Not a great holiday this year for me
Here it is, Christmas Eve. While I am a Pagan and this is not my religious holiday (that was a few days ago), Christmas is still something I love, filled with traditions: bringing the tree inside and decorating it, including the new Swarovski star for the year, our annual Holiday Feast, a roaring fire in the fireplace, sitting together in front of the fire, and going out on Christmas Eve shortly after dark to see the Christmas lights all around town. One street in particular, Sherlyn Avenue, outdoes itself; I think I have written about it before.
This year, we are snowed in. My car is dented and damaged, requiring thousands of dollars in repairs. Charles's car is currently sideways across the driveway with the front end down somewhat in a culvert, which happened as he was trying to back it out of the snow where it was stuck. It is blocking the driveway almost completely, and it is definitely impossible to drive around. Nobody is coming in or out until thaw, apparently, because no tow company will send a truck here to tow him out of where he is. I have tried. One guy with a tow company said he was going to come and winch Charles's car out with his Jeep, but it's been three days and he hasn't come. I called him over the past two and he said he had to prioritize people who were stuck in ditches in their cars miles from home, which is reasonable, but that's the only hope we have of getting Charles's car out. I tried asking friends, who tried asking friends, but no luck. Jim Sizemore did call and offer to give us a ride somewhere if we needed to go, but getting a ride somewhere and the annual touring of the lights are two different things.
My car was damaged last Thursday as I tried going out to ship off the family's gifts and some PD supplies I put together for our trip to see them. We were supposed to be in California with my family right now, gathering with my sister, brother-in-law, and our nieces, and my brother and our nephews. (My sister-in-law couldn't get the time off work. Christmas is not a big holiday in Japan. That's New Years.) My mother and her partner Maury are hosting this family reunion of sorts, which only happens once every couple of years or so. We are unable to get out, and we were unable to get out on Monday, when we were supposed to fly down. It turns out our flight was canceled and the next one that they could get us on was Christmas Day, which didn't work for my family at all, since everyone else is leaving on Saturday, Charles only has so much vacation time, and Christmas Day at the airport probably didn't sound appealing. We could have gotten an Alaska flight to Sacramento, if I remember correctly, but my mother lives in Santa Rosa and that's pretty far from Sacramento. All this was contingent on our getting out in the first place, which obviously didn't happen.
Back to my car. Charles had had no trouble getting to the ferry dock in his little roller skate of a car last Thursday morning, and he therefore thought that I should likewise have no trouble getting to the pack-and-mail store in the afternoon. It had snowed quite a bit in the interim, and I told him that I was snowed in, but he said that since I had 4 wheel drive, I should be able to make it there and back with no problem. I put it into 4wd before I even left the parking area outside the house, since the snow was not insignificant. I made it down the driveway with no trouble, and slowly started up the street. Our street hadn't been cleared at all (and still hasn't) and was somewhat difficult to navigate with all the snow on it, but I kept it in 4wd and went very slowly up the street to where kids were sledding down our street to where it turns in a sharp corner. The amount of snow and the fact that it was a downhill street made it very attractive to sledders, but they cleared out of the way as I crept up. I started down the hill, and felt the beginnings of slipperiness. I started sliding. I tried to brake; my brakes locked completely. I tried to steer; I couldn't. The slide accelerated. I tried to turn at the corner, and went careening into the ditch just as the corner turns, taking out a stop sign, the sharp corner sign, and a farmer's fence post. I broke his electric fence wire, too. My poor car was not OK, but the ditchward side turned out to be unscathed (at least at a cursory glance). The streetward side was not.
The car sports a large black front-of-grille bumper, the kind you often see on offroad vehicles. The bumper has been pushed into the front of the car on the driver's side, smashing the headlight. The impact crumpled the hood in the middle and dented it in a few places. I haven't tried to raise it to see if it will go up. The metal on the driver's side, on the side just at the front, is torn back, and the only reason it didn't tear back further is that it wrapped around the bumper where it was driven into the front and side. The chrome front bumper, the bottom one, is bent down. The farmer whose fence I hit bent it back up from where it was touching the left front wheel. That farmer was also kind enough to get his tractor and pull me with a chain out of the ditch. I believe he hooked his chain up to my tow rig in the back, which is firmly in place, and thank goodness I had it there to use. As I was trying to call a tow truck to get my car out of the ditch, another car came down the hill and started sliding. He managed not to hit me and went into the ditch at about a 90 degree angle to me, fortunately without hitting anything, but with the car pretty much lying on its side. A local man from up the street arrived in his Jeep to assess the scene; he said he was going to park his car up the hill to close our street due to ice, but that he didn't have any flares and thought they were needed. None of us had any, either. He told me that there was a worker-driver bus in a ditch up the street, a couple of cars in the ditches, and a Suburban with one wheel in the air.
