cimorene

I woke up with a godawful sore throat and tackled the Ubuntu forums in search of a working application for creating passworded .rars again, because I just received the fourth gift package of the season from my parents, starring The Nutcracker Suite by Spike Jones and His City Slickers, which is an important part of Christmas, I feel. No luck yet with that, though. At least, it totally looked like it worked, but when I tried to open the archives I failed, even though I didn't get an error message. Back to the grindstone.

(Bonus crack care package news: the customs listing said "Candy, sock, gift." I figured there was candy, a sock, and a gift in there. But silly me: There was red beans and rice, a bracelet, a few books and the aforementioned CD. So um... 'sock'? Possibly Daddy said 'books' and his attendant misheard it as 'sock'. It'd be just like the speakos he gets with Dragon Naturally Speaking when he dictates to the computer, but with girlier handwriting.)

But first, Chi and I visited the 19th-century house-complex behind the Apothecary Museum yesterday for Lucia day. I don't have any pictures of Lucia because all I could see was the top of her crown of candles, most of the time. It was a little crowded. I did take a few exterior pictures in the courtyard though.

They keep goats here in the summer.

The indoor chicken coop is in one of the outbuildings, a kind of pottery shed where they sell souvenir herbal tea if they're, you know, there. Which they weren't.

This guy was crowing every, like, 10 seconds. We followed his cries in from the courtyard straight to the coop, which is all made out of tied-together sticks, completely authentically old-looking. He's got a bandage on one foot, poor little dude, and he seemed pissed about it. His girlfriend's like, "Whatevs."