Happy New Year

Good bye to the year 2006. Welcome to 2007. I always have high hopes at the beginning of a new year, but I never have concrete wishes for anything specific. It’s just a nebulous feeling that the days to come will bring an ease to the country’s difficulties and to quote Porgy and Bess, hope that “living is easy”.

I make resolutions up the kazoo. I make a list of things I should do and things I might want to do. I jot them down on scrap paper until the list numbers between 10 and 15. It may take a day or two to make the list, but by New Year’s Day, the list is complete and I write them out on a nice sheet of paper and put it in a place where I’ll see it from time to time. I actually keep some of the resolutions.

One resolution I make every year and the one I always keep, is DO SOMETHING I HAVE NEVER DONE BEFORE. It doesn’t have to be world shaking, expensive, extraordinary or conformist but without fanfare and accomplished before the year is over. Among these resolutions I’ve had my ears pierced, raised chickens and sold eggs, took up the violin, passed the FCC exam and became a ham radio operator, and started this blog.

For many years I’ve been content to stay home, read a book and watch the TV coverage of fireworks celebrations around the globe while waiting for the ball to fall in New York. As a child of 8, I remember trying to stay awake but was too sleepy to wait until midnight so Mom served me strawberry Jello with whipped cream and helped me to bed.

The year that I was in the 5th grade, my family was at grandma W’s house on New Year’s Eve. H.O., Paul and George, my uncles who were only several years older than I, wanted to see the New Year in while sledding down the hill near grandma’s house. It was a bitterly cold night; the snow was deep and still falling. Every little while one of us would run back to the house to get warmed up a bit, have some hot cocoa and cookies, and then come running back to have turns with the sleds. George and I often did the runs together; one of us steering the sled and the other, running and pushing as hard as they could then jumping on top of the one steering for the icy two block ride down to the bottom of the hill. I still have a scar on my leg from the run that finished the sledding for that night. George and I slammed head long into the telephone pole at the bottom of the hill! George got a bloody nose and was yelling to beat the band. He was helped up the hill by Paul and H.O. who thought he was badly hurt because of all the blood. They left me behind and I had to limp to the house by myself. My leg had been caught between the sled and the pole and I could hardly walk. George and I chatted on the phone yesterday reminiscing about that night and I still lay a guilt trip on him for steering into the pole.

One New Year’s Eve at the Sky Ranch, when Esther and Vern and my husband and I were newly weds, we played a trick on Mom by pretending to have made her a strong alcoholic drink. We had only mixed 7up and ginger ale but told her it had a splash of whisky. Mom rarely if ever drank anything alcoholic but we convinced her that she might get tipsy. As the clock got closer to midnight, Mom actually began to be light hearted and gay and was laughing a lot. We were certain she was drunk, but later she told us that she was pretending to be high so the joke was on us!

Tomorrow afternoon, January 1st 2007, I plan to attend a ‘virtual’ New Years party on my computer. In ‘A Tale in the Desert’, the internet game I play, the avatars, Shuofthefieryheat, Kalateth, and iziz, are throwing a party for members of their guild to celebrate the finished landscaping of their palace gardens and to commemorate the coming year. Gorgeous flowers and banners decorate the rooms and atriums. Fountains and two obelisks make the palace unique. There will be wine tasting, Hookah smoking and much mingling of avatars. We’ll gossip and exchange wishes for a Happy New Year. A large display of fireworks is planned to anoint 2007 and bring it in with style.

I want to wish all my readers a Happy New Year. May all your wishes and good intentions come to fruition and flourish in peace.

December 23, 2006

It’s Saturday, the eve of Christmas Eve, 2006 and I’m looking forward to Christmas day. This year my holiday spirit culminated in a baking spree. Instead of making Sugar Plums this year, I decided to give presents of old fashioned filled cookies, date bars, rum balls, cranberry bread, two kinds of oatmeal cookies, chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies. Still on the baking list is carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, sugar cookies with colored sugar topping, and cherry pie. If I have any energy left I hope to make a lemon crème pie.

The recipes are the same ones Mom used during the years when I, along with my brothers and sisters were growing up and still at home. My sister, Esther, and I have been reminiscing about past Christmases during our instant messaging chats and she reminded me of the Burnt Sugar Cakes, the Devil’s Food Cakes with Boiled Frosting and the Upside Down Pineapple Cakes and the Coconut Cream Pies Mom used to make. We marvel that they were all baked in a wood/coal burning stove, not a gas or electric stove.

Christmas cards always add to my holiday spirit especially when there is news of a new baby in a favorite cousin’s life. Email photos of those near and dear, sent to celebrate the season, bring memories of past Christmases. TV stories of holiday travel delays remind me of long ago when I tramped thru falling snow with presents to put under the tree.

What fun it is to remember the myriad decorated trees I’ve had over the years. One year, when I lived in California, I returned a tree to the Christmas tree lot, demanding a replacement. I had purchased the tree around supper time when the night air was turning cold and misty with dampness, but the lights strung around the enclosure of the tree lot created an ethereal quality as Christmas music played and people laughed and browsed among the trees. I chose a tall, bushy fir and waited for the helper to nail on a wooden stand then went home to trim it.

After the tree had been decorated, it suddenly fell over, scattering decorations in all directions. I stood the tree up again, but before I could finish putting the ornaments back on the tree, it tipped over again. The stand had been nailed on crookedly and I had no way of fixing it. Never the less, I put the tree in a corner with ornaments hanging only on the front branches. When the tree fell over a third time, I removed the tinsel and other trimmings, put the tree in the car and drove back to the tree lot. I gave the tree back to the helper who had sold it to me and demanded another tree with a good stand. I think I must be the only person in the world who ever returned a Christmas tree!

