The Neverending Holiday

This is neither surprising nor untypical of our family. A little more communication would probably help, at least in keeping down expectations, but wouldn't really change anything.

We were expecting the family (Other Brother, niece, two nephews) down here for Christmas. My brother bought a nice standing rib roast for Christmas dinner.

Our Other Brother called--on Christmas Eve--to let us know he and the niece would be coming down the day after Christmas and the nephews would be showing up three days after that. We cut one third off the roast and I cooked that up on Christmas Day just for the two of us. We opened presents.

Other Brother and niece arrived Thursday afternoon with enough time to visit for all of two hours before my brother had to go to work. We opened presents and played games. They were going to come back later in the evening to look through my new telescope but the sky clouded over. Last night they came over and we all got to look at the moons of Jupiter, the Pleiades, and the stars Procyon and Betelgeuse. The niece wants a telescope. She also thinks Betelgeuse is a hilarious name for a star (and she's never even seen the movie). Today they've gone kayaking for manatees.

When the nephews arrive on Sunday, they're all going up to Busch Gardens for the day after which Other Brother leaves for home. The niece is staying with the nephews at least until their mom shows up and then will go home with her. Not sure when that will be. The nephews may be here through New Year's but who knows when, or how often, we'll see them. There are still presents to open and the rest of the roast to cook. If I get enough notice, I'll be able to make a New Year's dinner for everyone. If not, my brother and I will finish it off ourselves.

Also, my brother and the niece were the only ones to ask for (and get) anything specific in the way of presents. The rest of us just give and receive random stuff. It's kind of the way we roll. It's actually exciting in its own way never knowing ahead of time whether the recipient's reaction is going to be joy, satisfaction, let down or, "WTF were you thinking?!"

I got two joys and a let down this year. Not bad.

Reversion to the Mean, Or: Coal For the Kitties

Now, this is more like it.

I came home Saturday to surprise Paribanour in the Christmas tree. Technically, leaping from the Christmas tree, about a third of the way up. There were four ornaments on the rug, none of them broken. I reattached them and we stopped the tree from turning in hopes that would lessen the cats' curiosity.

My brother reported that after he had kicked Mittens out of his room for some infraction he went into the living room to check up on the F.L.A.C. and noticed under the tree one penguin, a lump in the tree skirt, then another penguin. Mittens had crawled under the skirt. He also had to reattach a number of ornaments from a previous incident.

After I took away their lizard last night (I don't know where they found it. Jasmine and Paribanour were staring intently barely a nose-length away while Mittens played with it on the rug. I was surprised to find it was still alive and put it outside.), they all became agitated and, frankly, a little pissy and I had to keep chasing them away from the tree until they finally all curled up together on the kitchen table.

This morning, there is a branch bent down to the floor, one of the lower ones with no ornaments but strung with lights, and no one is admitting to anything. The skirt is all scrunched up around the trunk.

My brother has packed up the trains and track. Even he admits there are limits and is not willing to tempt Fate further. Instead, he spent the afternoon putting out Santa, snowman and penguin inflatables on the lawn and lights on the house and fence.

Doubling Down On Good Behavior

The tree now has ornaments. It does look much better.

My brother went out and bought several packages of cheap, solid-colored glass balls of different sizes. Most are more or less traditional colors: shades of red, green, gold/yellow and white. But some are just weird. Gray? Brown? Maroon? Seriously?? I can't even imagine on what sort of modernist artificial tree those might be appropriate. We did put up some of the darker traditional colors, but those stayed in their plastic cradles. (They came packaged with the nicer colors. Otherwise he would never have bought them in the first place.)

We refrained from hanging anything on the lowest branches, which does look a little weird but, overall, the tree is better for having ornaments than not. The cats have not taken the bait and are still behaving themselves, although Jasmine gets a longing look in her eyes whenever she sits under the tree and gazes upward. It's the lights.

