Happy New Year Y'all! I liked this picture with a dutch windmill but the New Year on both ends, Oregon as well as Holland, looked more like this:

                                

Records are broken left and right for the wettest months (and/or year) of 2023.
Oregon has remained in some form of drought since the fall of 2019 but if it manages to continue to receive above-average rainfall and a normal amount of snow during the 2023-2024 wet season, state climatologists believe the state could fully recover from the ongoing drought.
So far, it looks like that's not going to be a problem, it rains almost every day!

                  

Anyway, regardless of the rain, the year came to an end as usual, and as usual we bid it farewell with a traditional meal of lobster on Old-Years Eve.
We even added a steak to make it 'surf-and-turf', since it had been in the freezer for a while and needed to be eaten.
Also as usual we didn't stay up until 12am, there's no way we can stay awake until than, but fortunately the year changed all by itself and we woke up to a whole new one!

And of course in our house that means ... oliebollen!
James did a stellar job once again, actually we agreed these were some of his best ever.

                                                       

Another tradition, I guess we have quite a few come to think of it, is our evening meal of black-eyed peas on New year's day.
(the peas represent coins, the greens paper money, tomatoes for health, pork since a pig always roots forward and corn bread for gold).
Basically it is said to bring good luck and who cannot use a bit of that?

There's one tradition we totally spaced on that day though which was watching the Rose Parade on TV.
I don't know how that happened but we missed it. Bummer .. oh, well.

OK, enough of all the food already! Like we do nothing else than eat .. OK, with this weather that's basically a lot of what we do, I guess.
The birds actually agree by the way, and more have found their way to my feeders.
There's a huge flock of Starlings that comes by every now and than:

They arrive 'en masse' ..



And leave the same way, all together in a huge, noisy cloud of wings and feathers ..

Sometimes when they take to the sky, they swoop and swirl into spheres, planes and waves. The phenomenon is called a murmuration, and it's named after the noise that is made by the many flapping wings of a group of starlings in flight.
It's an awesome sight!

That's about it I think. The rain has kept us mostly inside, except for a couple of appraisals we've done this week.
Fortunately they keep coming in, and it looks like it's even picking up a little.
Many people have postponed having their houses appraised until 'after the holidays' we think and we're getting some more calls as of lately.

I've been working on a monster of a puzzle over the holidays and finally, finally got it done!
There were several moments I wanted to give up on this one, that's how difficult it was to make!

It's not so much the image, which has enough variation in colors and shapes I think, but it's the shapes of the puzzle pieces themselves ... 'Bits and pieces' it says on the box, which should have warned me I guess because that's what they are!

But I persevered and got it done!
It was a puzzle I exchanged with my landlord by the way and I picked up a few more from her when I returned this one.
Hopefully they'll be a little easier, I purposely choose at least one that has more 'normal' puzzle pieces ..