Happy Post-Thanksgiving, A Season of Rejection, Holiday Lights with Dragons, Seeing Friends and Winter Birds

Happy Post-Thanksgiving

Hello! Hope you had a good Thanksgiving. We had a solo low-key Thanksgiving, which was nice. I’m not a huge T-Day person anyway, so we got out the Christmas tree, put on some Christmas movies, ate only the things we wanted to eat and FaceTimed with our families. We didn’t shop on Black Friday, but we did go out on Small Business Saturday and got a few things.

Here’s a shot of a sunset in Kirkland, in front of some shop holiday windows, a sunset, and some winter bird shots from my back porch, including a beautiful pileated woodpecker and a female hummingbird. I also had a week of rejections—but it’s also time that many literary mags are reopening, so it’s the circle of poetry publication, I suppose. Can’t wait for the days to get longer again!

: Me in Kirkland

: Kirkland sunset

: Pileated Woodpecker

: Hummingbird

Holiday Lights at the Bellevue Botanical Gardens, and Holiday Plans with Friends

In front of poinsettia tree at Botanical Gardens

In following my previous post about seeking to do positive things that will help lift our spirits, we visited the holiday lights—somewhat non-traditional—at Bellevue Botanical Gardens, which features dragons and flowers made of lights, as well as a very cool underwater scene. Video of dragon below pics.

This year BBG also has concerts every weekend, and when we went, they had a jazz guitar quartet, so we listened to a concert of jazz standards by Cole Porter and the Peanuts Christmas theme on steel guitar. We hadn’t seen live jazz in a long time, so it was a fun bonus.

Tomorrow I’m doing a class for a university on the East Coast early, and later in the week I’m going to meet a friend downtown for drinks and then go to the SAL event featuring Aimee Nezhukumatathil, whom I’ve known since we started blogging in….2003? So it’ll be nice to go be social a bit. I hope you are also keeping your holiday/election blues at bay with whatever makes you feel even a little happier.