NOTES OF CONCERN…
…Jack
Blair
A Merry Christmas You Say?
The holiday season filled with good cheer, happy and
pleasant people, shops filled with goodies, children brimming with happy
anticipation, decorations in the towns and cities, old Christmas movies you
loved from your childhood being reshown and a general atmosphere of good will is
everywhere.
Well let me burst that bubble for you.
I will share what the week leading up to Christmas was like
for me.
I went twice as far as usual on the coldest day to climb to
the top of a mountain to pick a Christmas tree, have it cut and wrapped and
bring it home.
How was I to know that people go to see these trees in the
summer or fall, buy one and have it tagged and in the cold of winter just drive
up with their tag, stay in their warm cars, and someone brings them their tree?
How was I to know that all the really great trees I could see at the bottom of
the mountain were not for sale. Who knew there was not be one Frazier fir
available, our tree of choice.
I bought one and brought the tree home and put it on the
porch. It stayed there for five days. Nobody told me to water it. The day we
finally put it up in the house it was a good thing we had enough ornaments that
people would not notice we didn’t have many needles on our tree. My wife has
serious reservations that there will actually still be a tree on Christmas day.
Also the week brought a request from my wife that I paint a
number of windowsills. Did you know if you take the color you want to the
hardware store and they have to mix it for you it cannot be returned if on
getting home you find it isn’t really a good match? So you keep buying until
you get lucky.
I said to myself: how hard could painting windowsills be.
Well, I hadn’t counted on one side of the sill being glass that is not to get
any paint. I did not count on moving along from window to window holding the
stain, a brush, a rag and how unfocused one can get in the process.
Who knew I would spill the stain, the entire can, on the
floor. And that was a carpeted floor. Who knew stain works through the carpet
to the wood underneath? Who should have known that is why people use drop
cloths. So in addition to finishing the staining the carpet had to be cut up
from the floor and the wood underneath cleaned.
Speaking of painting a painter was called in to do some
ceiling work. He has worked for us a long time and is a good friend. It was a
pretty minor job but it was a ceiling and he had to stand on a ladder. I should
have mentioned my experience of working without a drop cloth as he spilled his
paint on my favorite leather chair. Did you know paint cannot be taken off a
leather chair without leaving a serious difference in color variations with the
remaining leather.
It was clear by then that the week was not going very well.
Finally, I was returning home after dark, coming up Central
Street and stopping across from my driveway while cars driving in the other
direction were whizzing past me. I saw an opening, took a hard left into the
driveway and SMASH. My wife had visitors who had never been to our home and
were unfamiliar with the parking places. So they parked their car at the end of
the driveway and I drove right into it. Head on. Another wonderful thing about
the holiday season is I couldn’t schedule bodywork before January 7th.
If you don’t see much of me between now and December 25th
it is probably because I am afraid to leave the house, afraid to do anything in
the house, don’t have my favorite chair from which to watch television, and my
car needs a facelift.
I am finding it a little difficult to utter the expected “Ho
Ho Ho” of the season. I am hoping that I have received my share of surprises
from Mr. Claus this year and that he will skip my house until 2015.
