Cotton Candy Clouds for New Year's Eve

The sky this morning had the most interesting splotches of light on the clouds. Some of them looked like puffs of cotton candy at a fair.

We have come to it now, the last day of this year, and of this decade, depending on how one counts decades. At any rate, the "teens" of the second millennium are over and the "twenties" are about to begin.

I doubt they will be Roaring '20s like in the 1900s. But we'll see. By 2025, things might be grooving along as well as one could hope. Or we could all be dust on a barren, dead planet.

Moving on.

My major accomplishment of this year, by far, was writing a 100-page magazine at the behest of the county's 250th anniversary committee. I was asked in March and I finished it in mid-October, for the most part, although I was still proofing copies into December.

My next other accomplishment was being published in Artemis and then attending and reading my poetry at a poetry reading at the Blue Ridge Library in September.

I also managed to hit my 36th wedding anniversary, a feat in this day and age, and I've kept my husband clean, fed, and happy while he recovers from an ankle fusion surgery. I do think we need to build him a man space, though. I miss my alone time and having here 24/7 for six weeks has been nerve-wracking. I'm not used to having him around all the time.

What else happened that was noteworthy this year?

Ah, home improvements. We installed new flooring. Well, actually some of the flooring we installed in 2018 had to be removed and reinstalled, and we went ahead and put in hardwood flooring while we were at it. It has worked well and I think the house has less dust.

Also, we lost a lot of trees. The first blue spruce fell over in a windstorm in February, and the others we removed because they were dying. In 2012, I think it was, we had a drought, and we didn't water the trees because these were established trees - they were nearly 30 years old then - and it simply didn't occur to us to do so. As a result, they each caught a fungus that eventually kills the trees. We tried spraying them annually with fungicide but they were too far gone. Then the ash borers came through and took out the ash trees. So we had the blue spruces removed, and a very large ash, and from the looks of it we will have to have the tree people back to remove at least one more ash in the backyard that is too large to simply cut down. I miss my trees although I do enjoy the new views. We plan to plant something back this spring. I want evergreens, so I need to find a hardy type that will weather our changing climate.

One other thing I did was contact my local officials with concerns about Freedom of Information Act notices and their many closed meetings. This led to a flurry of meetings with county staff that were both perplexing and amusing. Some changes were made because I was right but the county still spends far too much time in closed sessions and it is very secretive about things they really have no reason to be so closed-mouth about. That happened in March.

My nephew married and had a baby. We threw him a combination marriage reception/baby shower in late May. The baby's name is Ellie and she's just starting to figure out she can move around. I think she'll be crawling in the next few weeks.

In late June, I developed a blood clot in my leg. I still have a knot there, although the clot is apparently gone and this is now a big varicose vein. It hurts sometimes, still.

We went to Myrtle Beach in September. I bought a cheap electric guitar, which I am enjoying very much. I'd forgotten how much I like to play an electric guitar. This one is very light for an electric guitar.

That brings us fairly current. It was a busy year. What will 2020 have in store, I wonder?