This year I put up my Dickens Christmas Village. It is a whole day's project to put up and another to take it down. I admit that it is much more fun putting it up, and that I dread the taking down part. I hadn't put it up for a couple of years. I took lots of pictures of it and I'm posting some here to share.
T'is the season . . . again
And again, this year the Fates of Weird made their annual stop-over at the Nill/Apple homestead. Last year’s visitation was a Zeus zap of lightening. This year’s visit was more subtle yet had the potential of causing catastrophic consequences. When we got home after running errands for a couple of hours one extremely hot July afternoon, in need of a soothing, cold glass of water, Chuck went to get some ice from the fridge’s dispenser. Nothing happened. That is, no ice came out of the dispenser. So, he opened the freezer door to see if there was a cube stuck in the dispenser preventing the ice from coming out. When he opened the freezer door the whole front of the ice dispenser fell out and the odor of burnt refrigerator innards wafted out along with it. The dispenser mechanism and the whole ice bin around it was charred. Weirdly, the ice in the dispenser was still in ice form and not melted water. However, it was completely covered by a layer of black, toxic-looking, oily goo.
After a few seconds of stunned incredulity, the reset button to our brain’s cognitive functions kicked in and we sprang into action. We emptied, as fast as we could, the whole of the freezer and refrigerator’s ruined contents into garbage bags to get them out of the house and also to reduce the appliance’s weight so we could force it out of its tight-fitting home between the kitchen cabinet and the wall to yank the plug before some other part of the possessed thing decided to spontaneously burst in flames. All of this, while inhaling the malodorous and certainly toxic fumes from the burnt plastic, or fiberglass, or whatever in hades the thing was made of. I’m sure we probably reduced our life expectancy by a decade because of all the poisonous crap that we inhaled during this maneuver. On the bright side, the thing that saved the fire from spreading was that the burning ice-maker motor ran out of oxygen in the air-tight refrigerator interior and extinguished itself. Otherwise, I’m sure we would have come home to, well, maybe no home.
Technology... is a queer thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other.
~C.P. Snow, New York Times, 15 March 1971
Like I’m sure so many of us do, I have a love/hate relationship with technology. Among the many modern technological doohickeys and amenities I love, the list would have to include the availability of information on the internet, the convenience of on-line shopping, the versatility of word processing, e-mail, instant messaging, hands-free calling from my car and my GPS path finder... well, then again, let me rephrase that because my GPS doesn’t really like paths, but I do. It eternally wants to get me to my destination via expressway even when the more scenic and direct route might be a back road or two-lane highway.
I only turn the thing on when I don’t know where my final destination is, which usually only involves the last couple of miles of the journey. For example, to find a specific place in East Lansing, which is a favorite destination of ours. We like going there to enjoy an outing at Eastwood Mall for a must stop at the Schuler’s Book Store or to dine at a couple of our favorite restaurants. East Lansing, for those of you who are not from Michigan, is about an hour drive from my house. All things being equal, I prefer to take Old Lansing Road, a scenic two-lane country road, which was there long before the expressway was ever built, and which runs parallel to the freeway a few miles to the south of it. Coming home, usually after dark, the expressway is safer than maneuvering the curvy, pitch black, country, deer infested road. But in daylight it is a lovely and relaxing drive through farms and tree-lined foresty areas. The thing is, that like I mentioned before, if our final destination is somewhere we are unfamiliar with, I punch in the address of where we are going into the GPS. The result of this is that, Geepers (my nickname for the GPS) goes berserk the whole way there. At every major intersection along the way, in her stubborn mission to guide me to the freeway, Geepers warns me to turn right. It’s now become a game that we have timed to the millisecond to say in unison with the computerized female voice “recalculating” as we continue straight on our scenic road ignoring the advice from the nagging mechanical device.
I almost feel guilty and it’s often crossed my mind that I hope she never does a “Hal” on me (for those of you too young to know what I’m talking about, Hal is the computer that goes insane in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”). I imagine her voice getting more and more agitated and annoyed with every “recalculating,” until eventually she starts to scream “RECALCULATING! WHAT PART OF TURN RIGHT DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND! ARE YOU RETARDED? WHEN I SAY TURN RIGHT, TURN RIGHT, DAMN IT! . . .” or words to that effect. Hmmmmm, if it ever does do that I’m throwing Geepers out the car window. Just saying.