Paribanour has been especially good considering she's the electronics nut of the clan. Whenever the TV goes on, she has to run over and hop on the table, pressing her nose against the screen and standing as tall as she can to bat at the picture. She crawls around behind and peers around the edges to discover where the sound and imagery comes from and where it all goes when it's turned off. Ditto with my laptop. She's the one who remapped my keyboard for me. Of course, it's not just electronics; any sort of tech fascinates her. She comes over to inspect the faucet whenever the water is turned on or off and has to stick her nose into the flow when I pour water into their drinking dish. I frequently catch her in the sink, inspecting the tap. The Christmas tree lights, however, she is content to lie under and just stare up at.

The train tracks still lie in great piles on the kitchen counter. Moving trains under the tree will be more temptation than any of them can stand, I'm afraid.

And, yet, who knows what my brother may dare next.

The Eternal Optimist Dares All

The Christmas tree is up.

I came home to find my brother had taken it out of storage and assembled it, with lights, while I was gone. A few other heavy and/or unbreakable decorations (the penguins and a couple of Santas) are also scattered around the house and under the tree.

He apparently spent some time, while assembling the tree, cowing the cats with various threats, both physical and psychic. Mittens seems suitably traumatized. Jasmine and Paribanour will occasionally sit up and sniff at the lower branches but are otherwise content to curl up on the festive under skirt beneath the boughs and nap. Paribanour worked herself into a tight little ball but, apparently, was still dazzled by the lights over her head. She slept with one paw raised up over her eyes. Jasmine tried to pick a fight with a penguin but, when it continued to ignore her, eventually gave up.

There are no ornaments on the tree and, despite my observation that it looks just fine the way it is and my recommendation to leave well enough alone, my brother still intends to buy some cheap unbreakables to gild the lily and tempt Fate.

He also retrieved the train set(s) that had been set up and forgotten (because unseeable) on the top of the barrier wall separating the kitchen from the cathedral ceiling living room. He's cleaned off most of the twenty-odd years of dust and grime and now has two complete trains and some three dozen pieces of track which he intends to set up around the base of the tree. He expects the cats to respect the layout.

There is a fine line between unwarranted optimism and outright delusion.

Just As We Suspected

Our smoke detector started going off on short random bursts the night before last. I figured the battery might be low so I retrieved a ladder from the lanai room and attempted to change it.

Attempted, I say, because the ladder was only eight feet tall and the alarm is set a good 14 feet up in the cathedral-ceilinged living room, right next to the air conditioning vent and just outside my brother's bedroom door. I'm not really happy with heights as it is and, standing on the top rung, I could barely reach the plastic disc only to find that it is not battery operated at all but attached firmly to the wall by the electrical wires that power it. I found this out by twisting the disc in a manner that would unscrew a normal battery powered model but succeeded only in wrenching it from the wall to hang dangling.

My brother came home to find the vandalized alarm hanging in a most accusatory manner, the ladder in the living room and cats resting on the lower rungs. I had thought that he, being taller than I, would want to fix the thing since the alarm was still going off on a random, if less frequent, basis but he said he had a larger ladder outside and would take care of it in the morning so I shook the cats off the rungs and dragged it back out onto the lanai.

When I came home last night, he had pulled the thing completely off the wall which means we have no smoke detector now although that doesn't bother me all that much since the only times it has ever gone off, other than this instance, is when my brother burns his supper which we already know because of the smell. (It didn't go off the night Mom draped a nylon top over her quartz heater. I woke to the smell of burning plastic, went into Mom's room, and managed to unplug the heater and pull the melting shirt off it before anything actually caught fire. Mom, who otherwise would have slept through the whole thing, was duly embarrassed and promised never to do anything like that again which, to her credit and despite the increasing dementia, she never did.)

