Cats' Christmas

We had a feline family fight a couple of weeks ago. Mom Jasmine and Mittens started a ruckus in my brother's room one night. It sounded loud and angry and serious. Paribanour surprised me by immediately leaping out of her chair and running into the room where she broke up the fight and chased Jasmine back into the living room. All the tails were bushy and all the fur was bristling for days (Paribanour gets a cool, spiky, Mohawky thing running down her spine when she's all het up). Jasmine and Mittens couldn't stand to be in the same room together and even took meals apart. They've finally gotten over whatever it was (or maybe just forgot) and have started grooming each other again. Might be the desire to share the space under the Christmas tree.

The Christmas tree is up. And decorated. So far the cats have knocked down one ornament and that was probably my fault for placing it too low. They have not been playing with the tree although Mittens has claimed the space right against the base as her nap area and both she and Jasmine take turns snuggling up around the penguins or, when they desire to not be seen, tunneling under the tree skirt.

There are a half dozen largish wreaths on the dining room table waiting to be placed and I found Jasmine curled up inside one this morning. She looked both comfortable and cute so I left her there. For now.

This holiday season kind of snuck up on us thanks to the warm weather. We've had the air off and the windows open continuously pretty much since Hallowe'en (with one exception for a week of torrential rain mid-November). The cats, for the most part, are behaving themselves around the screens and not clawing holes even when there is some animal out there in the night darkness whimpering under the mango.

Mittens, the littlest one who had the big adventure, is the exception. She's a climber and can not resist working her way to the very top of the floor-to-ceiling screen by the front door. She makes a fair amount of racket in the process whereupon I go out to investigate to find her at or above eye level, looking like one of those plush toys with the suction cups on its feet that people stick to their car windows. I look at her. She looks at me. I quietly ask, "What are you doing?" She puts her nose against the screen, looks at me again, and slowly climbs back down. Repeat every third day.

The Hallowe'en candy is gone, except for one Reese's cup I've been hoarding, and not counting the three bags my brother stored away in a closet thinking (erroneously) that they'll still be there for next Hallowe'en.

The Thanksgiving leftovers are gone, except for four containers of turkey soup, and not counting excess food that didn't get cooked and is just waiting its turn in a normal meal.

The penguins are out and the cats are (now, temporarily at least) on their best behavior.

Let's do Christmas!

Over 200 Served, Not Counting the Cops

Last night began with my brother cursing (one of his favorite pastimes) and vowing never to honor this holiday again (totally not to be taken seriously) because the wind kept threatening to blow over the balloons and even the zombies, and the blower motors inflating the balloons were worn out and there were no viable batteries to power the zombies' eyes and moans, pretty much all of which was true but irrelevant since the real problem was that, as usual, he left everything to the last minute, didn't do any pre-installation checking (re: batteries and motors) and, even on the morning of the day, wasted an hour or two (I wasn't home at the time) chopping down a bougainvillea that was encroaching on the lanai--and had been for several years so why it had to come down right then who knows.

There's no point engaging him when he gets like this so I just let him run his course and assumed the wind would die down once the sun set (it did) and the motors would be more effective when the air cooled (they were). The battery problem was solved when he ran off to the store as the first kids were arriving and bought a jumbo pack of AAs. 

Meanwhile the pillaging hordes started to trickle in about 4:30. Our first visitor, a teenage female pirate, was followed by a five-year-old female doctor. I was kind of disappointed that a lot of kids really didn't seem to put much effort into their "costumes" although the first pirate was very good and there were a number of passable ghouls, super heroes (both male and female) and even a couple of classic Ghostbusters. A couple of kids had corrugated cartons on their heads and I assumed they were Box Trolls but, when I said that to one she sounded very disappointed and sighed, "No, I'm a robot," and turned on the flashing rotating lights in her eye and mouth spaces. I think I might have gotten that correct if they'd been on to start with. The most original was a five- or six-year-old orange Crayola crayon. Second place went to a perfect little Beetlejuice being wheeled around in his stroller.

There were three distinct waves of foragers, the first starting just after sunset, the last coming through just as the police arrive around 9:10.

Did I mention that the police shut us down?

One patrol car went by very slowly on the main street early on in the evening but didn't stop. A second one came onto our street and parked just up from the main activity about 8:30 or so but that's way too early to enforce any sort of noise ordinance and we weren't that loud anyway so he left.

