Spike continues to improve

 It seems that we’ve dodged a heart-breaking decision as Spike has improved dramatically and has even made it up the front steps a few times. Of course he’s still muddled by dementia and may even be a bit worse in that regard but he seems happy enough, evidenced by the ravenous appreciation of his meals! If the word ‘try’ had a photo beside it in the dictionary it would be of Spike as he doesn’t give up even when things are difficult for him. 

He is sleeping more than usual but I chalk that up to needing rest to heal his brain - when I was first sick I needed tons of sleep to get through life for a year or more. In fact when I started back to work I had a nap time at noon everyday. It takes a lot of energy to build new neurons.

We were lucky to have another diversion last night with Trudie and Leo coming over for a simple dinner of roasted tomato soup and fresh bread. At the last minute I whipped up some cookies: orange and cranberry flavoured shortbread. I made them with frozen cranberries which was not ideal as they never firmed up properly. But they were tasty enough to add the recipe to my Christmas 7 cookie list! 

Trudie brought a few treasures: some blue decorations for my tree - oh how I love blue and gold together; and some infused vodka which was a fun taste test ;-) 

Glancing at the calendar this morning I realized that Christmas is fast approaching so I better get cracking with baking. The traditional Norwegian seven different kinds of sweets were a good diversion last winter when we weren’t seeing people, but this year with our social calendar it might be more challenging. So today I started the baking frenzy with a batch of butter pecan cookies. A flurry of butter and flour will pass the next several days :-)

We had our third corned beef incarnation tonight: latkes with zucchini (from our garden), potatoe and corned beef. Yum!

Awesome!

“Spike climbing the stairs”

“Michael Buble Christmas music”

“snowflakes against a dark sky”

“my little pup close at my heels on the way to bed”

“making food from stuff we’ve grown ourselves”