My brother had, by then, moved the bigger, 15 foot tall ladder into his room so he could clean his ceiling fan but, before he could start, the cats found it. Mittens climbed all the way to the very top. And was obviously stuck there. The look on her face said there was no possibility of her
ever climbing down that steep slope (and this is the cat that climbs screen doors all the way to the top and back down again). Paribanour started up after her, very slowly, and only got about two thirds of the way up before she, too, froze. My brother climbed up to retrieve them but they maintained death grips on the rungs. He almost lost his balance pulling Paribanour off. He couldn't climb back down holding the cats and had to toss each one down to me as he pried them loose.

They're now banned from his room until he's done cleaning and the ladder goes back outdoors. Because they will not learn from experience. Mittens was so desperate to take a second crack at the ladder, she spent ten minutes clawing at his door to get back in.

So, yeah, after last night, I don't see a Christmas tree going up any time soon.

F.L.A.C. vs The Spirit of Christmas Present

Usually, by this time of the month our house is at least partially decorated. The tree may not go up until next week, but the crèche, the ceramic Santas, the carol-playing Christmas train, the various wreaths, candles and table ornaments and such should be out and on display. Not this year.

There is a glitch in our Christmas Plan. Three of them, actually.

The cats.

Bartleby, rest her soul, was never a problem with holiday decorations. True to her character, she preferred not to interact with, or even acknowledge, trees, lights, inflatables, statuary, really anything obviously temporary. Disdain was the order of the day.

The F.L.A.C.*, aka the Entropy Gang, are a different story.

Considering their willingness to sleep with zombies, steal pistachios to play floor hockey, race from one end of the house to the other at full speed leaping on and across chairs and tables and crashing into walls, wrestle each other to the ground rolling around before leaping straight up into the air, climb curtains and hang from screens, nest in the bookshelves, knock over trash cans, remap my computer keyboard, nest in the recycle bag, spread litter across the floor, and shred cardboard boxes before nesting in the wreckage, it's no wonder we're having nightmares about what they could do to a Christmas tree decorated with thousands of dollars worth of handmade European glass ornaments. They would look upon it as a challenge.

My brother has made several trips to the storage unit looking for any cheap, unbreakable ornaments he might have stashed away over the years and there are several boxes stacked up at the head of the driveway now, but we're still concerned about the tree itself. We just know there will be a contest to see which cat can climb the highest. Jasmine's too fat to win that one but she will compete and might bring the whole tree down.

It will be weird if we end up with no tree at all, but this year we may decorate in extreme minimalist style.

*Furry Little Agents of Chaos

Immunized and Released By Order of the Judge

The County Clerk's office requires those summoned to jury duty to log in to the clerk's website the evening before the scheduled date in order to determine if attendance is really required. Out of curiosity, I logged in early and caught the requirements for last Friday. Numbers 1 through 81 were to show up Friday morning at the court house, numbers 82 and above were excused.

My number was 374, to check in Monday evening for a possible Tuesday call up. I figured my dry run last week paid off and I was as good as home free. Dutifully, I checked again after 5 p.m. for my cohort. The new instructions were: Numbers 1 through 891 to report. All higher numbers excused.

891?!

How many notices did they send out for today? I wasn't even close! I went to bed early, slept fitfully, got up in the dark and arrived with time to spare.

After going through security (slightly more efficient and less intrusive than the airport) I arrived in the large jury room which was hung with landscapes and already almost full. A quick count revealed fewer than 300 seats. The folks running the show explained that there were outside phone lines we could use, restrooms in the room and a cafeteria down the hall which they now decided to use as an overflow room. They moved close to 50 people down there and our room rapidly filled up again.

Just after 8 a.m., they began registering us by hundreds. They were extremely efficient but there also seemed to be a lot fewer than a hundred people in each hundred called. The man in charge kept repeating the phone, restroom and cafeteria instructions and asking if everyone had registered as some folks were still straggling in. One woman said she wasn't registered yet, but when she went up to the desk they discovered she was at the wrong court house.