Technology to the Rescue
In one of her comedy routines Rita Rudner comments that you know you’re in love when you meet that “certain someone you want to annoy for the rest of your life.” She isn’t wrong. In every relationship there are things that annoys, frustrates, infuriates or just irritates the other person. I don’t care how much you may love and cherish your partner. It is a given. Nothing wrong with it, it’s just the way things are. The trick of it is to embrace it and poke fun at it when you can and just enjoy and accept your differences. One of the things that I do that makes Chuck crazy is the catastrophically messy condition a previously pristine newspaper is left in after I have had my way with it. I don’t see what the problem is. Yes, it is left with folds in odd places, some parts are upside down, others are inside out, but it is basically still intact, if you define intact as being all there . . . somewhere?
Before we got our Nooks last year we used to get the paper version of the Sunday, New York Times. I usually got hold of it first and my sweetie would go apoplectic at the sight of the paper’s painfully distressed state when it was his turn to read it. Patiently, he would pick up the confussed mess of newsprint and proceed to organize it and refold it to it’s original condition before trying to read it. When he had finished reading it the paper always looked as pristine as if it had just come out of the newstand. It is a mystery to me how he does it, or for that matter, why he does it. I find the page size of American newspapers awkward. It is too big to read without folding it, difficult to turn the pages, impossible to fold them in any cohesive manner or to manage it in any user-friendly way. In short, it is a sort of news warfare that I engage in whenever I read the thing. Technology, however, has come to my rescue. I now subscribe to the electronic version of the NY Times. For the price of only the printed Sunday version, we now have it daily, and guess what? I get to read it wherever I am and there are no remains at the end of the day. I’ll have to ask Chuck if he misses the Sunday paper restoration ritual. Who knows, maybe he does.
Cart . . . astrophy
Another idiocyncracy that makes my sweetie scratch his head also involves a mess. It is interesting when you think about it. I am fastidiously neat when it comes to most everything, hosekeeping, bookeeping, and having a place for everything and everything in its place. But the chink in my armour, so to speak, are three things: the first I’ve just covered, newspapers; the second, is the tupperware cupboard – I’m not allowed to go there because I just shove with disastrous results; and the third is, according to Chuck, the way I “throw” (his words, not mine) things into a grocery cart. On the occassions when we are together at a grocery store he rearranges the cart every time I stop to put another item into the thing. Funny that three of the things that make him nuts have to do with messiness. But the chaos that is his desk and workspace are perfectly normal and acceptable to him. Just goes to show you, we all have our quirks. It’s what makes us who we are, and that’s alright.
2012 – The End is Nigh?
According to the Maya Calendar the world is supposed to end on December 21, 2012. Can’t remember if that is supposed to be Eastern Standard Time or Greenwich Mean Time. Either way. The theory is that there is supposed to be some sort of stellar alignment that will make the earth’s axis tilt and there goes baby, cradle and all. My theory is a little different. I think it is linked to the whole incandescent light bulb phase-out and the horrid mercury-laden fluorescent replacement ones that are supposed to be gradually phased-in starting next year. One of two things related to this event will bring about the annihilation of the human race: we will either all die of mercury poisoning from the damned things, or we will all gradually break our necks because the ghastly new light bulbs take half an hour to actually light up. It’s only a theory, but I think I’m on to something here. You decide.
I wish you all a bright and Happy Holiday and a healthy and grand New Year.
Affectionately,
Cynthia
We had our first snow of this winter last night. We also had a power outage because the snow was wet and therefore, heavy, plus it was very windy. But this morning we woke up to a pristine and beautiful scene. These are some of the images I caught just outside my house.
This year it seems that Michigan didn't put on as vivid a fall color show as it has in other years. I think that the excessively hot summer must have stressed the trees and they pretty much just folded and dropped rather than turn the vibrant colors that can take your breath away.
Usually about sometime after the first week in October is when Michigan’s trees are at their color peak. With that in mind we went, armed with cameras at the ready, in search of some scenes to photograph.
