Be Joyce, Be Joyce greatly,
O daughter of Inez
Shout, O daughter of Harry!
Behold thy Name cometh unto thee!
She is the righteous Sister,
and she shall speak not Jay unto the heathen.
– Music by Handel, Lyrics by Pooh & I

I shouldn’t be irreverent, when it comes to other people’s religion. I’m not speaking of Christianity. I still count myself a Christian, no matter what some other people might think, and the above little ditty aside. No, I shouldn’t be irreverent about the Church of Baseball.

Carl wrote me a great letter about Tony LaRussa, the Cardinal Manager that led his team to this year’s World Series championship. It was a nice personal touch, as was the plate. Not that the rest of you didn’t do good too. Don’t you just love my mastery of the colloquial English? Jane’s presents were spot on, except that Dave’s ear buds should have been for me. Thank you Frank and Kathy for the pasta dinner, we will be taking you up on your offer to come visit, next year. Chris, thank you for the gift of wine, it came in handy when Bob, et al visited us last week. Jeremiah was a bullfrog; he was a good friend of mine. I never understood a single word he said but I helped him drink his whine. Bubs always buys me the best shirts for work. They never last a year, because I wear them almost every day. To our twin sugar daddies, thank you. I would like to be able to say that we invested or saved wisely your collective presents, instead, we cashed the checks and then threw the money into our new furnace. 😉

“Persephone’s Pomegranate” was our Christmas dinner cooking/art project. See, I helped Anne in the kitchen. The pomegranate seeds were sprinkled in out dinner salad. It is a stop action animation. I made it look like a cartoon to cover-up a focusing issue with the original photography. I think that it turned out pretty well. If you look closely, at the end of the movie, Anne picks six pomegranate seeds out, per Persephone. We were going to have Dan do this, because he lives in La-La land, where six more months of winter is no big deal, but we ate them ourselves. Sorry, northern friends, but the best art is derived from suffering, in this case yours.