Thursday

The Little Woman has been planning a garage sale with her singing partner, but I think it's too late. The plan was to do it Sunday, but we don't have the stuff collected yet. She hasn't priced anything. She was going to put a classified ad in the L.A. Times. Time is running out for this project. We don't have the thing organized at all.

And I still have the Banner project to finish. Hope to finish it today. That check will make a nice Christmas present if I can get the thing finished and off to the client.

The Little Woman still has a bad cough, a residue of the flu she had. It's making her tired. She needs rest after that grueling session she had teaching art to the little nose pickers in the L.A. public schools. I have a bad cough, too. It's a seasonal thing. I expect this to happen just about every winter.

We don't even have a Christmas tree. We have always have a tree. Finances are tight this year. All season I have only seen one car with a tree tied on the roof.

Speaking of Christmas, here's a shot of the life-size creche my dad used to put up every year in our front yard in Lowell, Indiana. This was probably from around 1947. Dad bought the Mary and Joseph mannequins from a Chicago department store. The mule was, of course, our family mule. Doesn't every family have a mule? His name was Long Ears. Out of frame of the shot was a lighted star on a pole, and dad would put a record player on the porch playing Christmas music. It was really quite touching. Cars would stream past our house in an endless parade. Dad won the Lowell Christmas Decoration Contest every year for several years and finally they just phased the contest out.