Christmas on the Farm – 2016

So many parts of this year have been a blur. It’s been a lot of work, a lot of good times, and– every once in a while– the chance to just take a minute to stop and appreciate where I’m at.

Thanksgiving is the kind of crazy holiday where I drive everywhere to see everybody I can, but Christmas? Christmas is for mimosas, and brunch, and playing with toys, and hanging out on the farm.

My mom comes up on Christmas eve, and we wake up early for champagne and quiche, and everybody opens presents. Including the cat.

Notable among the gifts this year: Legos for me (because building things with legos is still awesome, even when you’re 35 and licensed to build actual houses with actual power tools), a xylophone for the chickens (because viral videos of chickens play xylophones is a thing), and a calendar with some of the best memories from the last year on the farm for my mom…

Also, one of these fun little drones, which in theory means I could take some beautiful aerial shots of the farm…

In reality, it’s going to take a lot of practice because most of what I did the first day I got it was to try and get it down from all the places it got stuck.

Literally, 5 seconds after I flew it the first time…

Uh, and then the second time I flew it…

(If you watch that with sound you’ll hear the noise a donkey makes when it’s thinking “wtf”? And also the sound people around me make when they realize I took my shoes off to climb a tree in the middle of winter…)

But we did get one good aerial shot of the farm in winter, before we lost control of the drone and it drifted upward (getting a good shot of everything for five square miles before crashing to the ground.)

So… I’ve got a little work to do on piloting, but maybe come Spring we’ll have more luck. Or I’m just going to get a lot more tree-climbing practice in.

However, for the moment I’m enjoying one of my very favorite Christmas traditions…

Unwrapping and reading the books I bought myself earlier this month!

I’ve read four of the five so far, and this has been my favorite:

And there’s one other present I gave myself just before Christmas this year…

(That is if you consider spending 5 hours painting cabinet doors after work every night for a week a gift…)

I mean, the real “present” here is that I can’t see the mess behind those doors anymore, and I’ve made just a little more progress on the kitchen before the end of the year. More on that coming soon, but right now I’m taking some time with my books and my lists, dreaming up all of the projects I’ll tackle in 2017.

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