We got home this afternoon, and I was glad to be in upstate New York again after our Thanksgiving in Vermont. As beautiful as Vermont farms are, they don’t seem quite real to me, and many of them are not, they are New Yorker’s notions of what beautiful farms should be like. In New York, farms look like real farms, we stopped to check out this goat outside of his roomy private residence by the road. We knew were close to home.

We skipped the Black Friday shopping spree – 140 million Americans went shopping on Thanksgiving, according to retail polls and surveys, this holiday has changed for good, for better or worse. We started out in the storm a bit edgy, we have returned mellow, the animals are good and look great, we are already plotting to see a movie over the weekend. Beyond that, more reading. I have not been able to read much since my surgery in July, that seems to be changing, and I am so grateful for that, I polished off the new C.B. McKenzie mystery today and am pondering some novels.