Cough Drops and Tissues

Lying on the sofa sick with a nasty cold yesterday, I got up to all sorts of tricks:

• Went through my Christmas hunting/gathering/crafting list and realized once again that I have a much easier time coming up with gifts for females than for males (except Todd--he's easy.  I just find him anything to do with books, fountain pens, coffee, vintage clothing, or moleskin notebooks and he's a happy camper).   
• Passed the better part of an hour imagining I was poor Robert Louis Stevenson stuck in the nursery with yet another illness.  Those gorgeous poems in A Child's Garden of Verses were the product of Stevenson's lifetime of ailments combined with his own brilliant imagination.  There I was, just like Stevenson, "the giant great and still / That sits upon the pillow-hill, / And sees before him, dale and plain, / The pleasant land of counterpane."
• Consumed a package and a half of Ricola sugar-free lemon-mint throat drops.
• Caught up on some of my favorite blogs!
• Read some of A.S. Byatt's novel The Children's Book.  Delicious.
• Took random photos of the cottage all from where I sat and/or lay on the sofa.  
• Stopped taking random photos when all that close inspection made me realize how dusty and cluttered the place is.
• Drifted in and out of sleep.  The photo in this post is the view I saw above my head upon waking just after sunset.  Nothing like fairy lights to cut through the fog and, in my case, the self-pity of a December cold.  

Thinking of you, my friends, and hoping you are happy and healthy!