Oh good grief life is crazy right now! Work is Bonkers with a capital B — not bad, just extremely busy. I’m doing my regular job, plus helping with the veterans group I volunteered for, plus helping plan a big event in December. It’s all been keeping my on my toes and wearing me out so I have very little brain power left for anything else. And I don’t really anticipate it calming down until after the holidays so I’m just buckling in and hoping for the best. I’m fully off my antidepressants now, which could have been very bad timing what with stressful work and the winter blues, but so far I seem to be doing pretty well (knock on all the wood!!).

We had a small, quiet Thanksgiving. My brother’s family had the flu so we cooked dinner and took it to my mom’s house and had a quiet evening with just four of us. I enjoyed it but I’m also looking forward to seeing my whole big family for Christmas. The husband and I made our annual pilgrimage to Weston for Black Friday, where I did the usual things: bought Santas for my Santa collection, visited Florilegium for yarn, and took a photo with Father Christmas. Makes for a fun day!

I’ve added a few other skeins to my stash lately too. I ordered the holiday wine mystery yarn box from Chestnut Hills Farm & Fiber a while back and it arrived recently, with gorgeous yarn and some super fun other goodies. And I discovered Naima Bond on Instagram and she was so awesome that I had to buy a couple of skeins from her too.

And in other news, it’s been Grace’s turn to be an expensive dog. She had a growth on her top lip that we were watching, and at first it was very small and the vet said it was a histiocytoma, a benign growth that should resolve itself in about three months. Well, it didn’t. It grew and grew and finally when it looked like a raspberry on her lip, I took her back to the vet. The darn thing had more than doubled in size in six weeks! So she got to go in for a little nip and tuck, and was going to get a dental cleaning while she was under anesthesia. Of course I got a call that she had two cracked molars that needed to be removed. Super. That night was really hard — she kept whining and pacing, despite us giving her as much pain meds as we could. Thankfully she recovered quickly and bounced back to her cheerful happy self within a couple of days. The vet sent the growth off to be biopsied and we should hear back about that next week. Fingers crossed! I won’t show you the growth, but I’ll show you her funny little sneer now.

There’s more I could share but that’s probably enough for now and I want to get some knitting done before I get too tired. Happy Wednesday, friends!