We can't be sure a complaint was filed since people were parking in the main road's median strip as well as on the shoulders in order to get into our street and the police may have been responding to the congestion. Comparing the ethnic diversity of our visitors with the homogeneity Neighbor Dan (who, it must be admitted had partaken of a number of shots) was not taking any chances and attempted preemptive revenge on the mean old man down the street who always complains about everything to the point of calling the police and filing reports about car horns, lawn mowing and unregistered vehicles, by taking a visiting German shepherd named Diesel for a walk and encouraging him to poop on said neighbor's lawn. Diesel was uncooperative.

Finally, three patrol cars came back around 9:20 and stayed until everything completely wound down about forty minutes later which it totally would have done anyway since we were running out of candy and the third wave was thinning out. They didn't say anything to anyone as far as I could tell but their presence was a big hint. Plus, the night was crystal clear and the temperature had dropped into the mid-60s which is a little cool for short-sleeves around here. We put the zombies safely away in the garage, my brother deflated the balloons and I went in to make a cup of hot tea.

My brother's mood had been steadily improving throughout the evening (as I knew it would) and now, operating on the theory that any party shut down by the police is by definition a success, he was delighted. By my calculations we served just north of 220 trick-or-treaters. I managed to salvage three 100 Grand bars for myself and my brother gave me two Almond Joys he acquired somewhere.

This morning is bright and sunny but the wind is howling again.

Resistance Is Futile

There were sixteen bags of candy, mostly bite-size chocolate bars of various types and some Skittles, sitting on our dining room table for the past three days.

Last night I came home to find one opened.

There are fifteen and a half bags of candy sitting on our dining room table with three days to go until Hallowe'en.

We're gonna need more candy.

Balloons Are Up. Dead To Follow

Our Hallowe'en decorations are finally up.

Almost.

The balloons are emplaced and, except for the ones over on the far side of the driveway (which include the headless horseman and the hearse), inflated. We have a couple of new ones including a large orange and black spider with glowing swirly lights in its abdomen. Neighbor Dan has a similar one but its abdomen is white and the swirly lights are multi-colored. I like ours better.

Neighbor Dan has had his decorations up since the first week of October. My brother intended to put ours up shortly after he saw Neighbor Dan's yard but his truck broke (again) that weekend so he couldn't retrieve anything from storage and then his truck was stolen so he mowed the lawn instead which was necessary but insufficient as this is the time of year when the grass shoots up about a foot over night and sets its seeds. Its all getting a bit raggedy already. He finally got around to placing balloons a few days ago.

Our yard still looks sparse compared to Neighbor Dan's but that's mostly because a lot of our decorations are not inflatables: the zombie wedding party, tombstones, dancing skeletons, etc. that really shouldn't be put out too far in advance although there's hardly any chance of rain anymore. Even the TV weather people have officially announced the end of Rainy Season. The days have been glorious, warm and sunny; the nights clear, cool and dry.

We have a couple new zombies, too. Actually, three, I think, plus the dog skeleton. They're the top-half-of-the-body-bursting-through-the-ground type zombies and will go well with the tombstones. One of them arrived broken and when my brother called the company they said they'd received a number of complaints about that one and they would refund his money and he could just go ahead and keep it anyway. That's the way to ensure customer loyalty. The skeleton dog is poseable and is currently leashed to the picket fence along the walkway to our front door. I don't understand how a skeleton can have ears and a nose, but otherwise he's kinda cute.

People have been driving by to check out the neighborhood prior to the pillaging spree this Friday. They seem to be impressed, if they are new to the area, or, if not, satisfied the tradition continues.

Oh, and I voted for the fourth time this year, not that it'll do any good in this district. Maybe in the statewide races.

The Night In Question

(The Wedding Party)

So, it turns out twenty (20!) bags of candy weren't enough, after all, and we needed to borrow one from Neighbor Dan who only bought 9 bags but his were three times the size of ours so it balanced out pretty evenly in the end.

Despite the last-minute nature of our decorating due to my brother's bout of the plague followed by his trip to the Bahamas and delayed return from spending an extra day with his girlfriend, we looked pretty good. A little sparse compared to previous years, but the trick-or-treaters didn't seem to notice.

(A Wedding Crasher)

The wedding party went over nicely. Several people even crashed it to have their pictures taken with the bride. Later in the evening, my brother joined them and sat very quietly until unsuspecting visitors came up close enough to collect their treats.

