White Hanukkah

I spent the morning raking the front lawn, which badly needed it. Miss Ellie, my landlady, has very bad knees and just had surgery a few months ago. As she mentioned later, she was tired of wading across the huge piles! It was dirty but kinda fun. I don't mind raking. I'm used to helping out with big yards. My mom and stepdad have a big yard in the house in North Cape May they're currently living in, and I used to help them, too. It was the same kind of yard, too - lots of trees and moss, not much grass.

The mailman arrived about a half-hour after I started. He bore another package for me. Lauren sent me a set of zip disks yesterday and said there was more coming, so I was looking forward to seeing what else she sent. I couldn't wait until I finished. I took a break for a minute to open the package and find...a WebKinz reindeer!

In other words...meet Mary, Clarence's twin sister. She loves to dance, so her room is mostly ballet-themed. I bought her the green-and-red layered t-shirt and striped shirt, and she sleeps in yoga pants, a red t-shirt, and moccasins. She tended to our garden today. I wonder how much longer until the tomatoes come up? They're the only things we haven't harvested yet.

And she got to feast on Goo Goo Berries! Goo Goo Berries are randomly floating through WebKinz World. Click on the huge blue pumpkin-shaped "berry," and you get berries for your pets! We're going to "sell" them in the Fudge Kitchen.

(The non-virtual Mary will be a Christmas decoration; she's keeping the Christmas bears company under the tree.)

It began to flurry as I worked on the yard. I thought nothing of it. We occasionally get flurries in December, but don't usually get any real accumulation until January or February. However, this time, it didn't stop...and it was piling on the leaves. I had to work at 1PM, so I finally quit and played with Mary. Unfortunately, by the time I finally peered out a window and remembered I had work, not only was it too late to ride my bike, the snow was coming down harder. Uncle Ken picked me up and dropped me off.

Work was steady-to-busy...but not as bad as it COULD have been, given the propensity of the local population to panic at the first sight of a snowflake. They must have done all their panicking yesterday when the first snow weather reports appeared on TV and online.