Just after 8:30, they announced that at least one of the judges wanted to "get started early" and that the bailiffs would be coming down any minute for the first group. We would be assembled by our numbers and sent out with the bailiffs in packets of eighteen. When the first jury was assembled they called the numbers randomly so, once we were in the waiting room, high or low numbers meant nothing anymore. My group was the third or fourth called and, for some reason, had 25 in it. We speculated that was because we might have an important or controversial trial with a possible large number of challenges. The order we called was the order we lined up and left the waiting room and the order in which we entered the courtroom. The trip between, however, was akin to herding cats and required a third elevator when two of our stragglers missed the one they were supposed to take. I felt a little sorry for our bailiff who was an older gentleman.

We were each handed a questionnaire at the entrance to the courtroom and warned that the judge would go through it with maybe the first three or four potential jurors but, after that, the rest of us should just expect to rattle off the answers when called on. In addition to personal information (name, residence, occupational and marital status), it also asked whether we'd ever served on a jury before, whether we had family in law enforcement, and whether we or anyone close to us had been a victim of, or accused of, a crime. I was appalled to find almost half my fellow potentials answered, "Yes," to these last two, some with multiple incidents on both sides including, shootings, armed robberies, auto thefts, home invasions and one arrest for theft of chocolate milk. I hadn't realized I led such a sheltered life.

The judge introduced everyone in the freezing court room, including the uniformed bailiffs, the court reporter, the state's attorney, the defense attorney and the defendant, who was a young man looking very respectable in khakis, an Oxford shirt with tie, clean shaven and hair cut. Who knows what he might have looked like on the date of the alleged crime, but his lawyer had him spiffed up and he tried to keep an embarrassed "Hey, I don't know why we're all here, either, it must be some kind of mistake" look on his face. With some success, I must say. He was charged with three counts: On the 4th of July last, 1. Breaking and entering a dwelling, 2. Breaking and entering a conveyance, and 3. Petit theft (less than $100). So much for the important, controversial case.

The judge explained the general workings of the system and the legal definition of Reasonable Doubt and interrogated us in turn from the questionnaire. The gentleman one over from me really didn't want to serve and claimed he was biased against the entire system and didn't believe the state should even have prosecutors but should leave everything up to the police. The judge was exceedingly skeptical. I thought the guy was trying too hard and expected it to backfire on him. When asked if he could turn up the thermostat, the judge explained that the county works on some sort of Stalinist centralized HVAC system involving a large facility somewhere in the county resembling a NORAD or NASA launch control center and if the one guy who controls that is happy it doesn't matter what anyone else feels.

Then the state's attorney questioned us individually, generally on the theme of "Do you hold any sort of grudge against the state or the police that might prejudice your judgment?" (The gentleman one over from me claimed he did by virtue of a previous arrest.) He ended with an explanation of the minimum he had to prove in the case using a hamburger analogy (if the judge defines a hamburger as bun, patty and ketchup, the fact that you prefer bacon, cheese and mushrooms is irrelevant as long as the prosecution provides a bun, patty and ketchup) which was unfortunate as it was getting on toward noon and breakfast had been a good seven hours ago.

The defense attorney then took his turn questioning us. He had fewer questions for select people but ended by expanding on the DA's hamburger, explaining that even if the state did give us our bacon, cheese and mushrooms, if they left off the ketchup we must acquit. I think even the bailiffs were salivating at that point.

We were ushered out of the court room while they made their selection, which took less than half the time they warned us it would, and then back in again to hear the results. Seven jurors were chosen, four white women, two white and one black men. No explanation was given for their selection. They were sat down in the jury box, sworn in then and there with promises to "truly and faithfully try" right out of Gilbert and Sullivan's Trial by Jury, and the rest of us were sent on our merry ways with the declaration from the judge that we were "immunized from this date for the next 364 days" from any further summons to duty.

We broke out of there into the hot sunlight like kids on the last day of school. I hope the kid really is innocent of the charges. I'll have to check the newspaper over the next few days.

Close, But Still Not the Jetson's Car

I've been a little disappointed in our collection of catalogs this year. The usuals have arrived on schedule and a couple of new, although not terribly interesting, new ones have shown up but, overall, and with the obvious exception of Hammacher Schlemmer, they're pretty bland this year.