After the farmer pulled me out, I drove home and my car has stayed there since. So have I, for the most part, with the exception of leaving with Charles in his car on Thursday or Friday night to run an errand. Other than that, I haven't even been able to get as far as the barn. The family presents remain here, wrapped and ready to be re-boxed and shipped, but it will take waiting until a thaw to get that done.
I had hoped to go to Moondogs tomorrow in the daytime for their Christmas dinner, which is only $1 and is a fundraiser for the food bank. Many people contribute either food or money above and beyond their dollar to the food bank, which is great. There will be quite a few people there that I know, including our newly-elected South Kitsap Democratic county commissioner, Charlotte Garrido, who will be helping to serve food. It's a family party, with people of all ages there. They do this on Thanksgiving as well, and that's where we wound up this year. It was fun. But if I can't get to downtown, it's going to be pretty hard to get to Moondogs. I really hesitate to ask Jim to give us a ride on Christmas Day, especially as he has to come from Bremerton, but it may well come down to that.
Maybe if we have a second shovel Charles and I can spend some quality time shoveling snow off our driveway, trying to clear it for a tow truck to come up and get his car moved. Unfortunately, it won't be a snow shovel, since we do not own one of those. I believe we have a second shovel in the barn, this one a flat-bottomed shovel best suited to shoveling cement. We will make do with what we have as best we can.
Charles's car wound up where it is because he thought it would be a good idea to take his car to the airport. It is smaller, much more gas-economical, and does pretty well in lousy conditions, since it is front wheel drive. However, it foundered in the deep snow on the driveway, which I estimated at at least one and a half feet deep based on watching how far it came up Charles's leg as he walked around trying to figure out what to do. I suggested he get a shovel and try to shovel a pathway for the car's tires. They'd been frozen to the ground by fruitlessly spinning them to get it out of the snow, as he had me do. He went up the hill and got my car, and tried to push his car with my car, putting a blanket over the back of his car so it wouldn't get damaged. The only thing that did was get both cars stuck so close that the technique of rocking back and forth couldn't really be applied. I had suggested to him that he go heat up some water and pour it around the tires to melt the ice. He reached into the back of the car and got some antifreeze, figuring that antifreeze would certainly melt frozen stuff. That may have worked if there was more of it, but there wasn't, so we were still stuck. I suggested he get a couple of two by fours and place them under the tires so the car could drive out on them. That's a technique I remember a tow guy using on my old truck after Bob decided to park it in a snowdrift one afternoon. Charles went up to the house and came back with two two by fours. He put them under the front tires and hit them with the shovel to try and get them a little farther underneath. I tried driving the car out onto the two by fours. It was apparently frozen solid to the ground. Charles tried shoveling more snow, and we tried again with the two by fours, but got nowhere. I got on the phone with my mother, telling her that we were snowed in and stuck on the driveway, and it looked like we were going to miss our flight. She consulted Maury, who has spent much time in Montana, and he said to get a bunch of hot water and pour it around the tires to melt the ice. Charles went back to the house and started heating up water. I tried to call a tow company, and managed to get one. The tow guy came out and looked at my driveway and attempted it in his tow truck, but the snow was too deep for the tow truck and we never even caught sight of it.
I eventually went back to the house and was the household half of the hot water brigade, filling up a pan as soon as Charles brought it back and handing him another one that was all ready to go. I had two big stockpots and a large regular pan filled with hot water on the stove, heating up to boiling. Charles had the silicone mitts and was using them to carry the water-filled pots down to the cars. He worked on my car first, and after a long time, managed to get it freed, and backed it up the hill back to the parking area, where it remains. He took a break, then decided to try to free his car. I stayed in the house and watched as he managed to get a little headway or back it up a tiny bit, but no further, over and over. He backed it up for a few feet, then went forward to try to make it through the snow so he could put his car behind the barn (where we had determined it would be out of the way best). No go. He backed up again, but suddenly was moving very fast and stopped with the car sideways on the driveway, with the front towards the culvert where the driveway slopes down towards it. One of his wheels is pretty dug in, he says, and there is no way anyone can drive the car out from where it is, not even after thaw.
And there it stays, and here we stay. I have to find out how much it will cost to fix my car, then we have to figure out what we can sell or how we can save up the money to do it. I may have to close one of my last two emergency reserves. The very last one is my IBM 401(k), which I suppose has lost a great deal of its value, not that it had much to begin with. The one I will probably have to sell is Bob's Microsoft stock. He got it on the employee purchase program. It didn't come to me, because he didn't have me listed as the beneficiary, unlike the rest of his accounts. I need to send them his death certificate (a certified copy), the statement that I got from the court naming me as his executor, a certified copy of my name change court paperwork, and that should enable me to get it transferred into my name. From there, I can sell the stock, taking whatever tax hit that entails and doing so in this market, and that may be enough to get the car fixed. It's not a very big account but it's something. Other than that, if that's not enough, or if there is damage that we can't discern that only becomes apparent once it's being worked on, we will have to sell something else. I don't know what, but it will be in the form of actual things that we value. Maybe a lot of our old LPs would be a good start.
We have no tree this year, because we anticipated being down at my mother's and helping to decorate the tree there. We had no Holiday Feast, because we frankly couldn't afford it. There will be no touring around Port Orchard to look at the lights this evening. There is nothing to give each other, because Charles was so depressed on Monday that he insisted I open my present at that time, which is a lovely blue iPod nano 8gb. I have nothing to give him, because his present is being custom-made and won't be here for some weeks. He knows what it is, because I had to measure him for it. It's a kilt belt, 3" wide as he wanted, in black leather, embossed on its length with fancy Celtic knotwork and with carved beaded edging top and bottom. The belt maker comes highly recommended as a master craftsman, and he makes one belt at a time. But that still means that I have nothing to give him tomorrow, and he has nothing to give me.
So I'm just plain down. I've been keeping up a cheerful front since late Thursday or early Friday, and much of that until Monday afternoon was because I was looking forward to seeing my family, especially the kids. After that, it was just holding it together, and looking forward to getting out to Moondogs on our own power on Christmas, and maybe being able to help out in a soup kitchen food line as well. I was looking forward to some of our more quiet traditions at home, like a big fire in the fireplace and sitting together watching the fire, and like going out to see the lights on Sherlyn Avenue. But none of that is to be. The fire is out, because there is a big dining table in the living room that has been there since last year's Holiday Feast. It came out of the barn and really should go back there - in fact, it should have gone back a long time ago. We've been using it for gaming, but there's no reason we can't use the coffee table as we used to. There will be no fire this year with that table there taking up most of the room by the hearth and the coffee table underneath it.
So the big excitement on Christmas Eve this year is unclogging the drain in the bathroom sink, which is now done (thank goodness) so that the sink once more drains freely. We are anticipating some more snow sometime tomorrow, which will just serve to make Charles's car even harder to get out. And as you can see, I am depressed, and while I'll probably snap out of this sometime very soon, I really needed a chance to air my disappointments. I'll get my act back together because I do that, and because I have to for Charles. There is nothing that can set him off being depressed like my being depressed, so I can't afford to wallow in this. He is someone who gets depressed, really depressed so that nothing can cheer him, fairly readily, so my triggering him is not something I am willing to have happen.
I hope your Christmas or whatever holiday you celebrate, be it Yule, Chanukkah, Kwaanza, Festivus, Santa Lucia, or anything else, is joyous, merry, spent with friends and family, warm, dry, everything that you wanted it to be. May your days be merry and bright.
Happy holidays, everybody.
River
This year, we are snowed in. My car is dented and damaged, requiring thousands of dollars in repairs. Charles's car is currently sideways across the driveway with the front end down somewhat in a culvert, which happened as he was trying to back it out of the snow where it was stuck. It is blocking the driveway almost completely, and it is definitely impossible to drive around. Nobody is coming in or out until thaw, apparently, because no tow company will send a truck here to tow him out of where he is. I have tried. One guy with a tow company said he was going to come and winch Charles's car out with his Jeep, but it's been three days and he hasn't come. I called him over the past two and he said he had to prioritize people who were stuck in ditches in their cars miles from home, which is reasonable, but that's the only hope we have of getting Charles's car out. I tried asking friends, who tried asking friends, but no luck. Jim Sizemore did call and offer to give us a ride somewhere if we needed to go, but getting a ride somewhere and the annual touring of the lights are two different things.
