An introvert owl, air frost, cakes, Kindlingtown, Epiphany. (In which I shamelessly make a post almost entirely out of other people's photographs.)

After the last post, I felt this fellow expressed things well.  He is a grey owl in an animal park in the UK.  He was housed in this old brick building temporarily while his aviary was being built, but now he doesn't want to move from it.  He likes watching the other birds outside, but has no wish to join them, so he has been allowed to stay in his own little house. (Photo credit and more info in the link). 

He speaks to my soul, to wit, to woo.

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A bit before Christmas my lovely niece (she's a designer, that's her website, she's called Tom too, I chose the profile page to link to because there's a photo of her on it) woke up one morning to a remarkable air frost, and she got out early to catch these stunning photos, which I told her I would steal and put here, bwha-ha-ha.  So good when people send me gorgeous stuff because they know I'll love it. 

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Then, she and her mum, my lovely sister, sent me these cakes!  Well, not the real thing unfortunately, but some pictures of them.  They always make a wacky Christmas cake, I don't have any photos from previous years, but last year it was covered in fondant icing penguins, the year before that they made fat robins out of Ferrero Rocher chocolates and red fondant icing (only thing worth doing with FR chocs IMO, you don't want to eat the things that's for sure).  This year, they were going to be in more than one place for Christmas, so they chopped the cake into cubes and made four different ones.  The black and white one was inspired by Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus. The coloured chequered one looks to me a bit like Elmer the Elephant.

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I went to get wood in the other day, and thought I ought to use up some of the smaller offcuts from the kindling bin. Then I thought perhaps they could become a townscape. I usually go out with Molly and find the fire lit on my return, as I did that day, but Tom hadn't had the heart to dismantle the resulting construction, and lit the fire with just two sticks and a pine cone.

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And finally may I wish a happy Feast of the Epiphany to you all - the decorations are put away for another year and I've just been out listening to stories, drinking mint tea and eating little cakes, walking around with a daft glove puppet which Princeling had made in a puppet-making workshop on one hand and the silver paper crown from his galette des rois in the other, and more or less passing myself off as a social animal.