(Spot the Living Guest)

Reactions ranged from glorious screams to comments of, "Really?" (but only following a sideways jump of at least three feet), to one woman who got into a snit and just stomped off. Generally, though the responses were great, especially from the kids and foreigners. The kids, in particular, showed no fear. They posed with zombies and in front of the hearse and danced with the skeletons.

(Spiderman Does a Turn With the Singing Skeleton)

One German gentleman came up and, explaining that it was his first time here, asked me when the holiday normally occurred and how long it lasted. I told him it was always the evening before All Saints' Day and, although the decorations went up a few days earlier, the kids came by only on this one night. He seemed intrigued, yet bemused, by the whole concept. He especially didn't seem to understand the gorilla chasing the six-foot banana down the street.

Another German family came by later in the evening. They were relative veterans, it seems, as they were all dressed as pumpkins. I informed them they made a very sincere pumpkin patch but I don't think they got the reference. And the only beagle that showed up was dressed as a lobster. 

The giant banana came back later in the evening all out of breath. He took a couple of candy bars and said, "Thanks. That monkey's been after me all night long."

(Giant Lawn Cat Is Watching You Trick-or-Treat)

Final tally: 200+ kids of various ages and sizes plus almost as many parents/guardians (many themselves in costume), three dogs (one disguised as a crustacean) and the equivalent of 23 bags of candy. And lots of appreciative compliments. Guess we'll do it again.

(Y'all come Back Next Year, Y'hear?)

Show Time

My brother took an extra day getting home from his trip. Actually, he stopped by his girlfriend's house and spent the day with her before coming home.

As a result, he is now (yesterday and today) scrambling around the front yard staking and inflating his scary Hallowe'en decorations. Despite not being able to find all of the extension cords, they seem to be coming together much better than Neighbor Dan's balloons a good half of which he replaced with all new items because they would not inflate properly. That was a big hit to his budget this year.

Ours still have a few problems. The headless horseman is slumped over by the mailbox although the hearse behind him is doing fine. And there's a ghost out by the main road that keeps falling over. Either a guy line or a spike keeps coming loose in the wind. And the giant black cat looks a little wobbly in the knees. Nevertheless, my brother seems confident all will be up and running come sunset.

On the non-inflatable side, over by where the trick-or-treaters will be coming up the drive, the zombies have established a wedding party by the recently established graveyard and are merely waiting for the groom to finish extricating himself from the ground. The bride looks positively ethereal.

And on the more mundane, but no less important, sugar front: We have twenty (20!) bags of assorted candy bars sitting on the dining room table being inspected by the cats. Our contribution to the continuing childhood diabetes epidemic is well established.

Let the pint-sized hordes descend. Let the pillaging and plundering commence.

The Cuddly Un-Dead

Well, my brother left for the bus to the boat to the Bahamas this morning and none of the Hallowe'en decorations are up, yet, although that's not entirely his fault.

(Paribanour and "Larry")

The cats, it seems, have adopted the newly arrived zombies and are much more comfortable cuddling with them than with the living humans who, y'know, feed them and clean their litter boxes and play with them and give them treats. Case in point: Paribanour snuggling up with both "Larry" and "Henry." 

                            

                                     (And with "Henry")

   (Paribanour relaxing in Henry's embrace . . .)   

I do like the way their eyes light up and match the zombies'.

We'll have to hurry to put up our decorations when my brother returns. Most of them are in storage and I don't even know where the storage company is so I can't do it myself. Neighbor Dan has his all laid out and was inflating them yesterday evening but he complained that the motors on several of them seemed to be wearing out and were just not pushing air like they should.

(. . . and sharing the love with Larry)

I wish we could trust the cats outside. They'd make a great addition to the cemetery section with their dark gray fur and glowing eyes. Maybe they'd be happy to curl up with their undead buddies out on the lawn. More likely, they'll freak out completely when a hundred or so costumed little kids and their parents wander up our drive.

That's the sort of thing that would bother them.

The Frightful Day Approacheth

The local newspaper has officially announced that Rainy Season ended last Wednesday. They may be right. We haven't had a drop of rain since then and hardly a cloud in the sky.

Let the games begin.

Neighbor Dan took an early lead by laying out several of his inflatable Hallowe'en displays over the weekend but he has yet to inflate them. I suppose he's just positioning to get a feel for balance and composition but he has also not mowed his lawn in over a week and his grass is already shoe-top high and raggedy. If he leaves the displays staked as is he won't be able to cut and will be close to knee deep by the time the big evening rolls around.

