Has Santa been good?

Who’s watching the watcher, huh? We all walk on eggshells about making the naughty or nice list, but who’s keeping tabs on Claus, eh? Probably Mrs. Claus, I guess. OK, mystery solved. Go back to your Christmas preparations.

Icy Putt-putt

Friend and party mastermind Hilary Valentine went the extra mile and a half for her annual stocking holiday party by constructing a frozen mini golf course in her backyard. There was a candy cane shaped hole. Ice lanterns. Special score cards. Little tiny pencils. The whole deal. Impressive.

Ice Lanterns

Take a bucket of water. Submerge some smaller vessel inside the water in the bucket and secure it, somehow. I’ve never done this myself so at this point I’m speculating. Wait for it to freeze. Remove smaller thingy. Insert candle inside the hollow and boom, you got yourself outdoor lighting. They’re cool. And apparently an Alaska thing.

Calamity

The Oddfellows Hall in Enterprise is a community hall where all sorts of good things happen. Ballet class. Taekwondo. Music events. It’s also home to the Soroptomist Thrift Store, a Wallowa County fixture that’s like a big garage sale where all the proceeds go to good causes like scholarships and so forth.

A hidden pipe from a decommissioned water fountain of yesteryear froze, burst, sprayed water and made frowny faces. But cleanup and repair efforts were launched and if we’re going to find a bright spot among this unfortunate event, I think we can all agree that it’s the discovery of this ultra-cool stove, seen down in the basement of the Oddfellows Hall. Man, that’s a groovy looking heating device.

Musical Interlude

The song I currently can not get out of my head – get out of my head, song – is Kory Quinn’s Barnyard Stomp. This guy played at Juniper Jam in the Fall and was just in town playing at Terminal Gravity and he’s good. Maybe too good. You should listen to him.

Fight Scene

My niece Claire is a Scooby Doo aficionado. She loves her some mystery solving. As we were loading a DVD to watch Scoob last time I was there, she explained what I would be seeing in this episode and then, as an aside, turned to me and said, “I’m pretty into Scooby Doo,” in exactly the same way somebody might reveal they were an authority on chipped Ming Dynasty ceramics or Impressionist painters who leave a bad impression. Man, that kid cracks me up.

Here’s the dramatic fight scene from a homemade comic book to be released on Christmas morning, starring my nieces and  nephews as superheroes that fight all the bad guys from Scooby Doo.

You may wonder why the bad guys are holding ice cream cones. In this particular story line, the monsters are trying to steal all the ice cream in the world. Duh.

Merry Christmas

Wishing all you Winding Waters friends and family just the best Christmas ever.

Here’s one last pic. This here is me and Pablo Arentsen walking back to camp after a day of steelhead fishing on the Imnaha. That was a good day. I want all the days of 2014 to be kind of like that day. Except maybe better fishing. And not as cold. But otherwise that was a pretty great day.

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