🎁 🎁 🎁 three presents for 1/5, the 12th day of Christmas, Epiphany Eve (I am Melchior, King of Persia, an old graybeard bearing gold), as I struggle with the afflictions of my body (plus some extras, like ten days of near-deafness) and with a long litany of Things Gone Wrong, including the roof rats that have been eating away a wooden door on my patio (it’s winter, and they got cold and hungry, and seem to have imagined that things would be better inside my storage closet) and a prescription drug service whose erratic and incomprehensibly shifting software has consumed significant chunks of four of my days as I tried to get some prescriptions refilled on-line for mail delivery — I tell you this to explain that my absence from posting has been neither thoughtless indolence (stretched out on a plushy sofa while snacking on chocolate truffles) nor yet another near-death episode (with ambulances, emergency rooms, and surgeries), but just the confluence of a high level of everyday medical awfulness and the howling devils of daily life (les choses sont contre nous, et les bêtes aussi)
So let’s talk about axolotls. This from an elfshelfism that came my way back in December on Facebook, which I failed to save, but then it turns out to have surfaced in a posting on Threads on 12/13 — these things get passed around from hand to hand, like jokes and nursery rhymes — by charlesrathmann, who wrote
Elf on a shelf. eh? I give you:
(#1)
