I have just this to say:  An 8-foot Christmas tree, loaded with over 3,000 ornaments, makes a really big mess when it falls.

I’d planned to do many things today, but ended up doing only one.  And it’s not finished yet, either.

1.  A true friend never gets in your way – unless you happen to be going down.  –Robert Edwards

*2.  At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves. –George Orwell

3.  There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure.  The failure is a stranger in his own house.  –Eric Hoffer

4.  . . . (he) is good only for frightening fish when he falls into the water.  –Zen proverb

5.  It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.  –Emerson

6.  If any young man expects without faith, without thought, without study, without patient, persevering labor, in the midst of and in spite of discouragement, to attain anything that is worth attaining, he will simply wake up, by and by, and find that he has been playing the part of a fool.  –Minot Judson Savage

7.  Failure is instructive.  The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.  –John Dewey

8.  We die as often as we lose a friend.  –Pubilius Syrus

9  The wisest thing to do with a fool is to encourage him to hire a hall and discourse to his fellow citizens.  Nothing chills nonsense like exposure to the air.  –Woodrow Wilson

10.  There is no such thing as a plain face.  –David Levine

11.  We are all largely fictitious, even to ourselves.  –Raynes Heppenstall

12.  One should never place confidence in the future – it doesn’t deserve it.  –Paul Chamson

13.  Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey.  –Cynthia Ozick

14.  Don’t place too much confidence in a man who boasts of being as honest as the day is long.  Wait until you meet him at night.  –Bob Edwards

15.  Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.  –Francis Herbert Bradley

16.  A man’s true wealth is the good he does in this world to his fellow man.  When he dies, people will say, “What property has he left behind him?” but the angels will ask, “What good deeds has he sent before him?”  –Mohammed

17.  The things that come to the man who waits are seldom the things he waited for.  –Bob Edwards

18.  Choose rather to want less, than to have more.  –Thomas ‘a Kempis

19.  Never wrestle with a pig.  You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.  –Anon.

20.  Never try to teach a pig to sing.  It wastes your time, and annoys the pig.  –Anon.

21.  I can’t write a book commensurate with Shakespeare, but I can write a book by me.  –Sir Walter Raleigh

22.  Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you.  The jotting is simplicity itself – it is the occurring which is difficult.  –Stephen Leacock

23.  Wit consists in knowing the resemblance of things that differ, and the difference of things that are alike.  –Madame de Stahl

24.  Results!  Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results.  I know several thousands things that won’t work.  –Edison

25.  Character is what one really is; reputation what others believe him to be.  –Henry Ward Beecher

26.  It will cost something to be religious; it will cost more to be not so.  –John Mitchell Mason

27.  A happy life is one spent in earning, learning, and yearning.  –Lillian Gish

28.  . . . thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. . . . –Thomas Gray

29.  One has only to grow older to become more tolerant.  I see no wrong that I might not have committed myself.  –Goethe

30.  What you will do matters.  All you need is to do.  –Judy Grahn

31.  Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.  –Jerome

32.  Everything that is done in the world is done by hope.  –Martin Luther

33.  The heart has reasons that reason does not understand.  –Jacques Benigne Bossuet

34.  Borrowed thoughts, like borrowed money, only show the poverty of the borrower.  –Marguerite Gardner

35.  Borrowing, like scratching, helps only for a little while.  –Sam Levinson’s Mother

36.  . . . for Time is the longest distance between two places. . . .  –Tennessee Williams

37.  The crown of all faculties is common sense.  It is not enough to do the right thing; it must be done at the right time and place.  Talent knows what to do; tact knows when and how to do it.  –William Matthews

38.  The best way out is always through.  –Robert Frost

**39.  Truth is rarely pure, and never simple.  –Oscar Wilde

40.  Time is a fixed income, and, as with any income, the real problem facing most of us is how to live successfully within our daily allotment.  –Margaret B. Johnstone

41.  Truth hurts.  Not the running after; the running from.  –Unknown

42.  Time flies and draws us with it.  The moment in which I am speaking is already far from me.  –Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux

43.  Feeling does not become stronger in the religious life by waiting, but by using it.  –Henry Ward Beecher

44.  Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. . . it has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.  –C.S. Lewis

45.  Man’s faith, instead of always remaining the great creative factor, sometimes betrays him into the impasse of stubborn, sterile dogmatism.  –Michael John Demiashkevich

46.  Let the farmer forevermore be honored in his calling, for they who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.  –Thomas Jefferson

47.  The stupid you have always with you.  — Thoreau

48.  I have never yet seen or heard anything serious that was not ridiculous.  –Horace Walpole

49.  A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.  –Marianne Moore

50.  Where there is yet shame, there may in time be virtue.  –Samuel Johnson

*  Dear heaven, I hope not!

**  This one’s for you, Miguel.

Now, back to the mess.  I’d try to make a joke about sifting tiny fingers and feet out of the piles, comparing it to an explosion or plane crash or something, but it would be in bad taste.  Besides, I don’t have the energy for another PC war.

Oh good, there’s that little hand I’ve been looking for. . . .