea soda, which I love. The other was

I re-subscribed to Cook's Illustrated (after a gap of a few years) and paid for access to their online sites, and told them to send me a sample of their sister magazine Cook's Country. I discovered back in January that one of the local PBS stations carries the Cook's Illustrated TV show, America's Test Kitchen and I was watching Test Kitchen episodes today so that I could delete them and free up space on the DVR. They have all of the TV recipes on-line, and they also have all of the episodes on-line so that if you want to try a recipe you can follow along as they demonstrate the techniques and pause or rewind whenever you want.

I'm not going to make any serious decisions about things until after the acupuncture on Monday. Making decisions when you know your brain chemistry is hosed is a stupid as making them drunk.

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Mon, Mar 10, 2008

Daylight Savings

Posted at 8:16 pm MDT to Weather

I am clock-jetlagged today. And I forgot to change the thermostat clock yesterday, so this morning the house was chilly as well as dark.

The fact that I am working partly on Boston time -- two later than my local time -- just complicates things.

There are rumors of studies showing that clock changes cost money and don't really save fuel. Maybe someday they will just leave the clocks alone.

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Sat, Mar 01, 2008

Red Chard Omelette

Posted at 9:02 pm MST to Weather

It was 70 F today in Boulder. We still have our two historically snowiest months ahead of us (and in fact, it is supposed to snow tomorrow) but it was nice to have a little taste of spring.

I had one of my Farmers' Market meals for supper: red chard and eggs, with chard that was picked only few hours earlier. I usually make a sort of frittata, but didn't feel like firing up the broiler, so I folded it over into more of an omelette. And I have to say, that was some of the darkest, reddest chard I've ever seen.

I was able to get the super-fresh chard because I took advantage of the nice weather -- and being mostly not sick -- to run a few errands and stop by Nanette's farm for a cup of tea and some conversation. I was watching in the greenhouse as Nanette plucked the chard leaves I just had for supper.

Nanette and her oldest daughter, Rowan, have been selling fresh veggies through their website since the Farmers' Market ended in November, and many of their crops are still going strong.

And they are running out of lighted shelf space in the small building where they are starting their seedlings for the coming season. (Nanette was planting tomatoes and onions when I arrived at the farm.) And there are already lots of trays with little green leaves sticking out of the dirt on some of the shelves that were filled earlier. Some of the seedlings will move into the big greenhouses, some are being grown for eventual transplanting into the outdoor fields. A few flats may be offered for sale at the early markets.

I keep thinking I would love to have some edible plants in my yard, but my soil is bad (unless you want to make bricks), my well water is worse (unless you want oven cleaner straight from the tap), and I get way too much wind and hail here.

I haven't had much luck with houseplants since I moved to Colorado. When I lived in Connecticut, I always had houseplants, but it is so dry here that I can never get the water right for them. I'm doing good at the moment, actually: I bought a few herb plants at the market last year and two of them (two little bay plants with about a half dozen leaves each) have not died yet.

I have a 30 gallon long tank in my living room that once held goldfish (before I started travelling all of the time). One of these days I need to either clean the minerals off the glass, or replace it with a clean tank. It might be nice to have a terrarium that size: I wouldn't need super-tiny plants, since the tank is 30 inches wide by 18 inches tall by 12 inches deep. The plants and cat would be safe from each other, too.

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Thu, Feb 28, 2008

Noise

Posted at 9:46 pm MST to Weather

Last night was very windy. As in, there were radio warnings for semis driving north and south along the front range. Between the noise, and Dinah walking on me because the wind woke her up, I didn't get a lot of sleep.

I have several paragraphs of story on Bug (the OLPC) and about 6k of background text here on Sophia, but my head feels like it is full of marshmallow.

This is frustrating.

Posting may be a bit light this weekend. The text will be going elsewhere.

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Wed, Feb 27, 2008

Vampire

Posted at 4:42 pm MST to Weather

Once again I'm very slightly feverish in the mid-afternoon.

This is going to sound weird, but I have just realized that the times during the past few days when my body temperature has gone over 98.6 (which is my hot-flash temperature, normal is more like 97.something) coincide with the times when the sun sneaks in and hits me.

I'm not talking about sun-bathing here: I'm talking about sun, through glass, hitting a couple of square inches on my face or the back of my neck. The stupid virus must have increased my sensitivity to sunlight.

No wonder so many of my story characters have non-standard relations with UV.

I think I need to get drapes that close better, and not just to keep the strip of sunlight from shining on the big TV.

When my relatives from New England visited, they asked, "Why do you have your windows covered? You have such a great view." Large window areas in the living/dining room and 320+ days of sunshine at 6000 ft is the reason: without curtains this room is an oven when the sun hits the windows, even in the winter, unless it is actually precipitating or a major cold wind is kicking up.

The rest of the house is protected by the porch/deck roof, but not the livingroom and dining room, and the sun hits all of these windows every afternoon. It's just a question of what angle the sun hits the windows at, and for how long. The house is at a 41 degree angle from north-south and one dining room window faces more or less southwest, with the other 3 in this area facing northwest. Now, at the end of February, half of the curtains on each northwest-facing window are glowing, and the sun is seriously stalking me through the cracks of the southwest facing curtains.

