No new horse

I did my budget and all the extra money I thought I had, where I could maybe get another horse is not there.  Possibly will look brighter next month,  depends on whether dad pays some of the tree trimming bill.  I put aside my petty "they treat me like an ATM" feelings and sent bro and Sil a check and a check to her son and son's gf for Christams.  I did write in the son and gf card "check out KenColeman.com"  A reasonably polite way of telling them to GOYAaGaJ methinks.   I could feed another horse but there isn't really money to pay market price for an adult horse and I'm pretty leery of rescuing one;  I'm no super keen horse judge.  I can spot some obvious 'probably wouldn't hold up for distance riding' but not enough to feel confident and we already have great plenty of horses I don't want to try to use for distance riding. 

Wrote a slightly overdue paper review this morning.   I did not catch every poor sentence but did give several  cases where a bit of word change will make things more clear.  I could hardly write "I have no idea if this is novel research because I've been horridly lazy about keeping up with reading the research journals but meh, thats why they get more than 1 reviewer.   The basics seemed fine, although I would not spot if the equations were wrong.   Got 15 cards addressed and very short notes added to the form letter on Sunday and mailed em this morning.

Saturday I finished cleaning up the horse pens from the half ass job the skid steer guy had done.  I am going to search for a new person but it wasn't sooo bad, certainly it was much easier for me to finish up the cleaning after he had moved the heavy piles of hay and manure that I had tractor raked up last week.  Also on Saturday got dad to help me get holiday decorations down, did 2 loads of laundry but skipped doing the towels and made CF steaks.  Steaks were fairly meh, but better than coming out tough or me thinking they tasted bad.   Sat evening I set up our artificial tree.  I'm going to have to get a new(er) one next year I think.  Its shedding needles and looking a bit ragged to me.  Turned out it was good I had not gotten outdoor lights put up because I remembered that its getting too hard to get enough lights for the tree with the bigger size bulb indoor lights we had always used so I took one of the strings of little indoor/outdoor lights for the tree instead of putting along our roadside fence. 

Sunday dad and I got the outdoor lights up,  he put up his laser and LED lights, which are sure a lot easier for lighting up the house and trees/shrubs next to house than actual lights.  I made fish for supper.  I have decided I like baking fish sometimes instead of frying it.  I'll still fry cod, it seems to taste good fried, but the other grocery fish benefits from a bit of soaking in lemon juice and and then bakes up fine.   I've also convinced myself its OK to use foil and make my life easier for baking a couple pieces of fish for supper.