I spent both Thanksgiving and Christmas with Gloria, as we cooked for folks on Thanksgiving and wanted to do very little on Christmas. I offered to take her out to some place in Santa Rosa that was doing dinner on Christmas and then somehow, damn me, let her talk me into letting her cook for me on Christmas. Just the two of us.
And then my friend Bob got me an invitation to a Christmas Eve dinner that i’ve been hearing about for years at Saratoga Springs, so the plan became to drive up there on Christmas Eve, have the dinner, and then drive back down to Santa Rosa on Christmas morning. Airtight.
Well, until i got there after the beautiful drive and unloaded my contributions to the dinner and then started discovering things i’d failed to bring. Like a pillow, which sounds trivial except that my degenerative disk disease makes it necessary to prop my head in just the right position at night. And then i realized that i hadn’t brought enough warm bedding since the place i’d be sleeping was cold. And then i started trying to socialize with all these people i didn’t know by sidling up to a group of them and eavesdropping until somebody said something that gave me a conversational opening. And then realized that i’d forgot my hearing aids, which i really need now if i’m in a group of people.
So despair swept over me and i told ’em i wasn’t feeling well and left. Had a hamburger and chocolate milk shake for a Christmas Eve treat in Hopwell on the way home.
Got up on Christmas morning and drove back up to Santa Rosa, but on the way, on the first block of Scott Street there between Duboce and Waller, a block i’ve traversed literally hundreds of times over the past 35 years, i spot for the first time a sight so fine that i turn around and stop the car and get a pic:
When i arrive at Gloria’s she’s making a wonderful Christmas dinner for us featuring a roasted chicken with dressing on the side, good veggies, and for dessert a lemon meringue pie that was the best i ever ate. Sorry, Mother. She’d brought her cymbidiums in from the freezing night temperatures, so it was like eating lunch in a greenhouse. Afterwards she led me over not far from her house to a fairly new commercial development that was built around a spring they accidentally uncovered at the very beginning of the development. Handsome place:
And to close the year out, here’s a bachelor household tip i developed just this morning.
That handsome rubber coaster beside your keyboard for your coffee mug?
If you don’t hose it off periodically, the crud buildup will reach the point that the coaster will briefly adhere to the bottom of the cup as you raise it; but before the cup reaches your lips, the coaster will release and fall to the desk, dramatically reducing the weight of the coffee cup and causing you to involuntarily jerk it upwards. Sensing in a millisecond that this is not desirable, you will abruptly halt the upward motion of the cup….but not, alas, that of the remaining coffee.
Shirt, pants, desktop, keyboard, and floor.
The mouse, alarmed by my great oath while the coffee was midair, scurried to safety.