The one I was looking forward to, Vermont Country Store (because it's the one catalog that offers old-fashioned metal ice cube trays with a pull-up release handle to replace our increasingly brittle, leaky plastic twist-the entire-tray-to-get-the-cubes-out ones) sent a truncated "gift" catalog without the usual old-timey necessity items--like ice cube trays.

Speaking of Hammacher Schlemmer, this is the first time my brother has ever tossed a catalog my way and said simply, "Want!" I don't blame him. The featured toy for folks with too much money is a helicycle, a three-wheeled, two seater, street legal enclosed motorcycle which converts into a helicopter. And it's only $295,000, including flight lessons. No telling what the insurance would run. Still, I think if I win the lottery, if I ever play the lottery, I'd rather just buy four or five Teslas and keep the change.

And, anyway, that's already old hat. The newest Hammacher Schlemmer (they come every two weeks this time of year) features a tricycle that seats seven adults in a kind of circular firing squad pattern. Only one person controls direction and braking but a fancy gearing mechanism means everyone pedals. And it's a much more reasonable $20K.

 

Now, if only it played calliope tunes and the seats moved up and down.

 

 

Dry Run, With Scenic Benefits

I went for a drive this morning, testing the timing and directions in case I really do have to show up at the county courthouse next Tuesday for jury duty. The instructions say to call Monday evening after 5p.m. to find out if my number's been called, and it may not be in which case I'm apparently off the hook, but if it is I'm supposed to be there at 8a.m. and I sure don't want to get lost or be delayed by rush hour traffic on the way.

I left the house later than I'd intended and without the written directions on the notice itself and missed a turn I know I should have taken, although the route I took seemed not to take any longer and may, in fact, be a viable alternative, and still managed to get there with time to spare. Frankly, I expected a lot more traffic for the middle of rush hour. The only really annoying part of the trip was driving directly into the sunrise.

On the return trip, of course, I had the road pretty much all to myself. The sun was at my back, the temperature was rising through the seventies on its way to a predicted 86F (eat your hearts out everyone else in the continental deepfreeze), the Mexican clover is in full bloom, coating fields and lawns in its pale purple imitation snowfall, the construction guys have moved noticeably along in their sidewalk building although I remain confident in my prediction we will not see them at our place until well after New Year's, and the local construction-related speed trap is up and running (fines are double for speeding in a work zone when workers are working, which is all the incentive the city cops need). It's a good day.

And the fact that I took the time to ensure my readiness for jury duty probably means I won't be called after all.

It Was a Species Specific Party

We seem to have survived our bout of giving thanks and are recovering nicely.

The day itself went well. I managed to coordinate myself well enough to be able to clean up as I went along so there was no huge pile of pots, pans and dishes at the end and, yet, everything came out done at the same time. Turkey, sausage/cornbread stuffing, sweet potatoes in a brown sugar/pineapple glaze, scalloped potatoes, sweet corn, carrots, tomatoes, homemade cranberry sauce (which somehow always impresses people even though it's the easiest thing in the world to make), fresh rolls and apple pie. Not sure I could time that all right again if I wanted to.

Our biggest challenge came as we were sitting down at table and realized all three cats were in the kitchen with better then half a roast turkey sitting on the counter. We spent the next ten minutes chasing them down and (gently) tossing them out into the foyer and closing the door behind them. They knew exactly what was up and were not cooperative but we got to eat in peace. They made up for it by digging out all their catnip mice from wherever they'd been hidden and bouncing off the walls and racing at top speed down the halls and across the furniture all weekend.

I refuse to shop at all over the holiday weekend but my brother went out once. All he got were a couple of air mattresses in case our Other Brother and the nephews come by for Christmas/New Year's. It took him a good four hours. He could just as easily have waited until any time this week, or even next, but I guess the urge struck him. He had another piece of pie to help himself recuperate.