Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

I’ve been gone from here a lot lately. It’s been a gloomy, drippy solsticial season. I still take my nightly strolls, but it’s been pitch-dark when I get home from work and shame myself out the door like a reluctant cat.

Today, however, the cloud cover dissipated and there was this brief harbinger of longer days at the lake, when a week ago there’d have been an inky black hole where this photo was taken..

I don’t have a Super Bowl favorite, don’t think I’ve seen either team play. That’s not a surprise since I leave it all on the couch on Saturdays during football season. Some years I find myself fast-forwarding through the game play to just see the ads.

In other news, our 52-year-old Payne gas furnace died last week Well, it didn’t actually die, it was euthanized by a gas company employee who was working on our meter, took one look at the old crone and forbade us to re-light the pilot light.

Suddenly I’m having to educate myself about heat pumps and side vents and SPEER and BTUs.

We each have our respective person-caves with electric heat (my office downstairs with a Vornado and hers an upstairs bedroom with baseboard heat) but the rest of the house reminds me of when I used to do inventory in cold-storage warehouses, opening containers to ensure that their contents were really frozen King Crab legs and not barnacles scraped off a crab pot.

Snd this welcome ability to remain comfortable in these segregated spaces means that the bathrooms are tantamount to outhouses, with the attendant discomforts.

 Yesterday would have been my dad’s 99th birthday. Irascible and sentimental. I recall a time about 10 years ago when I was flying east for work a lot and stopping at my folks’ house in Ohio for an appended weekend on the way home from Seattle. I always had a rental car, and parked it in the same place in their driveway apron, well out of the way of “anyone” driving by what he might have seen in his rear-view 20 years ago.

 On one of these visits when leaves were adorning their place we were in the driveway and he said something like it made him happy to come outside and see the bare pavement where I always parked. Why?, I asked. He said, “that’s because it reminds me Phil was here”.

 In the tumult of life wherein jet engines throb and continents await and boarding passes hasten, the momentary quietude of a rectangular piece of northwest Ohio asphalt becomes an unlooked-for token of love.