We didn’t come home empty handed, but we were somewhat disappointed that most trees seemed to have just shrunk and dropped their leaves The ones that had color showed more yellows with very few vibrant orange and red in the mix.
Here are a few of the photos we took that day. It was, to be sure, a beautiful day. The air was just fresh but still warmish, it was sunny with blue skies and it was good to just walk about and be outdoors. A great excuse to go on a drive and walkabout.
I am not a computer whiz. I am pretty versed on navigating and using word processing programs and Microsoft Office. But when it comes to the computer’s guts and what makes the darned things work, well, there we are getting into a whole new story, and this is where the arg factor of the whole computer thing comes into play.
My troubleshooting computer malfunctions and glitches ability has a very limited repertoire of options. In fact, it pretty much consists of unplugging and re-plugging devises, and/or shutting down and restarting my computer. Beyond that I am powerless and clueless. Please note that I am not the exception to the rule when it comes to computer know-how, but that rather, I am pretty much the rule. I however, unlike the majority of people who may find themselves in this dilemma, am a very fortunate person because I have a friend who is a computer genius, and when I or my sweetie run into real problems that can’t be solved by an e-mail or phone-guided troubleshooting step-by-step “now do this, and then do this” coaching conversation with this computer genius, he is unbelievably sweet enough to make a house call and help us – a busman’s holiday for him because that is what he does for a living all day at work
So, I have to ask myself, what does the average person who doesn’t have a computer genius for a friend do? Throw the damned thing out the window? hope that it will get better on its own? or take the computer into a store and hope there is someone who can help them? I imagine that whatever the answer to that question is, there must, by default, be a lot of cursing involved.
So, I ask myself, why can’t they, or why don’t they make a computer that doesn’t decide to stop functioning properly at random. Oh yes, it isn’t that the user does anything that causes the malfunction. I have had countless occasions when I have been happily working along doing something that I have done dozens or hundreds of times before, but for whatever inexplicable reason that particular time it causes my computer to give me a message that goes something like: “YOU HAVE COMMITTED A FATAL ERROR AND NOW THE COMPUTER NEEDS TO SHUT THE PROGRAM DOWN. WHATEVER WORK IN PROGRESS YOU HAVE BEEN SLAVING OVER FOR THE PAST TWO HOURS IS IRRETRIEVABLY LOST. YOU ARE SCREWED AND UNLESS YOU ARE A COMPUTER GENIUS YOU MIGHT AS WELL RESIGN YOURSELF TO THE FACT THAT YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BE ABLE TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO FIX THIS PROBLEM – EVER.” Ok, perhaps the wording is a bit different, but for all intent and purposes I am not really stretching the point. This is a terrifying and totally underserved thing to be confronted with on your own computer screen. I mean, through no fault of your own your computer arbitrarily decides to go on strike and make your life a living hell for an indefinite future.
How do the people that make computers and computer programs get away with this? How and why do they make a product that is prone to melting down at random? and why do we, the user, put up with this and continue to encourage them to sell a product that is obviously still in the experimental stage? Why do we tolerate and not rebel at the obscure language and gobbledygook that is the computer lingo. I mean we go along with things like going to the “start” icon or button or whatever it is called, as the go-to place to turn our computer off. For the love of god! what would be so wrong with calling it the “OFF” button.
The thing is, computers are really still such a mystery to us all that we simply accept that this is the state of affairs. We, the consumer, pay them (the computer and software manufacturers) to be used as guinea pigs in the experiment in progress that is the modern day computer. We make the assumption that if a computer malfunctions and we don’t know how to fix the malfunction, that it is not the fault of the company that built the computer or the software that screwed up by making the darned thing impossible to figure out by mere mortals in the first place. We simply put up with this insane state of affairs and meekly go along with it and blame ourselves for not being more computer savvy.
What we should really be asking is why they don’t make computers easier for the average computer user to figure out and why they don’t use language in their manuals that is actually understandable. I mean really… have you ever gone to a manual or to the help button on your computer and tried to figure out what the hell they are talking about? I mean, really! whenever I’ve tried to look in one of these sources I realize that I don’t even know what the heck the question is. Let’s be real here, you have to actually know what the problem is before you can ask the question of how to fix the problem, and if you knew what the problem was in the first place you probably wouldn’t have to be asking the question.
