As it's only a northern song

Called my parents, saying it was just checking in and making sure nothing serious had gone wrong. My mother chuckled and said that of course if anything serious had gone wrong, they would have called. Fair enough. Like, just this morning their fridge stopped working, and then their freezer stopped too. (They called apartment management and got that fixed.) And then she went to her car to do some campaigning and the battery wouldn't start.

So that cancelled my dad's plans for the day as he took the car (somehow) to the mechanic and, after a couple hours, got the verdict: there's nothing wrong with the battery. Nor the alternator. Nor anything, really, why are you bringing this car to a mechanic? So nobody knows what the car's issue might have been. Maybe it's just that whole 2021 energy stopping it from doing things. But anyway, besides food and transportation breaking today, nothing much is going wrong there, a happy bit of news leading into Christmas.

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Let's peek around the neighborhood just a little more, on that nice warm Wednesday evening.

More porches, more places to put lights. This one's got a candy-cane style going.

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I know it looks like they gave up on the lights three-quarters of the way through the porch but that's just where I am relative to the building. It's got the whole front covered and most of the side of the porch, so it all looks reasonable.

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And here's more lights and wreaths and even a decorated wild tree.

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Trivia: Through the late 19th century coffee was a more important crop than tea in South India; by 1881 there were still under 5,000 acres of tea cultivated in the area, mostly in the Nilgiri Hills (part of the Western Ghat mountains). Source: Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire, Roy Moxham.

Currently Reading: With Amusement For All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830, LeRoy Ashby.