2015 So Far

Well, this new year seems to be starting off different.

Three police cars showed up out on our main road about 1:45 a.m., parked in a line about a hundred feet apart with lights flashing and stayed there for an hour or so encouraging a party down that way to break up. It was a pretty good party, too, from the sound and sight of it, with music, fireworks and a large bonfire. (I'm pretty sure it was just a bonfire despite looking as if the host house was burning down with flames rising above the roof and thick smoke billowing out since the fire department never showed up.) It took a while for the dozen or so cars to leave.

Fortunately, the police didn't come any sooner since one of the neighbors down our street had been shooting off commercial-grade fireworks from the pavement in front of his house. They were very impressive (Literally. You could feel the force of the shockwave when they exploded.) and quite beautiful and very loud. The cats hid. They started well before midnight so after an hour and a half someone came out and yelled at them to knock it off. They yelled back, "Happy New Year!" The complainers yelled back, "Happy New Year, to you!" and went inside. A couple of shots later the fireworks ended. That's how civilization is supposed to work.

January is a Blue Month for my platelet donations this year: my every-four-weeks schedule means I will donate twice this month. The first one was scheduled for the first of the year which wasn't going to work for anybody so we moved it to Friday, the 2nd. The regular RN was still out on vacation and the hospital was low on platelets so the sub asked if I'd be willing to do a double, which I was. All went reasonably well with only minor beeping of the machine. When we were done, however, the bandage was not applied tightly enough (can't place blame since I participate in that process). I mentioned that I was feeling a little light-headed when I stood up and another donor said, "Maybe it's because you're leaking all over the place."

Sure enough, the bandage was soaked through, blood was running down my arm, and drops were spurting out all over the floor. I hadn't felt a thing. I sat back down and we got it stopped quickly enough. They spent several minutes scrubbing and decontaminating the floor. I went home, threw my shirt in the wash and took a nap. We all promised to be more observant next time.

My brother decided to put the cats on a diet. It's only the mom, Jasmine, that's fat but they all eat at the same time from shared plates so they're all being cut back in both volume and frequency. One of the enterprising little buggers quickly figured out how to self-serve by nibbling/tearing a small hole in the kibble bag. It was perfectly done and only released food when they stuck their faces in the hole. The only reason I noticed was because they acted totally disinterested when I put out the scheduled meal, instead of the hunger-fueled frenzy that had quickly become the norm. So now the bag is in a sealed bucket and they're unhappy again.

New Year, Same Us

Looks like the New Year just turned on a dime.

It started the way it ended: warm, slightly humid, cloudy. Yesterday a cold front moved through. Perhaps it's a "cold front" since it can't compare to the deep freeze people are going through in the rest of the country, but our temperatures did drop 20 degrees over the course of two hours and rain came in wiping out the humidity. The crescent moon was out but I've become a wimp since moving down here and it was too damn cold to use the telescope.

The house got down to 65F last night but a warming trend is forecast for the weekend and it's going to have to stay "cold" for a lot longer before we break down and turn on the heat. Undershirts, long sleeves (my brother broke out a flannel shirt I didn't even know he owned) and sweaters for outdoors are more than sufficient for us although the cats, despite their fuzziness, are not happy. This is the kittens' first winter and they don't know what to make of it. That, and the Christmas tree coming down, is confusing them no end. At least the cooler weather has convinced the library to finally turn off their air conditioning.

The cold did do in my car battery and I had to have my brother come down to the deli where it died and jump start it. New battery, new posts, new left headlight (coincidence) and we're good to go.

Meanwhile, I find out my brother ran a stop sign on a deserted* road where only one directional turn is permitted . . . and managed to get caught. So he now has his first moving violation in over 20 years, a $167 fine (Who makes up these numbers? What's the logic?) and has to take an on-line remedial driver's course. I presume that's to keep points off his license.

And I forgot my platelet donation was scheduled for the second and went ahead and took my aspirin on the first. I was scheduled for two donations this month but now we'll only do the one on the 30th. I feel bad about that.

Happy New Year!

*except for the lurking cop who caught him.

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.

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.

Job Security

The town work crews have started putting in the sidewalks they warned us about months ago.

I could tell because the local police set up a two car speed trap right in front of our house, which is still a couple of miles from where the crews are working, to try and slow people approaching the construction zone from our direction. The police station itself is only about half a mile from the construction in the other direction and there's a controlled intersection right there so not many folks are up to speed yet when approaching that way.

