Come December and stories of Father Christmas, with his hard-working elves and energetic reindeer flock, are in magazines, TV channels and every other media. Father Christmas gets only December,and maybe, a bit of the preceding and following months.
He is a blip on the screen, when compared to the all pervading, omnipresent, constant attraction of the new Lady in Town___Damsel Distraction. Yes, she is the reason for my absence from what-was-my-favorite-corner-of-the-Net, my non-existent online store for knitted goodies, my sporadic posts and even more sporadic emails to the important and precious people in my life.
She lingers in every moment, every activity and every plan which I live through. These days, she just barges in and takes over my feeble mind and procrastinating fingers, and lets good intentions drown in a flood of Net surfing, spider solitaire and idling in the sunshine. Her army of enchanting elves have been trained well. They lurk at every corner, with an enchanting range of pleasant times. Allow me to share the ways my days disappear in the company of “DD and her EE”!!
Winter mornings start around 7 am, when the mists and fog recede and the trees are etched on the frosted window panes of my room. Biskit is already waiting for me to move, but Pepper?! she snuggles deep into her blanket and purrs pleadingly to sleep some more. That’s all I need to sleep away another 30 minutes, get up late, and then gallop out to meet our 5 canine friends who get a cuddle , a pat, and then some breakfast after the morning walk. Elf “doggie distraction” keeps me going till 9 am. The bed remains unmade, breakfast and tea gets delayed, and morning yoga is pushed away to another day.
By 9 am, the other elves come marching into my day! Whatsap messages are an elastic lot, depending on my inclination to download the ” good morning” balloons or the bouquets of flowers. I can handle the mobile with ruthless deliberation, but there is something about the red Mac which makes me melt into a mass of lazy laxity. Elf Facebook can sneak out an hour or two, my favourite blogs oblige me with interesting posts and links, and Gmail has a couple of messages which need to be handled ( the queue of emails which need a reply just keeps growing longer with each passing day).
I try to come to this page, but those well trained elves throw their bait of some good, old fashioned Net surfing…some games of spider solitaire….brainpickings.org articles……and the day is over.
The short evenings are for our daily doggy walk, baking this new cake and gorging on it, cooking something nice for dinner with daughter, and a couple of hours of mindless TV viewing with a blanket on my legs, woollies on my head, hands and neck, heater on the carpet and the electric blankets switched on to warm the bed.
If I haven’t mentioned it earlier, I need to share my total love for this invention by mankind. Electric blankets make my world go round, make my dreams possible, and make it easy to live in these icy climes of Ranikhet. If there is one thing which I will advice you to acquire/procure/steal/borrow, before moving to the hills, it would be a couple of electric blankets. Biskit and Pepper are nodding their heads in unison, while I write this…
Wonder if they will nod their heads when I write about this place?