Stacy Horn

There’s this app, Rafflecopter, that I can use to set up a raffle for my books. I suppose I could do a raffle without it, but still. The thing would be thinking of a way to conduct it that wouldn’t be annoying for people to enter. Or be too much work.

For Christmas I got two prisms for my window, and I love them. The colors move around my apartment throughout the day, sometimes lighting up my hands, or the cats, and other things. This is a gargoyle thing on the wall in my kitchen

Every year I attend the Grace Church performance of Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors. I grew up listening to this opera at Christmas, to hear it now makes me feel … like life goes on forever. I remember snippets of the holiday from my childhood, my grandparents, our house in Huntington, tinsel (never used now due to cats). Sigh.

Here’s a very short video I made of their performance 7 years ago, in 2014!! I really am a creature of habit. Another nice thing, attendees get a poinsettia out of it! The church invites the audience up onto the altar afterwards to help themselves to a plant. The green one (once red) was from last year, the red one was this year’s.

A brief video of caroling at Jenny and Christy Spiecher’s house. Jenny used to live in the first floor of my building. I have a picture from their party last year (scroll down). Two of the musicians are the same, and they are from the Romp family, from Christmas on Jane Street: A True Story. They’ve been selling trees on Jane Street since 1988. This party was packed, by the way, but most of the people were in the room behind me. Where the food was.

The maddening thing is, when I went out I realized later that I’d gotten some things for Christmas that would have helped. Like the “infinity” scarf, which would have protected with my freezing-to-death face. And ear muffs. Speaking of which, check out the Tweetie Pie ear muffs.

Well, as cold as I was, at least I wasn’t these poor guys. (Checking off bus driver as a possible mid-life career change.)

Maybe it’s less fun for people in Boston and out on Long Island (hello family!) but I plan to go out there and play shortly. I took the shot below on the roof last night. It was windy and absolutely freezing.

I’ve also got this insanely long list of articles to read, plus my blog for my book The Restless Sleep has been broken since I moved Echo’s webserver onto a new machine and that has to be fixed. I’m afraid to try. It involves learning new things.