The construction is only on the southbound side of the street, at least so far, and considering where they are, the size of the work crew I saw and the necessary surveying, staking, grading, cutting, clearing, digging, forming, pouring, curing and clean up involved, I don't expect to see them down our way until well after the first of the year. Of course, now that we're safely out of Rainy Season and almost out of Hurricane Season, they can only be slowed down by Holiday Season. That's Thanksgiving/Hanukkah, Christmas and New Year in the next six weeks, more than enough to grind any public project to a standstill.

At least the cops can make their quotas without having to drive all over town.

Deconstructing The Old Year

Our nephews came down for the New Year celebrations. They were down here to party with friends so, technically, they just used our house as a base of operations but they did visit for a while when their sister and mom returned from Georgia and they also helped tear up the back yard which was a good thing.

My brother has long wanted to remove the small mound out back that Dad built years ago. It originally contained a rock garden and a small working waterfall feeding a stream that emptied into a koi pond. The mound was built on a base consisting of the excavated dirt from the pond. On top of that, Dad stacked a short ton of coral boulders glued together with cement. The watercourse from the fall to the pond was lined with river stones embedded in cement. The pond was a homemade basin of cement over a sheet of black waterproof plastic liner and edged with slate cemented into place. Dad was a frustrated landscape architect and concrete was his medium.

The overall effect was very pleasant for several years but, eventually, the underlying earth sank a bit and the water didn't flow properly and the pump stopped and the whole thing was too tightly cemented together for the operating guts to be accessible to repair and so it became simply a pond with a slight rise in the background. The folks added and aerator to the pond and the fish were happy.

The fish were happy for a while, anyway. I was on the phone with Mom one day when she suddenly exclaimed, "Oh, look at the great blue heron!" which, of course, being on the phone from Connecticut, I could not, but she described in detail how it had just landed in the pond. Her excitement was understandable. Great blue herons are magnificent birds and not that common, even down here, are usually spotted at long range off in a swamp somewhere, and to have one standing not more than 20 feet from the back door was extraordinary. It was only after the great blue had flown that Mom realized the visit might have been somewhat less than exceptional and that, in fact, they had invited the heron by setting out such an easily accessible goldfish buffet. A few of the smaller fish survived by hiding under the leaves overhanging the edge of the pond but they were too traumatized to ever come out of the shadows again.

Dad died and the pond and mound became overgrown. The last of the fish were eaten by some other bird (no witnesses this time) and the water was allowed to evaporate. My brother didn't make any changes while Mom was alive because she liked some of the flowers that took root there.

That all changed this past weekend. The nephews gave my brother a new sledge hammer and chain saw for Christmas. I gave him a new orange tree. On New Year's Eve day we all went out and started dismantling the pond with the sledgehammer (my brother initially claimed he didn't need a new one so the boys started off with the old one but it broke about ten minutes in (Dad always made bunker-grade concrete.)) and the overgrowth with the chain saw.

The nephews have now gone back to base. The project's not done yet. The walls of the pond are completely broken up and it is about two-thirds filled in with rubble and dirt. The mound is half gone. We will have extra volume remaining thanks to the cement fill. The coral boulders have been rolled back to the property line in preparation for we know-not-what further use. The trees and bushes are down (with the exception of the central trunk of the tree on which the mockingbirds built their nest last summer where its ruins still perch) and the branches hauled out front for disposal.

The area looks disturbingly like a mass grave. Sod or grass seed will take care of that. What's worse, we can now see the neighbors.

A Good Start To a New Year

My brother came back from the store on the morning of New Year's Eve with a couple of treats: a pound of shrimp and three lobster tails. So New Year's Eve dinner consisted of shrimp in linguine, a large mixed salad, and broiled lobster in drawn butter. (Despite this generation living all over the country, we've been New Englanders for the last 390+ years. Doing anything else with lobster is just gilding the lily.) And a 2010 Argentine Malbec. Sure it's a red but it was very fruity and went quite well with the seafood.

There were a couple of minor issues. Mom didn't notice that the shrimp had not been shelled and popped a whole one in her mouth legs and all. My brother made her spit it out and we took a minute to make them edible for her (and insisted she use her fork). She claimed she could get the meat from the lobster tail herself but couldn't with her fork and we, again, had to stop her from pulling it out with her teeth. We warned her she could cut her lips on the shell but she didn't seem to mind the risk.

Once we had the rest of her meal prepped and safe to eat, she lifted her glass and called out "Happy New Year!"

Our goal is to get her to the next one, but at least her attitude is in the right place.