'twas the night of

Later the hallowed 25th, we had a late and light (as in lite) supper. Here Sarah puts the final touches on the table. Foreground is tete de moine cheese--thanks Stephanie. Oh, it was one haute cuisine spread! Then gift exchange. The chairs were our gift to each other.

Amish school's out

After a half day of school and carolling by mule drawn hay wagon, the scholars leave and get home in time for lunch. After the children left, the teacher allowed me to snap the decorated classroom.

best lights prize

Nothing in Monterey rises to the level of a best Christmas lights prize, but I am handing out a new category--most remote lights. These are "in" the village, back Spring Road halfway to the illegal goat path crossing. The real prize goes to a house in the center of Leola with a drive-through. Here are two shots. A second house gets honorable mention, close to second place.

it's beginning to look a lot like...

...a blizzard. But what a gentle, soft relaxing one. Just as I download the photo from camera to computer, the email cancelling church comes to my inbox. Those lights are LED ones, a sign of the times.

then siding and windows

This is finger-numbing nail pounding in 38-degree weather, bright sunshine or not.

then come(s) rafters

killing frost

This Wednesday at 6 a.m. the outside thermometer registered 12 degrees. I had to scrape ice off windshields. That's a killing frost. Tell that to the Swiss chard still standing unshielded in the garden. Some of my friends don't like the way the Swiss voted on minarets. But you gotta give it to the Swiss for having hardy chard.

frame goes up

(reverse order) First the concrete floor sets. Then much of the frame is assembled horizontally. Forget those movie pictures of 40 Amishmen straining to lift the side of a barn. Here in modern Monterey we just let the crane do that. It starts to look like a building finally.

timber framing

Aaron is putting up a timber frame shed beside his shop. I'm guessing that, apart from the hot air balloons that occasionally drift over the village, this crane is the highest anything ever got in Monterey.

hometown rap

Put the kids to bed. Well, it's not that rated. (New Holland is a town five miles east of Monterey.) Then...

word play

One of my joys is word watching. This rare one came on my word-a-day email: rhopalic (from Greek for a tapered club, getting wider like a baseball bat). Here's a rhopalic example they sent.

"I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalises intercommunications' incomprehensibleness."