My brother, on the other hand, mowed yesterday afternoon. At least, he mowed the front lawn which, after all, is where the decorations go and the only part visitors will see. Actually, in best Redneck fashion, he mowed most of the front lawn, ignoring under the live oak and bougainvillea and around the coconut palm on the logical assumption that neither decorations nor visitors will go there and it will be dark anyway, after all, so who's going to notice.

I've only seen one other house with any decorations and they've been up since late September but the house is nowhere near us and their display consists entirely of smallish inflatable Disney characters leaning heavily on the theme of Mickey as Sorcerer's Apprentice. Not even also rans.

And Hallowe'en Is Still Over Two Weeks Away

I went out this morning to the library and as I drove down our main neighborhood street (the one that had the  lane removed and turned into a bike way and is soon to get sidewalks) I passed a house with the most extraordinary--and scary--lawn display.

The entire frontage facing the street, from property line to property line, was piled literally five feet high (more in some spots) with furniture, clothing and large, bulging, black plastic trash bags. They made a wall, a berm, a blockade across the entire access to the house. There were a trio of pick-up trucks parked on the street and median (the driveway was blocked). From the size of the house and the sheer volume of the mountain range of trash out front, I can only surmise the occupants must be/have been classic hoarders. I can not imagine how it would be possible to stuff that volume of stuff into the available space.

I have no idea if this is the result of an intervention or merely the cleansing after an estate sale.

The funny thing is, the outside property itself has always been well cared for. Lawn mowed. Shrubberies trimmed. No litter. There was never any indication that anything might be amiss inside.

I feel the urge to recycle some old paperwork and magazines, now. And catalogs. They're coming in fast, now, too.

The Props Department Delivers

Fall is in the air and my brother has been into the catalogs again. Our newest semi-audioanimatronic props arrived yesterday. The UPS person apparently came while we were out.

Henry

Four large cartons appeared in our foyer. There is a life-size vintage Victorian animated dead bride and three zombies: two partial upper bodies to be placed to appear as if crawling from the grave and one animated full-body undead walker.

Larry

The company which offers these characters has also, for some reason, named them. That's a fuzzy shot of Larry in the suit while Henry is the dapper one in the bow tie.

I'm assuming my brother intends to retire some of the less frightening inflatable Hallowe'en displays, like the pumpkins and giant Bart Simpson and such as, in favor of the more, shall we say, naturalistic presentations he's been acquiring over the past couple of years. Otherwise, our yard, especially the driveway approach used by the trick-or-treaters, is going to become very crowded indeed. The life-size inflatable illuminated horse-drawn hearse with re-animating corpse inside will definitely stay as will the 20 foot tall black cat but some of the others will just have to move off to the side yard where they will actually be easier for passing traffic to see.

And Random Acts of Retail

My brother complained, after the mail came yesterday, "I just threw out every catalog in my room!" by which he meant approximately three dozen or so recent arrivals (and didn't count the twenty or so still in the living room). He held another even dozen in his hand fresh from the mailbox.

I often wonder from whence the catalogers get our address. It's kind of a game trying to figure out whose mailing list we came from. Sometimes it seems pretty obvious: Wild Wings, purveyor of wildlife coffee mugs, nostalgic animal art and clothing, most likely came by way of the World Wildlife Fund or Birds and Blooms magazine, both of which have had our information for years. Likewise, we know where Wireless (NPR), Signals (PBS), Smithsonian and National Geographic catalogs all come from.

But what about Front Gate? Their publication (I hesitate to call it a mere catalog) is printed on heavy glossy paper bound in a clay-coat four-color-process cover stock more suited to a commercial real estate prospectus. Then again, projecting that kind of image is necessary when your offerings--one-off holiday decorations and full-size pre-decorated Christmas trees--are priced from the low three-figures to the mid (and upper) four-figures. Are these guys, maybe, second generation from the Grandin Road people of life-size Hallowe'en zombie fame?

And then there's Russell's For Men. Apparently, there's an A. G. Russell's with a more general demographic somewhere that has skipped over us in favor of leather wallets, leather vests, leather travel accessories and knives of various sizes, shapes and utility (including, one presumes, scraping hides preparatory to making leather). Neither my brother nor I, are particularly lacking in testosterone yet we can not determine the provenance of this one.