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Thu, Jan 31, 2008

Temperature

Posted at 7:45 am MST to Weather

It's very cold today, and it snowed over night. It's just a couple of inches, but I'm glad I'm working from home again. According to the radio, the roads are a mess.

I'm cold, too. I've been coughing a lot for the past day or so, and feel a bit odd, so I tried taking my temperature. I'm not sure 96.4 F counts as human... maybe I'm transitioning to undead?

There's some kind of crud going around the office. I hope they were not contagious last week when I spent some time in the office.

I hope this cough doesn't hang around too long. Throat swelling and the irritation from the coughing tends to make it even more likely than usual that my esophagus will misbehave when I try to swallow.

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Fri, Jan 25, 2008

Nasty Cold Wind

Posted at 9:06 pm MST to Weather

It is very windy this evening, and it isn't a chinook: the temperature is only about 20 F. Unless I am misreading the thermometer in the dark and it is even colder.

I don't know how fast the wind is blowing, but when I got out of the car to get my mail on the way home from work, I got hit by a face full of gravel. Not dust. Not sand. Gravel.

I hope my glasses weren't scratched. They are less than a year old, and I usually can get two years' use out of a set of lenses.

It's going to be hard ot sleep tonight because of the noise.

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Sat, Jan 05, 2008

Wind and Snow

Posted at 9:03 pm MST to Weather

A year ago this weekend, we had the ground blizzard that put five foot snow drifts across my driveway that did not go away for weeks.

This year, we've had smaller amounts of snow at any one time, and the winds are true chinook snow-eaters instead of being cold. I ended up with a two foot tall drift between my house and the driveway, but the past two days of warm weather and strong winds softened it enough that I was able to chop a path through it this morning. And now the winds and sun have melted the path mostly down to the dirt.

Last year the strong winds were cold, and just turned the drifts to the consistency of concrete.

They are predicting more snow for this coming week, but if the weather patterns this year keep following the more normal pattern of alternating precipitation and melting that they have shown so far, we will be in good shape for the year. The winter shows signs of being far more comfortable than last year, and unless things go abnormally dry for the next few months, we will not need to worry about a drought in the summer.

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Fri, Dec 07, 2007

Beginning to look a lot like...

Posted at 9:37 pm MST to Weather

My schedule has been very hectic this week, since I was working for both my on-site customer, and mornings and evenings for a remote customer. And I had a dental appointment Monday evening and a user group meeting last night that ran long: I didn't get home until after 10pm.

Today there was snow on the ground at dawn but the roads didn't turn out to be too bad when I drove to my on-site customer. When I drove home at noon time, the snow had mostly stopped, but the snow clouds were sitting on the ridge here, so it was very foggy.

I have to be escorted when I'm on the site and they were having their holiday party, so I had the afternoon off. It was nice to have a little time off. But it is frustrating only being able to work on the on-site project in occasional 3 hour chunks: it seems like I just get some momentum when I have to leave.

After lunch I went over to Nanette's for a cup of tea and a nice long chat. They have the farm decorated with lots of lights, and they already have their Christmas tree up and a gingerbread house on the coffee table. I think that combined with the snow to finally put me into a holiday mood.

I've done a little already: I brought holiday cards and stocking-stuffer presents for Shawn and our employees to the meeting yesterday, and I've bought some gifts...

I stopped at a couple of stores after leaving Nanette's and made some more progress on the shopping, even though the snow never really stopped and actually picked up a bit after dark. One of the stores was McGuckins Hardware, which has a wonderful Christmas ornament department and great kitchen stuff as well things you'd expect to find in a hardware store.

They are predicting more snow for tomorrow and Sunday, and I still need to buy a few more things. But if the weather is bad for the weekend I can spend the time decorating the house and wrapping the presents I've already bought. If I can get the out-of-state stuff shipped Tuesday morning (I can't be on-site until after lunch) I'll be in good shape.

I need to reorganize the house to make room for the decorations, too. Buying a tree next weekend isn't going to work if there in no place to put it.

And I've added some pieces to my winter Village, so I'll need a larger space for it. I added a blacksmith for my blacksmith shop, and a waiting customer and horse, and some carolers for the Dickens' Christmas Carol side of things. I also got a sparkly white 'snow' mat and some trees so it will look a little more like a landscape and less like a bunch of stuff on a shelf.

All of my pieces are by a company called Department 56, but I'm mixing pieces from their Dickens Village and New England Village lines. So far I have:

HollyBerry Cottage
Chas. Hoyt Blacksmith (that's the smithy)
A Christmas Carol Visit (Scrooge and the 3 ghosts)
Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim
The Big Prize Turkey (Poulterer's stall, with man holding the turkey and a boy)

The Hitching Post (Horse and owner)
Town Blacksmith (hammering a horse shoe)
Christmas Carolers
Village accessories (that's the trees)
The snow mat.

I may eventually get some more landscaping stuff: they make little shrubs and paving and bits of stone walls and street lamps and such. They make a Halloween Village that might have some gravestones for the Ghost of Christmas Future to lurk among. A horse and sleigh or horse and carriage might be nice. too, but I'm not sure I have room for them. I really need to find a better place for the village than I had last year. Especially if I ever want to add any more buildings.

Another piece I need to add this year is a big tub to store all the village piece in their big styrofoam coffins. They won't really fit into my other ornament-storage tubs, and they deserve a home of their own so they won't be lost or damaged in the off season, or colonized by the dratted mice.

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