A cold, gray Boxing Day

Sophie worn out by life  in Tomball

No, Boxing Day is not a day to throw away all the boxes your Christmas gifts came in. It’s a traditional British holiday, maybe just meant to extend Christmas one more day. It’s primarily a day to spend relaxing with family and friends—and who doesn’t need that after the climactic and hectic pace of Christmas Day. For some in England, it’s a day for fox hunting, though one would hope that sport is fading out—for the sake of the fox. More bizarre, some hardy souls swim the English Channel—or try to. And there’s football, horse racing, and, to borrow from America, shopping.

In this country, we don’t pay much attention to Boxing Day, but its still a day of recover. In Tomball, it dawned gray and foreboding today—and only got darker as the day went on. When I’m here in the Tomball house, my favorite seat is at one end of the dining table—from here I can look to the left and see the swimming pool and, beyond, a field; straight ahead I can see the tiny lake that the house sits on. I love the view in all weather but maybe most in summer when the kids are in the swimming pool. Today it was a striking vista but not an encouraging one. It was a perfect day to work at my computer.

Colin worked hard on setting up my Apple watch, trying to get it to connect the phone to my hearing aids—it won’t do it yet, but he discovered that the Apple people are researching that. And we haven’t figured out all of the cardia monitoring function, but some. It’s a steep learning curve, but I’m confident I’ll master it. I wore the watch to sleep last night and was grateful, because my phone was dead and I was without the flashlight function. Hadn’t found that on the watch—though I now have—but the watch gave short bursts of light which helped me stumble my way through the dark.

I did odds and ends at my computer—writing a couple of thank-you notes and taking care of a couple of business matters. But mostly I worked on my Alamo manuscript and edited three chapters—feeling quite proud of myself. Lots of cutting and pasting, challenging work.

Of course, on this dark and dull day I got a good nap.

Oops, a dogfight over a plastic toy. Sophie was trying to take it from Grace—trouble is it was Grace’s toy and Grace is at least twice Sophie’s size, a big and solid dog compared to Sophie’s 30 lbs. After much squealing on Sophie’s part and growling from Grace, they are separated. Time for bed.