Thanks to FedEx overnight delivery, we have a long way to go before the catalogers stop sending in the realization that is too late for us to order.

All Things Considered, That Went Well

We survived the looting and pillaging mini-hordes. It took ten bags of candy to do it, but we didn't run out and actually have a few pieces left over for ourselves, like we need them.

Earlier in the day I came home to find my brother upset because he'd decided to frost the skeleton cakes with a glaze, apparently not realizing just how runny that would be (why not I don't know, it's not like he's never seen a glazed cake before), and ended up with two skulls that looked as if they'd been used for candle holders with wax dripping all down the sides. I liked the effect, but he didn't.

Later, he tried making a "fire" pit using colored streamers blown upward by a fan but, after a couple of hours constructing the thing, the fan he had wasn't strong enough to move anything so he went out but couldn't find a single window fan at WalMart (!) and finally purchased one at Lowe's which didn't have enough power, either, so the whole project went south. He took it surprisingly well, which is not his normal M.O.

The actual bribing of the monsters started a little late and slow this year but picked up after 8 p.m. and eventually ran long. I especially enjoyed the tiny three-year-old Batman and also the slightly older Batman who, being a little unclear on the concept, upon hearing us yell, "Hey, there's Batman!" lifted his mask and insisted, "No! It's me!" Never seen him before. We had a pair of moving sound-activated ghosts suspended from wires that crisscrossed the driveway moaning and cackling. Some kids were freaked out but the ones I liked were the kids who were so fascinated that they forget all about asking for treats and just stared transfixed as the ghosts floated by overhead.

The police stopped by at the height of the festivities and we were worried either the cars parked up and down the median strip of the main road were causing a hazard or the neighborhood curmudgeon had complained. (He's filed formal complaints at one time or another against every single property owner adjacent to him and a couple of others that aren't.) It turned out to be just a routine patrol and we all carried on.

The weirdest thing I saw all night though were pick-up trucks with flatbed trailers (the kind lawn care companies use to transport mowers) kitted out with chairs and even a porch swing all filled with kids cruising  through looking for likely neighborhoods to loot. Apparently, those trailers are a thing down here.

From Each According to His Abilities . . .

My brother demonstrated, again, why I end up doing most of the cooking around here.

He decided he wanted another skull cake to take to work and made red satin cake batter from a mix while I was out. I came back to find the skull halves in pieces. We debated all the things that could have gone wrong, from not being cooked through to trying to get them out of the molds before they were completely cooled down, when he suddenly remembered, while looking at the instructions on the next box before trying again, that he had neglected to add any eggs the first go around.

(Seems like it took forever to find the split seam
between the toes on the left front foot.)

He's outside today setting up and inflating the Hallowe'en balloons (which is his métier) despite a continuing low-grade variable wind. There's just nothing else to do if we are to have any decorations at all. It should be O.K. for 24 hours despite Frankenstein's Monster's stakes being pulled from the ground by the wind over the weekend . . . and that was while it was still just a misshapen lump on the ground.

Neighbor Dan was out there, too, and very upset. His balloons have been lying around out in the weather so long that several of them have developed rips and tears and won't blow up. We had a leakage problem with the giant black cat last year and found Duct tape an excellent bandage.

The tombstones are in. The four new apparitions will stay in the living room until the last minute and then join us in the driveway when the first little monsters arrive.

As we've both been reasonably good about not eating the candy ourselves, there should be enough to go around. This year.

Making the Best of a Windy Situation

Even though Sandy missed us by about two hundred miles, it's big enough that the backside winds have been blowing steadily for the past four days. And, while they're from the north and dry thus giving us high clear skies and temperate days, they're also strong enough to prevent my brother from putting out any more inflatable Hallowe'en decorations or blowing up the ones that are already on the lawn.

Neighbor Dan has been unable to raise his legions either and his have been staked out since the first of the month which means the grass all around them is now almost two feet tall and what's under them is probably dead.

My brother has been receiving more Hallowe'en stuff than I knew about. There are now four life-size ethereal figures looming around the living room. Three females and one male, all close to six feet tall, with livid hands and faces and draped in linen and gauze. They can't go outside, either, until the calm returns.




We did get to make use of one of his new purchases: a skull shaped (two halves, front and back) cake pan. He brought it out last night and we made up a double batch of pound cake* batter because the skull cavities looked a lot larger than they turned out to be so, after baking, we ended up excising a lot more of the material between the two halves than we had intended in order to get them to fit together properly the result being we have most of a pound cake, in two pieces, left over which is

actually a nice problem to have.

