Dear Kids,
         In my letter last week I wrote that I was going to color my hair pink for the new year.  And I did–a very bright pink.  Way pinker than last year.   And the next morning  there was an e-mail asking if I could play the organ at a funeral in three days.  Panic!  My hair color simply wasn’t appropriate for a funeral, and it would take weeks to wash out the pink.  I was thinking maybe they could set up the flowers in front of me, but the funeral was for an old man, and there wouldn’t be very many.  Then I called Jane to see where she bought her wig.  It was a shop in Orem, so I went there Thursday afternoon.  The ladies there were very nice, but they didn’t have my color in a style I liked, that wasn’t too expensive.  (Although it dawned on me that anybody who chooses a crazy hair color ought to have a wig on hand.)  Finally I decided to stuff my hair into a knitted beanie, and I wore a sweater I had that seemed to match.  It really looked OK.  I wore dangly earrings to make myself look dressed up.  Since I still walk with a cane, people might have thought I was a cancer victim, but that would have been OK too.  It was all good.  Dad led the music, and we had a nice time together.
         My brother Charley had a surgery yesterday to take the shunt out of his brain and clear out some gummy blood.  A couple of days earlier he had driven to the hospital for a second opinion about the surgery they wanted him to have.  He had a seizure in the parking lot, but a security guard got him inside, which probably saved him.  We hope yesterday’s surgery will finally set him on the right path.  Compared with him, my problems are nothing. 
         We took down our Christmas tree right after Christmas,  because the cats were killing it.  So now they’re attacking everything else.  The blinds are a great target, and we’ll have to replace more than one set, but only after the cats grow out of this phase.  They really like my fake trees.  Monday morning I was teaching a piano lesson in the front room when the fake tree by the window came crashing down.  Scout ran out of the branches.  I told my student (Claren Palmer) that this was normal for our house.  And I left the tree down until the lesson was over. 
         We’re supposed to have a pretty good snowstorm today, and I hope we gets lots of snow. It’s been really cold, too–minus 11 on New Year’s morning.  Winter was late coming this year, but it’s making up for it now!
         Lots of love to everybody, Mom