I already know what my presents are but that doesn’t take away my excitement for Christmas day. I’ll be having a wonderful dinner with my son and hear the voices of loved ones as they phone with glad tidings and wish us good cheer. I wish the same for all my readers. May each of you enjoy the season with joy and tranquility. Perhaps the wish we all have in our hearts, Peace and the end to the war in Iraq will be realized.

Update on Miss Mimi

Miss Mimi is leaving kitten hood behind and becoming a cat ‘teenager’. She’s learning to use her wiles and kittenish charms to get her way. I’m not positive that she knows her name, but I suspect she knows it when it suits her. We are learning and adjusting to each other’s routines. I’m becoming familiar with cat behavior which is both amusing and destructive if one isn’t aware that curiosity is a cat’s middle name.

My first awareness came when I discovered the cord used to charge my cell phone had been chewed in two as well as the wires of the house phone. The cost of replacement and repair was a signal to cat proof wires by wrapping them with Radio Shack tape designed for that purpose. Mimi is still teething but chewing is giving way to other pastimes.

Her curiosity knows no bounds. I often catch her eyeing something she has noticed for the first time. She likes to pounce, stalk and wrestle. She is teaching herself how to catch mice and fight off enemies. Her favorite play is jumping in and out of her cardboard boxes or paper bag, and protecting the toys she has placed in them, then jumping out to claim victory over some imagined prey. In the morning after she eats, she gets hyper and likes to race from room to room checking on all the secret nooks and crannies she has found. She lurks around corners for imagined prey and constantly faces danger in the protection of her toys.

Mimi purrs while she sleeps. She likes to be on my lap especially in the morning while I sip coffee and watch the morning TV news. She snuggles into a crook in my arm and purrs away and sleeps until the news is over. If she’s not on my lap while I’m sitting with my feet on the ottoman, she leans against my legs and relaxes into a purring sleep.

She is constantly aware of where I am and follows me from room to room. If I’m in my bedroom working on the computer, she curls up on the bed and sleeps or grooms her long fur. If the light bothers her while sleeping, she moves to the closet and stretches out in the shadow of my granny dresses.

Mimi has several favorite sleeping places if my lap is not available. The higher the look out spot, the happier she is. The window ledge by far is the one chosen most often, but she also likes the glass table near the TV where I keep all manner of things at my finger tips like the ‘whodunnit’ I’m reading, pencils, cell phone, reading glasses, Kleenex and a small bottle of sanitizer. A chair with a stack of pillows is always a favorite. The other day I found her sleeping in the bathroom sink!

December 7, 2006

On waking this morning, I realized that it was December 7th, the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. I wondered if any TV news programs would mention it considering the non-stop coverage of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq study that was announced to the public yesterday. The study is a bi-partisan effort to help the administration find a new course in foreign policy that allows our troops to exit Iraq.

This evening NBC did show a minute of the ceremonies in Pearl Harbor. This will be the last observance since so few veterans are still alive to attend. It took me a few moments to comprehend the meaning of that statement. I don’t think of myself as being in that age group, but of course, I am.

We learned of the attack by the Japanese when Dad went to see who was ringing the door bell. It was a boy I had been dating. He was shouting something about the country being attacked and handed Dad a brace of pheasants. He, his father and brother had been pheasant hunting that morning and on their way home they heard the news on the radio. They stopped by the house only long enough to give us the pheasants and tell us the news. When we heard the shouting, most of the family quickly gathered to see what the commotion was about and we stood there with our mouths open, looking from the boy to the pheasants and tried to make sense of what he was saying. They were in a hurry to get home and tell his family, but we kept him from leaving just long enough to tell us again that an island called Pearl was being bombed.

The minute the boy left, we turned on the radio. None of us had ever heard of Pearl Harbor and the only island we knew about was called Hawaii which was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Why would anyone bomb that? The news was sketchy at most. After President Franklin D Roosevelt spoke to the nation, the situation was clearer but we had no idea how our lives would change from that point on.

Before Pearl Harbor, when we went to movies, we saw newsreels of the war on the Russian front, the fighting in Spain, the Japanese in China, but the attack on Hawaii caused a wave of patriotism that permeated the very soul of this country and lasted until both Hitler and Japan was defeated.

I got a job in an aircraft company and Mom went to work in an ammunition factory. Family members and school friends began to wear uniforms of various branches of service. Rationing of certain food stuffs and gasoline quickly became the norm. War bonds in various denominations were goals that even small school children aspired to own. Women began to fill jobs held by men who went into the army or navy. Suddenly the depression was over and there were jobs with higher wages than before the war. People moved to cities and states where the jobs were. Hitchhiking was common and people went out of their way to give hikers a ride when possible. WW II changed the country in profound ways. Those days of trust and innocent peace no longer exists.

Today the country is obsessed with salvaging some kind of solution to our involvement in Iraq. We can all see the writing on the wall, but we don’t want to accept the decision that seems most practical, which in my opinion is, declare victory and come home. The Iraq war has already lasted longer than WW II. Since this will be the last time WW II veterans will meet, it won’t be long before Iraq veterans can start commemorating their battles until they are too old and too few. Is it possible this country is destined to have an ensuing batch of veterans taking their place?