Bill Roper's Journal

It has snowed a lot here today. A ruler in the back yard carried by younger child measured in excess of six inches at around 6 PM. It is still snowing now. Happily, the snow is supposed to clear out by 6 AM which means that the roads should be clear for K to take her bus back down to Ball State for Monday classes. All I have to do is get her to the pickup site before noon. Assuming that I can get out of the as-yet-unshovelled driveway...

The tree was purchased and placed in its stand yesterday. Late today, the lights and ornaments were added and it is very pretty. We are not sure what Calvin the Very Hungry Dog is going to make of the tree, but I am sure that we will find out. I really wanted to get this done this weekend, because I wanted K to be able to help decorate and I didn't want to wait to get a tree for another two weeks. And so it is done. :)

The news came down the line yesterday that Leslie Fish was very ill and in home hospice, followed today by the news that she had passed. I was never particularly close to her for a wide variety of reasons, none of which were particularly anyone's fault. Nor was I likely to have ever agreed with her politics in general, although I might have agreed with one thing or another at one time or another. This is somewhat akin to two blind squirrels discovering the same acorn.

But there was music. So *much* music! And when Off Centaur Publications was being a tremendous force in the filking community and being built on the contributions of so *many* different people, well, to filk Kipling, "It was Fish, Fish, Fish." And that made a difference in my life and that of many other people. She wrote a lot of songs and some of them were great ones.

Maybe that's not a bad way to be remembered.

Gretchen and I are giving a Zoom concert tomorrow as part of the Festival of the Living Rooms at 7 PM CT (6 PM MT), so it was important for us to actually have a place to set up for this. We selected the living room, which is where the Christmas tree is, which meant that getting the lights and ornaments onto the tree was a good idea. This was mostly accomplished this evening.

I have allocated several hours to get the performing space ready. This *should* be plenty of time to correct anything that tries to go wrong. :)

We'll see some of you there!

The Christmas tree is now *straight* in its new stand and the lights are on.

Tomorrow, we'll go for the ornaments. :)