While the width of the skull cake is almost right, especially given the extremely pronounced zygomatics, the parietal is truncated giving it something of a bullet shape when viewed from the side. It remains, nevertheless, delicious.

My brother found some black food coloring when he went out late last night for additional baking supplies, so I am leaving the skull decorating to him.

* Is a double batch of pound cake a kilo cake? Sorry.

And Not a Moment Too Soon

The UPS guy delivered four large boxes of body parts this morning.

I didn't know what they were, of course, when they arrived but they were addressed to my brother so I stacked the cartons in front of the door to his room. He took one look at them, smiled, and said, "Ah! Dead people!"

It seems we will be competing with Neighbor Dan in Hallowe'en excess this year after all. Neighbor Dan's blow-up menagerie of goblins, ghoulies and monsters has been spread across his lawn since the beginning of the month. Several of them are new this year. (The main effect, so far, is that Neighbor Dan has been unable to mow for almost three weeks and it shows.) All we've had to show until now are half a dozen balloon-head ghosts swaying around the live oak, and those only went up two days ago.

The contents of my brother's boxes consist of various zombie bits to be used to create a graveyard uprising.

(What a graveyard uprising might look like.)

My brother has started laying electric cords in preparation for the implantation of the inflatables. We're already stocked up on candy. I predict by the end of this weekend we will be in full holiday battle mode. 

And Home Again Already

My niece is out of the hospital and home again.

She's on Tylenol and Motrin for pain relief and is walking around, playing her harp, playing card games with Mom and complaining of being bored already. She wants to be back in school again. I'm sure her friends can't wait, either.

Her Mom reports she was running a small fever, but her doctors expected as much, and as long as it stays below 101 everything is supposedly fine.

So, now we can get back to the annual Hallowe'en battle of the inflatable lawn decorations, wherein Neighbor Dan has already taken the offensive and may have a commanding lead.

Mom, A Life: Part Six

Mom, A Life: Part Five

Life With Father

Mom had apparently been in love with Dad for a while, since before his truncated failed first marriage even, although she would never discuss the gap in time between Dad hitchhiking to visit while she was a nursing student before 1947 and their marriage in 1949. The thing she did know about Dad was that he was artistic, a good dancer and something of a dreamer.

Dad always thought of himself as something of an entrepreneur, an independent small businessman. When the family started to grow and they bought their first house in East Haven, Dad set up a one-man advertising agency in New Haven, using his artistic talents. It struggled at first, and money was tight, but that did not stop the romantic in Dad from buying an upright piano for Mom for an anniversary present one year. She was furious. (I only found out many, many years and many, many piano lessons later.) Mom was always the practical, accountable partner.

Mom and Dad both loved to socialize and throw parties especially if Mom could come up with a theme. They held costume parties, luaus, scavenger hunts and hallowe'en get togethers. One party in the 50s was a hobo gathering where each guest (in appropriate raggedy costume) was given a large can full of stew and a smaller can for drinks. One scavenger hunt, apparently in drag, covered five towns and may have involved the police. (Rumors vary.) There is a photo, which I have seen but can not put my hands on just now, of Dad wearing a German pickelhaube helmet from WWI, three sizes too small, and blowing a bugle of the type used by postal riders back when there were postal riders.

Dad's agency grew and was successful for a while. His largest client was the A.C. Gilbert Co. makers of American Flyer trains and Erector Sets.

With the opening of the Connecticut Turnpike (I95), the shoreline east of New Haven became available for development and the family moved to a small (12-25 houses) development deep in the woods of North Madison at the end of 1961. The house was an ugly modern split level with too small windows. Mom proceeded to paint the main wall in the living room purple and used an enormous sponge to daub large (also purple) splotches on the wall of the master bedroom. She also created a large (3 foot tall) jack of diamonds playing card to hang on the family room wall. The card was lost when we moved to our second house in town, a large post-colonial sea captains house built 1798, but it was found and appeared in the local newspaper chained to the ankle of the reporter's wife.

(The garage on the left is at street level and had a flat roof. The room at right was originally a screened in porch. The house is visible only because the huge and ancient horse chestnut tree is gone.)

