– Wednesday, December 25th, 2024 – -8˚C / +17˚F = Cloudy, with traces of flurries still falling @ 01:04 am Atlantic Time in New Brunswick, Canada.

-“00:11 am December 25, 2024 + Security Camera Monitor Photo” –
— Security Camera Monitor photo taken at eleven minutes after midnight – The weather app said “Cloudy” – but we’re still getting light flurries. – The “LST 651” on the top right, sitting on the shelf above the monitor – was one of several my father made using plastic cut to size and needle point with yarn, and a lot of four letter ‘magic words’ that turned the air blue every time he missed a stitch or made any other kind of mistakes in the process. He made a bunch of them for the reunion of his World War II shipmates on the LST he served on in the Pacific, including Okinawa, where he ferried a lot of Marines ashore, piloting smaller landing craft back and forth under heavy fire, during the horribly messy fighting there – and we know a lot of those Marines never came back. His needle point LSTs were center pieces on tables where the survivors sat for dinner at their reuinion that year, which was probably one of the last reunions that group had. { Not exactly the happiest thing to post on a Holiday that supposedly celebrates life and spiritual salvation for us earthbound humans, even if the holiday replaced a Roman Holiday that didn’t exactly celebrate wonderful Christian values. But then – too much of what we hear these days coming from supposedly wonderfully religious Christian mouths isn’t exactly wonderfully spiritually uplifting stuff that Christ let Himself be tortured and killed to spread to the world as a message of encouragement and hope – ya think?)

-“Our Christmas Tree this year, and the modest presents beneath and/or around it.”-
— We haven’t exactly felt like celebrating anything in the last couple Holiday seasons, but this year when Cathi thought we should do something a little more cheerful for ourselves and to hopefully spread cheer to her daughter and her daughter’s husband – I said that I could probably afford a small artificial tree that we wouldn’t be allergic to and she said, “No-” she knew we had something already that would fit the theme and yeah, it even had small LED lights in place and she had a couple ornaments with special meaning to her that made their way onto the tree and we didn’t go crazy getting each other presents, but we did more than enough to keep the spirit glowing.
— I have no idea how this is going to format when I push the ‘Publish” button, so I’ll stop here and see how it looks.
~~~~~ Jim




















