January 6, 2012
Dear Everyone:
I caught a cold a few days after
Christmas.
Not a terribly bad one, as colds go, but enough to put me “under
the weather” for another week or so.
Thus my plans to “start the year off” with renewed
enthusiasm for exercising and getting a lot of work done have pretty
much fizzled out. Not that
I’m “slacking” entirely. I
still do my back physical therapy exercises every afternoon.
Takes more than a sniffling, snorting, excruciating cough to stop
that.
In the meantime, I’m looking into what to do with
my Christmas Tree. This is a
“live” tree, meaning that it was once a living plant, growing in the
ground somewhere until it was “harvested”.
I love having this kind of tree because I can smell it in the
morning when I come out into the living room.
It smells like Christmas.
On the “down” side, it has to be watered every day,
just like cut flowers. Only
cut flowers don’t usually require getting down on the floor and almost
lifting the entire tree to get the business end of the watering can into
the holder. I actually
stopped watering the tree a few days ago to let it “dry out” before
taking it out of the stand.
Now what to do with it?
Someone put up a notice near the mailbox kiosks and
garbage dumps, announcing a “recycle” program especially for “clean”
trees (no “flocking” allowed.)
Just place the tree in the “car easy area” before January 16th
and the waste management company will pick them up at its
convenience. There’s a “car
easy area”? Whatever does
that mean? There’s an area
set aside for “easy” cars?
Does this mean our community discriminates against cars that play
“hard-to-get”?
If they meant the “car
wash area”, I’d be in better
shape. Sure, it took me over
two years to find it. I only
knew about it because people kept coming to the
Homeowners Association
meetings to ask when the vacuum cleaner would be working again.
The answer: Never.
Not only did they have no way of opening the machine up to
replace the bag, they had no idea where to find new bags.
Apparently, the original developers had left that information out
when they sold the place to the new developers.
Nevertheless, today is “Twelfth Night”, the
“Twelfth Day of Christmas” and the holiday decorations must come down.
The twinkling lights in the windows are no problem.
It only takes moments to pull them off the suction-cup-hooks and
occasional reinforcing tape.
As for the tree itself:
Stripping off all the
ornaments is far easier now that they’re
nearly all made of “shatterproof” plastic instead of oh-so-breakable
glass. An extra-large
plastic bag holds more and takes up less storage space than all those
fitted boxes used to. And
the LED light strands disengage far better than those old sets that came
in a circle.
By tonight, the tree will be outside on the patio,
much to the delight of all the little forbidden birdies.
It can wait there until I either find the “car easy area”, or the
dumpster. In any case, the
Holidays are over and the
New Year has begun.
I ordered some new software for my computer; but
I’m waiting until next week to actually do the installation and start
figuring out how to use them, after I’m feeling better.
A Brave New World to look forward to.
Love, as always,
Pete
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