Toward Spring

We left the tree and the decorations up after Christmas, and then we left them up past New Year's. Then (partly because it's a hassle to take the tree down on a weeknight) we agreed to begin observing Twelfth Night and to take the evergreens and all the cute festive stuff down after that. So Saturday night we ordered in a feast (happened to be from a really excellent Mexican food place called Left at Albuquerque, which only works as a route to Mexico if you're starting from the east but which I fondly hope is a nod to Bugs Bunny), and we spent the early hours of the evening dipping variously-colored corn chips into salsa and swapping tastes of Grilled Shrimp Fajita and Outlaw Chicken Burrito while working on the current jigsaw puzzle. Warning: when cut up most of the peices of Van Gogh's Starry Night look very much alike. We've been on this puzzle (okay, not every waking minute, but *still*) since late November. When we were puzzled out we sat up and watched Stardust, which we both really liked.

Special eveing. Nothing fancy, but special all the same, the last evening with the ligths on the tree. Yesterday we took everything down and packed it away til next year. And today, after days of storm (and I do mean storm), we have sunshine. It'll pass, there's rain forecast the rest of the week, but for right now it's a reminder that the days are getting longer and Spring is coming.