The robins are back. But since the ground is still frozen they have to scrounge around for food because they would get beak bleeds if they tried to “dig” for worms. Therefore, they eat stuff like leftover berries on ornamental fruit trees which have fermented over the winter. The result of this is that we have a lot of intoxicated robins, which fly in erratic patterns and instead of singing their usual birdie songs they sort of produce a hickupy warble as they fly into walls and windows.
Another sign of spring is that pretty much like clockwork, on the first of March the skunks come out of hibernation. You know this by the number of skunk carcasses littering the roads. They are groggy after their hibernation and slower moving than normal. Plus, not being the brightest of critters they have forgotten the whole “cars on roads” thing and therefore there are a larger number than usual of their dead bodies littering the road and perfuming the air.
Teenagers start wearing shorts and tee-shirts when it hits 40 degrees. I’m talking teenagers here, so don’t assume heavy brainpower at work or functioning internal temperature gauges. Teenagers are powered by hormones and what they think is the “cool” thing to do. Apparently freezing parts of their anatomy is a small price to pay if it means an increase in their perceived coolness factor. Don’t ask me to understand or explain it. My mind can’t go there. I am only reporting what I see.
Grass is again visible after being buried for three straight months. Well, I call it grass. It is actually this weird gray and brown stuff that has patches of straw-colored crap that is called winter mold and that apparently, according to my lawn service, I am supposed to rake out of it. Like I don’t have a life and nothing better to do with my time.
Dry cleaners are busy with the whole Michigan population taking their winter coats to get cleaned before storing them away for the warm weather months. Of course, we usually get a surprise blizzard sometime in late April and have to drag the darned things out again. This ritual is a sign that we Michiganders are either slow learners or the eternal optimists. I’m going with the optimist version.
We all get colds or sinus infections. The reason for this is simple. Our bodies have no clue what to do with going from temperatures ranging from 70 to 30 to 40 to 60 to 20 to 15 to 65 degrees – all in the course of one week, and sometimes in one day. When you start out the day in a coat and end up in short sleeves by afternoon and then back to a coat by evening, your immune system sort of goes on strike and says: “Ok, what’s the deal here. There is just so much I can deal with, so I’m going on strike and you lose.
But don’t get me wrong. Us Michiganders love our state and we are a strange and hardy lot. We may grouse about the weather and all the good and bad things that go along with it, and by March we are all sick and tired of the cold and the snow and we look forward to feeling the sun on our faces and not having to pack on five layers of clothing just to walk to our mailboxes. But if truth be told, we love the change of seasons. In spring we look forward to warm breezes and sunny days, but by October we are tired of mowing the lawn and the hot weather and feel revitalized when we start getting that chill in the air, and we actually look forward to sweater-weather and the thought cooking a hot batch of chili or a slow cooking roast in the oven.
A few weekends ago we had a garage sale. I swore the last time I had one of those that I would never have another one again as long as I lived. And so, after a week’s worth of sorting and organizing and pricing and carting and setting-up, here I am again, making the same promissory statement: I hereby promise to myself never to willingly put myself in a position whereby I find it necessary to have a garage sale to get rid of accumulated junk that needs disposing of by any and all possible means.
Let me explain, I am not a pack-rat by nature. However, the same cannot be said for my sweetie, who, if unchecked will accumulate stuff and pile it, pretty much anywhere and everywhere – not a habit I find endearing. So, this garage sale was an act of desperation, a means to an end – the end being to get rid of all the crap that Chuck has been hording for some years now. The end result of this desperate act is that now the storage room is organized and there is actually room to store the things we need, use and want, and all the unneeded, unwanted and never-to-be-used in a thousand years items are gone – huzzah, alleluia, hurrah, yippy, bravo, well done that, fantastic, and tidings of joy.
The traffic flow through our garage was a constant for the two days of the sale because we were but one of the participants in a mega, two-subdivision garage sale event. Which meant that people who take the garage sale thing seriously were out in droves going from garage to garage looking for . . . well, for whatever it is that garage sale bargain hunters look for.
