1. I’m down to my last dose of Paxlovid this afternoon, hoping that the COVID Crud will lift in full around the same time that I stop taking these large and awful-tasting pills. I certainly feel better today than I have for most of the past week, and remain thankful that whatever combination of natural immunity, vaccination, medication, prior exposure and/or dumb luck meant that it never felt like anything more than a severe and tenacious cold with some really heinous body aches thrown in as a bonus.

2. It’s a good thing that those body aches abated a bit over the past 24 hours or so, as I had to use them muscles today to do some (gasp!) snow removal work. We woke up yesterday morning to a dusting of the white stuff, but it didn’t take anymore than a broom to get it off the ramps and walks into and out of our house. Then last night, we had a crazy spot of weather for about a half hour, a true thunder-blizzard, with frequent lightning, little hail stones, wind, rain, ice, snow, frogs, locusts, and God knows what else falling out of the sky. Even the weather map wasn’t quite sure how to label the storm path, so it just put two storm paths one on top of the other (click to enlarge):

Is it hail? Is it a thunderstorm? Is there water, or ice, or rain? Yes, on all counts.

When I got up this morning, I was surprised to see that we had probably three or four inches of accumulation. I was also surprised to see that sometime during the night, conditions must have adjusted to create a perfect flocking scenario, with every branch on every visible tree looking like the white stuff had been professionally laid on by an ambitious interior decorator hoping to create the perfect Christmas scene. Just a bit early there, son. But don’t bother trying again later, please and thanks. Here are some photos I took from inside the house, while the stuff was still fresh, and before I had to go out in it:

And here’s one more, taken yesterday morning. The flocking isn’t quite as good, but it does capture the holiday spirit nicely, I think:

3. Speaking of holiday spirit, a friend of ours asked me last week to create a fun and festive Christmas playlist for a party, which we were supposed to attend, before the plague caught and hamstrung me. I agreed to undertake the task, in part because it was a favor to a friend and I am altruistic like that, and in part because I’m a selfish pig, and I absolutely hate most of the Christmas music pap that gets shoved down our throats every year, so if I could do my part to control my audio field at an event, then Hey Nonny Nonny, I’m on it. (See here for more on my issues with modern American Christmas music. Spoiler: The title of the post is “Grinching“).

Since it was a party, I figured I couldn’t go hard into the sorts of historically accurate symphonic and choral works that are more in tune (ha ha) with the liturgical meaning of the season, so instead I went for a diverse collection of quirky subjects and styles, while hewing to the mission statement that it have something to do with the December holiday season. Sure, some of the usual suspect songs ended up in my mix, but I tried to make sure they were offered in versions that everybody’s not heard 7,000 times already since American Christmas Consumer Season began, in early October.

Because I have caved to streaming, I can now share that mix with you, dear readers, so that perhaps you will also be able to also curtail the usual crap in your own sonic spaces, ho ho ho. Here ’tis: