Delayed Effects

This morning I walked out into the backyard and was surprised to see some delayed effects of our cold spell. One of our big ficus trees has suddenly dropped its leaves, filling one end of the pond. Is it dead? Only time will tell. The sister ficus tree, on the other side of the pond, still holds its leaves but they are all black. Why the difference?


Then on to the mango tree, which seemed perfectly fine yesterday, and now I can see a dramatic difference. The leaves are dying from the outside in, the green turning to copper.

For the past three days, the situation in Haiti is growing worse, so many desparate people in such a small place, no place to sleep, no water, no food, no hospitals.

I go back inside and do some research. Here's one place to start.

A Day in the Life

Chances are, I will look back some day, sitting in that nursing home, eating a lunch of blended pea and carrot, and I will wonder where my life went. So here's an opportunity to capture at least one day for posterity, a log of my day from Monday:

5:45 am: The bathroom light wakes me up. Cheryl has just taken Willow and Bingo downstairs. I am disoriented

6:00 am: Downstairs, in the kitchen. Time to make the coffee, experimenting with my own blend of New Orleans and Peets coffee. Put some oatmeal on the stove. I like coffee and steel-cut oatmeal in the morning

6:45 am: I walk Cheryl to her car (checking for any demons or vampires that might be lurking) and kiss her goodbye. Bingo goes to school with her today, so it's just Willow and me, and Willow's hopes are dashed, once again, as I climb the stairs up to the office. She curls up on the rug behind me.

7:00 am: Read the emails from my clients. The sky is falling, again. I prop it back up.

8:00 am: Back downstairs for more coffee. Stop to play the piano. Bach. I suck at piano but don't care.

8:20 am: More emails. I prioritize my work. Look out the window.

9:30 am: I finish answering emails and then solve a problem that would stump most 5-year-olds.

10:45 am: Work on my blog. Downstairs to play the piano. Bach. I've been trying to play this piece, off and on, since Nixon was president.

11:00 am: Willow and I go out back to survey the damage from the recent frost. Looks grim.

11:30 am: Time for lunch. More toast! Today I'm making pita bread toast with hummus and wonder if anyone is luckier than me (seriously). Watch the Daily Show, recorded from last night. Laugh out loud.

12:30 pm: Back upstairs and read more email. Solve a problem that most hamsters could solve.

3:00 pm: Work on my blog. Go downstairs to play the piano but change my mind.

3:30 pm: Time to take a nap.

5:00 pm: Wake up from nap. Read my email.

5:30 pm: Go to yoga class. It's freezing cold in the room but we soon get warmed up. The woman next to me farts and I suppress a big laugh. I realize again that the past and future don't really exist, but I still think about the day and I anticipate the different things I might eat for dinner. Probably toast. I got Cheryl a toaster for her birthday (and other things).

7:00 pm: Back home to fix toast. Cheryl and I talk about our days (mostly her day) and then we decide to watch some Rumpole of the Bailey. Really good stuff from the 70s. I forget to make the popcorn.

9:30 pm: I get into a hot bathtub full of bubbles.

9:50 pm: I kiss Cheryl good night, then turn on a little reading light and continue with the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic book, volume 1. Great stuff.

10:10 pm: I put in my earplugs and fall asleep.

The Winter of our Discontent

As is common in Florida, our house has a heat pump. Actually, we have two: one on the roof for the upstairs, and one for downstairs. The concept is pretty simple--air from our house is circulated through the heat pumps and back into the house. In the summer, it works like a refrigerator to pull the heat out of the air. In the winter, however, the process pulls heat from the outside and uses it to heat the air inside.

Most of the time this works fine. But as you might imagine, the colder it gets outside, the less efficient is the heat pump. After all, when it is 29 degrees outside, there is not much heat energy available for us inside, just in case, for example, we might like to take off our leather coats and relax.

To make things interesting, there's a sweet spot, at around 40 degrees, when the coils of the heat pump freeze over with a thick layer of ice and the air quits moving altogether. As logic would dictate, to thaw out the coils, I have to put the heat pump into cooling mode, which is what I just did, cooling off the house just as I was finally getting warm. Sigh.

The bright side is that we are warming up a little. The downside is that the past 3 days of cold have really punished some of our plants, a few of which, like our papaya tree in this picture, probably are gone for good. The monk's cap above also took a beating, and we were told that this plant has been in the yard continuously since 1924. I still see some green leaves on it so I'm hoping for the best.

Not Staying Warm

It's a simple fact of human history that we learned how to keep warm even before we sharpened a spear or wiped our butts. And yet, with the accumulated wisdom of countless millennia, from cultures developing independently in Europe, Asia and the Americas, pushing even to the extreme poles, of people who universally have learned to find some comfort in the midst of snow and freezing winds, with all of this, I am still not able to get my feet warm in this over-sized cracker box of a house in Florida, and we have more cold weather to come.

Yesterday we had a Deadwood marathon with a friend, all of us with several layers of clothes, thick sweaters, sitting under blankets, drinking hot tea and coffee and still unable to breath a relaxed breath, only to then go out for dinner, hoping for some relief and maybe a seat next to the open-pit grill, but no, the people in the restaurant were bundled up like refugees in a bleak post-Stalinist Moscow tenement, huddled over glasses of hot tea for warmth, looking around and bleating like confused sheep in a drafty slaughter house.

And speaking of Deadwood, in three seasons of the show there was not one snowfall, no hint of the truly cold winters in that part of the country (the Dakotas). Why? Because being cold is not dramatic or fun, which is one reason we moved to Florida anyway. And besides, I'm still coughing and fighting off a cold and I have this weird condition where my body heat escapes and I turn into a 3-year-old girl who has just dropped her ice cream cone on the ground and who cries until someone does something, only I'm still cold.

On Saturday, in the cold and rain, we took Bingo to his secret training camp in the woods. He thoroughly enjoyed himself.

So how is it that dogs are comfortable with no clothes on at all? What the heck is going on? Will someone please turn on the heat? (The whining will continue until this is resolved.)

Frisbee Fun

Long before becoming a management goon, Willow was an accomplished athlete with a silver medal in Frisbee free-style, beaten out in that controversial meet in Athens by a doped-up border collie who took all the gold (and who later was discovered in a Paris bordello, unconscious from what was called compulsive butt-sniffing).

Willow never recovered from that defeat. She turned away from sports, turning instead to the life of scheming corporate stoogery, just like me, though I was never very good at sports, and now I just stand and throw the Frisbee, and take orders.

Willow never turns down a quick game of catch, even when a deadline is near. No hurry this time--we haven't had a deadline or even a project for several months now. When I see her like this, tail wagging, head held high and with the Frisbee in her mouth, I see the happy little puppy of Olympic fame.

Video credits go to my nephew, who also took many great camera shots while he was here.

A Sad Passing

A friend of ours passed away and will be buried today in Duluth. She was a very sweet person--someone with no pretensions and no bitterness about suffering with cancer for years, someone with a sparkling laugh and a bright voice wrapped in the most pleasant and natural Minnesota accent, a voice that invited you to eat and be happy. I think she would have enjoyed the picture below.

Last night we discovered that Willow and Bingo have apparently reconciled (that's Willow, the old lady, on the left). If I've ever seen a more blatant and shameful display of affection, I'm very sure I don't remember it, and I'm glad we didn't walk in on them any sooner than we did. Click on the picture to see it in more graphic detail (if you are that sort of person).