Unfortunately, in 1967, A.C. Gilbert went bankrupt and it turned out they were Dad's only sizable client. Both Mom and Dad tried various desperation measures to bring in income. Mom had a successful but short-lived business making pre-baked pie shells out of the house and had them in various stores along the shore line but, even with us kids assembling and labeling the boxes daily, exhaustion set in before enough capital was available for serious expansion and the project collapsed. At one point Dad sold bait to fishing supply shops along the shore. Eventually, they had to declare bankruptcy and we moved to our third house in town.

Redneck Studies

Continuing my studies of my brother's acquired redneck tendencies, I have concluded that another defining characteristic is the inability to bring any project to completion.

This is not to say that required repairs are left undone or that desired outcomes are not achieved. They are. But the redneck mindset sees reaching the goal as the end of the road and does not recognize the necessity/desirability to return the scene to the status quo ante.

Thus, the clothes dryer is repaired after blowing the starter mechanism but the tools used to replace the motor are still in the laundry room.

The piece of loose siding up under the eaves over the garage that revealed the hole by which the various creatures that have shared our house with us have entered has been reattached, but the ladder my brother used to climb onto the overhang remains in place providing a convenient way up for more critters.

A dead inflatable Hallowe'en lawn decoration, after a failed resuscitation attempt, lies scrunched up against the garage door, both guy and electrical wires trailing across the driveway like the tentacles of some decaying orange squid.

The trash cans can not fit into their faux picket fenced enclosure because it is "temporarily" filled with empty cardboard boxes removed from the overstuffed garage in some vain attempt to make it passable. The fact that my brother must climb over the boxes in order to turn on the lawn sprinkler system is not enough to motivate him to remove them. At least, sitting in the driveway, they block the view of the "squid" from passersby on the street.

I attempt to zero out the various projects whenever I can but new ones keep popping up.

Balance of Terror (Holiday Version)

Several decades ago, in a previous millennium, my International Relations course discussed the theoretical possibility that the Balance of Terror between the US and USSR could have been maintained with a very low number of nuclear warheads on each side as opposed to the tens of thousands eventually produced. As I recall, our conclusion was it could not, that the low balance was too unstable because nukes are cheap and that the next stability point comes only when both sides have maxed out their capabilities. The only choices are none or all.

We seem to have arrived at some sort of unspoken truce this year between ourselves and Neighbor Dan. What with our lawn problems and the expenditure of energy needed to put up the Hallowe'en decorations at the last minute only to have to take them down again almost immediately, my brother has not been in the decorating mood for a while.

Meanwhile, Neighbor Dan and family were away for an extended trip through most of November.

The result is neither party has yet put out any outdoor Christmas decorations. Nothing. Nada. My brother has decided as long as Neighbor Dan does not, he will not. While I am not privy to the internal Neighbor Dan Family debates I get the feeling he also is waiting to see what we will do.

The difference between our competing lawn decorations and the strategic arms race (aside from the number of potential fatalities) is this: a deadline. The longer each side waits the closer we get to the Christmas don't-bother-it's-too-late date. The closer we get the easier it is to just say "Why bother with so little time left."

Our solution this year appears to be: None.

Totally Sincere and Unironic

We've finally started putting up the Christmas decorations. We're not the only ones who are late this year. Neighbor Dan, with whom we also compete on the Hallowe'en decoration front, has not put up anything outside yet at all. So far we're working on the inside stuff.

The Coca Cola Santa is on top of the bookcase. The circus train that plays eight fuzzy, tinny electronic bars only of a dozen different carols and hymns is on the divider by the front door. (No one has turned it on yet, thankfully.) The full creche is set up on the counter where the kitchen meets the living room and there are some Christmas candles on the coffee table. Oh, and two ceramic snow people by the front door.

So far that's it. There are boxes everywhere my brother retrieved from the storage unit so that will change over the next few days.

My brother put up the (artificial) tree last night. He strings the lights as he attaches the branches from bottom to top which allows him to easily place lights in the interior and looks really nice when complete but Mom kept asking what was wrong with the tree right up until he topped it off with the drunken Santa at which point her praise became so effusive as to drive us both nuts.

"Who would have thought that was possible? It's amazing! There's nothing else like it anywhere! You should take a picture and send it to Believe It or Not! It's a miracle!" Fortunately, Mom is no longer capable of either sarcasm or irony (I think) so my brother merely took a deep breath, and a drink, and got out the vacuum cleaner to pick up all the needles.

That's right. Our artificial tree sheds. It's very realistic.