The fun part of the sale was visiting with many of our neighbors who stopped by, mainly, to chat and see how we were weathering the flow of humanity. And what a flow it was. The types of people that showed up to stalk the merchandise was, indeed, a sampling of humanity -- crabby people, polite people, biker types, whinny and annoying people, rude people, cordial people, fat types, skinny types, people with well behaved children, and then there was the child from hell. The particular couple with the hell-boy looked like they had the combined brain power of an amoeba, and their devil-spawned offspring inherited his parents’ lack of intelligence or common sense. This kid, who was around eight years of age, attempted to climb a ladder leaning against the garage wall, sit on a rocking chair with no bottom, crawl under the table, and attempt any and all types of antics that anyone, including a normal eight year old, would have known were actions detrimental to life and limb. The parents of this demon child were too stupid to notice or care. I, on the other hand, did not hesitate to yell at the annoying urchin to stop doing whatever idiotic antic he was attempting – liability insurance might not cover death or dismemberment due to stupidity. Although these people were on my property for probably only five minutes, those five minutes were definitely reason enough never to want to have another garage sale for as long as I draw breath.
One of the phenomenon that I find fascinating are the total strangers who will tell you their life history or will share intimate details about themselves that you would definitely prefer they kept to themselves. I’m talking people you’ve never seen before and will (the fates willing) never see again. It is mystifying to me why anyone would confide that much information to a stranger without any prompting or encouragement. But there were several people who fell into that category. It is a weird predicament in which to find yourself. On the one hand you are hostage to the situation -- you can’t walk away because you are running the garage sale. So you’re stuck listening to someone’s life-story without an escape option. Your only recourse is to make somewhat appropriate noises from time to time throughout the stranger’s monologue, but not too many because you don’t really want to encourage this person to continue with their narrative. So you grunt from time to time and hope that someone with a question will interrupt and save you from the flow of unwanted information streaming your way.
The star of the event, however, was my clematis, which has now climbed half way across the ached trellis which stands on the path leading from the driveway to the back patio and was in glorious, breath-taking full bloom. I lost count of the number of people who, when they caught sight of it as they approached the garage, would stop dead in their tracks and just stand there admiring it and commenting on how it was the most beautiful clematis they had ever seen. Many people asked if they could walk up to admire it up-close. It truly is a thing of beauty. But like most things in nature, its blooming life is short, in this case, about two weeks. But it is, indeed, an event to enjoy when it graces us with its short-lived radiance.
And so, like the clematis blooms, my garage sale is now a memory. In the case of the clematis, a good one, the garage sale . . . well, let’s just say that it served a very necessary and useful purpose. But man-oh-man, it sure entailed a lot of effort and time.
My peony bush is so beautiful when in bloom. Unfortunately, the flowers are so short-lived. Like so many things that we look forward to all year the peonies are in their full glory for, perhaps a week, and then they start to tumble over, especially if there has been a windy day or a heavy rain, and their glorious beauty dies away for another year.
I was, however, able to capture some of their beauty in photos, which will have to suffice until, like the phoenix, they come back to life next year.
Halloween this year was tons of fun. We had a surprise visit from a good friend who got into the spirit of the holiday and stopped by to delight us with her wonderful witchy persona. Her costume was fantastic, in spite of her nose problems – it kept on falling off, to her chagrin. Since she drove over she forgot her broom, so, I loaned her mine for the picture. Ok, so it's not the traditional straw broom, but on short notice it's the best I could come up with.
The weather was a major contributor to the success of the festivities as we had unseasonably warm weather here in Michigan. It was in the 60's and clear, accounting for the record number of trick-or-treaters, the majority donning imaginative costumes, which, because of the warm weather we were able to actually see. In other years they have been hidden under a heavy jacket or coat.
I love Halloween. The little ones next door, to whom we are honorary aunt and uncle, have been looking forward to it for weeks, excited at the prospect of dressing up and going trick-or-treating. I'm sure that that emotion and anticipation was reproduced in millions of households throughout the country. It is a simple holiday, no huge commercial blitz, no annoying jingles playing in the stores trying to lure people into a buying frenzy, no big pressure to get ready for it other than having some candies and a smile ready to greet the little ghosties and goblins begging for goodies at the door. Hope you all had as good a Halloween as we did.
Change is Good
