So this is Christmas


It was a relaxing Christmas. I woke at 6:30 to a country breakfast bake prepared by Christy and Penny – well actually we opened presents first after simulating placing baby Jesus in the manger. We lit the fireplace and had a warm cozy breakfast.

It was a blustery cloudy cool morning but we still did our Christmas Day beach walk. Christy, Finn and I went to Destin Pass and walked out to the jetties and along the beach. Once again there weren’t many other crazy people out walking the beach. We had consistent 20+ mph winds and the surf was 5-7 feet and rising. Finn didn’t care and wore himself out running after sea birds and any reflection of sunlight he saw. We were surprised when the clouds broke and we had bright sun for part of the walk. The clouds returned later and remained for the rest of the day.


It was already noon when we got back home. Penny had the ham in the oven and she and Christy went on preparing the rest of our meal. I played around with the 70 or so pictures Christy took of Finn on the beach. I got a call from brother, Lou and called Sister Kathy. For our Christmas meal we had ham, sweet potato muggin, mac & cheese, broccoli, apple salad and biscuits.


The afternoon was clean up and football on TV. My fantasy football team lost today so I cannot win the league this year.


For dinner it was cherry pie a-la-mode. Then it was more football – blogging and digesting.

I enjoyed answering the phone with “Merry Christmas” That is suggestion #287 in “The Little Book of Christmas Joys”.


Tomorrow it’s back to Physical Therapy. I have one more session on Thursday and that’s it. I go see the doc next week and see what we need to do for my right arm. It is still giving me problems.
Now we have the last week of 2006. It’s time for resolutions and reminiscing. I’m behind on my training for the River Run in March so I have one resolution to make. It is hard to fathom that I’ve been retired now for 1 ¼ years. It still hasn’t sunk in. I think the fact that I have had health issues for the whole period has played a big role in this. There were a lot of tasks around the house and yard that I thought I would have finished in the first year but are barely done. So here’s to having a healthy new year and finally accomplishing those tasks.

‘Twas The Night Before … "


Here it is 9:30 PM on Christmas Eve and Penny and Christy have gone to their rooms after a scrumptious evening dinner. I asked them if they were having any visions of sugarplums, but they didn’t even know what a sugarplum was.


We went to church twice today – once for Sunday, once for Christmas. We like to go to the children’s Mass and see the kids act out the manger scene. This year they did a good job. As is typical for Christmas, this mass was packed. There were lots of extended families and a mess of babies. Needless to say the church was not quiet. For the first half of mass – before the kids did their play – a shepherd or wise man would run down the isle to make a bathroom call. This year the microphones worked so the kids could be heard. My favorite part was when the littlest kid came out, stood on a chair and held up a big paper star – the guiding light for the kings. The star was half his size and he held it out straight and high for the whole time. They gave one of the older girls a solo and she forgot the words. The rest of the group picked up the verse nicely for her, but it was sad to see her embarrassment.


There was no accompanist at the mass so the choir carried all the singing. It actually set a nice soft mood for the mass with just the voices. After the play when Father was preparing the gifts the babies began to be restless. At one point in particular when he was consecrating the hosts a wave of angry baby noises rose through the church. It reminded me of the way dogs bark in a neighborhood. One starts and sets off all the others.


Penny seems to have a knack for attracting big people that sit in front of her at sporting events, movies and tonight at church. We had a very large young man sit right in front of her. Since this is a military parish I figured he might be a soldier of sorts. I turned to Penny and said, “How do you do that?” meaning attract big people. She looked at the guy and said, “Genetics and hard work”. Obviously she didn’t understand my question and told me how big people are made.


It was nice to see all the families smiling and talking at church. It reminded me of earlier Christmases in CT when we would have all the relatives over. There was always a huge tray of “cold cuts” and crusty bread. My Dad always got a tray of Italian cookies. I liked the almond cookies. It was at one of those Christmas gatherings that I got drunk. I couldn’t of been more than 4 or 5 years old, but for some reason I wanted to taste my Mom’s highball. I don’t remember if I was given the drink or snuck it. I think she let me have the last of one of hers, figuring the ice had watered things down. Whatever the circumstances, my only memory of how it felt was walking through our kitchen flopping my head side-to-side marching along singing some song. It’s a wonder I’m not an alcoholic!


This is not a white Christmas, but it is a wet one. We are supposed to get about ½ inch of rain. It’s nice to know we are safe and dry and have nowhere we need to be. Tomorrow morning we will wake, have Christy put the baby Jesus in the manger and open presents.
Now it is time to go to bed and have those sugarplum visions dance in my head.
Merry Christmas!

Winter Days


Winter makes for an interesting time here in Northwest FL. This past week I walked on the beach and had a nice sunset ;

Took pictures of the foliage around the neighborhood;

Noticed Christy's plant is blooming nicely;

Started on the Christmas decorations and tonight we are snuggling up because it will be in the mid 20’s. All that is missing is the white stuff but a White Christmas is not impossible.

Whale Holes

When I was in college in 1969 – shortly after Apollo 10 took a picture of earth from 200,000 miles away showing earth as a small blue sphere floating in a black void – I used to picture all the people on that globe going about their daily business thinking their business was so important. Then in my mind I would back off from earth until it was a barely visible and think about those people. Then I would think that I could continue backing until the solar system and even the galaxy was indistinguishable in the universe. Why do we think our causes are so important? Why do we fear or destroy people who don’t share our beliefs? Why can’t we see how alone and dependent we are on each other? Why can’t we see the big picture and understand what is important?


A couple of things happened this week to bring my college thinking to mind. The first was an E-mail Kathy sent me about the size of earth compared to other planets and the sun and then went on to compare the sun with other stars until our sun was the size of 1 pixel on the screen when compared with other stars.

Next I read a couple articles in an old National Geographic. They are related because they both are about intelligent life, distance and time. The whale hole story was sad. Apparently weather conditions in the arctic can cause all the openings in the ice to close in a short time span. In this instance only one small hole through the ice was available for these beluga whales to breath. The closest open water was 8 miles away, far too distant for the whales to reach. So the whales that found this hole were trapped in this location. The picture in the magazine showed a hole roughly 50 ft in diameter full of whales vying for air. I wondered how many whales never found a hole and suffocated. The whale hole was a bounty for polar bears. The bears feasted on the whales at will and had eaten so much that they could go for a full year with no food if necessary with the body fat they had stored. Still the bears continued to feast. The whales were stuck. This was the only place to get the air they needed.


The second story was about intelligent life in the universe and the vast distance that isolates us and eliminates any possibility of contact with other intelligent beings assuming they exist. If you use Carl Sagan’s estimate of 1 million technical civilizations in our galaxy alone then even if they could travel 10 million mph it would still take 300 yrs to reach us from the nearest star system. So like the whales we are all stuck here together.

We don’t have bears devouring us. We seem to do a good job of that all by ourselves.

Last night 60 minutes did a story about the genocide in Rwanda. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/30/60minutes/main2218371.shtml
We’ve had Conquerors, kings, inquisitions, jihads, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing and wars too numerous to mention. Like many back in 1969 I thought that the sight of the earth from space would be an epiphany for the world. We would see our beautiful, fragile, little blue planet and want to do whatever necessary to preserve and protect our planet and make everyone’s life better– even if it meant we had to get along with one another. I was young and more idealistic back then - and dead wrong.

So here we are stuck in our little “whale hole” hoping for a spring thaw.