My car was damaged last Thursday as I tried going out to ship off the family's gifts and some PD supplies I put together for our trip to see them. We were supposed to be in California with my family right now, gathering with my sister, brother-in-law, and our nieces, and my brother and our nephews. (My sister-in-law couldn't get the time off work. Christmas is not a big holiday in Japan. That's New Years.) My mother and her partner Maury are hosting this family reunion of sorts, which only happens once every couple of years or so. We are unable to get out, and we were unable to get out on Monday, when we were supposed to fly down. It turns out our flight was canceled and the next one that they could get us on was Christmas Day, which didn't work for my family at all, since everyone else is leaving on Saturday, Charles only has so much vacation time, and Christmas Day at the airport probably didn't sound appealing. We could have gotten an Alaska flight to Sacramento, if I remember correctly, but my mother lives in Santa Rosa and that's pretty far from Sacramento. All this was contingent on our getting out in the first place, which obviously didn't happen.
Back to my car. Charles had had no trouble getting to the ferry dock in his little roller skate of a car last Thursday morning, and he therefore thought that I should likewise have no trouble getting to the pack-and-mail store in the afternoon. It had snowed quite a bit in the interim, and I told him that I was snowed in, but he said that since I had 4 wheel drive, I should be able to make it there and back with no problem. I put it into 4wd before I even left the parking area outside the house, since the snow was not insignificant. I made it down the driveway with no trouble, and slowly started up the street. Our street hadn't been cleared at all (and still hasn't) and was somewhat difficult to navigate with all the snow on it, but I kept it in 4wd and went very slowly up the street to where kids were sledding down our street to where it turns in a sharp corner. The amount of snow and the fact that it was a downhill street made it very attractive to sledders, but they cleared out of the way as I crept up. I started down the hill, and felt the beginnings of slipperiness. I started sliding. I tried to brake; my brakes locked completely. I tried to steer; I couldn't. The slide accelerated. I tried to turn at the corner, and went careening into the ditch just as the corner turns, taking out a stop sign, the sharp corner sign, and a farmer's fence post. I broke his electric fence wire, too. My poor car was not OK, but the ditchward side turned out to be unscathed (at least at a cursory glance). The streetward side was not.
The car sports a large black front-of-grille bumper, the kind you often see on offroad vehicles. The bumper has been pushed into the front of the car on the driver's side, smashing the headlight. The impact crumpled the hood in the middle and dented it in a few places. I haven't tried to raise it to see if it will go up. The metal on the driver's side, on the side just at the front, is torn back, and the only reason it didn't tear back further is that it wrapped around the bumper where it was driven into the front and side. The chrome front bumper, the bottom one, is bent down. The farmer whose fence I hit bent it back up from where it was touching the left front wheel. That farmer was also kind enough to get his tractor and pull me with a chain out of the ditch. I believe he hooked his chain up to my tow rig in the back, which is firmly in place, and thank goodness I had it there to use. As I was trying to call a tow truck to get my car out of the ditch, another car came down the hill and started sliding. He managed not to hit me and went into the ditch at about a 90 degree angle to me, fortunately without hitting anything, but with the car pretty much lying on its side. A local man from up the street arrived in his Jeep to assess the scene; he said he was going to park his car up the hill to close our street due to ice, but that he didn't have any flares and thought they were needed. None of us had any, either. He told me that there was a worker-driver bus in a ditch up the street, a couple of cars in the ditches, and a Suburban with one wheel in the air.
After the farmer pulled me out, I drove home and my car has stayed there since. So have I, for the most part, with the exception of leaving with Charles in his car on Thursday or Friday night to run an errand. Other than that, I haven't even been able to get as far as the barn. The family presents remain here, wrapped and ready to be re-boxed and shipped, but it will take waiting until a thaw to get that done.
I had hoped to go to Moondogs tomorrow in the daytime for their Christmas dinner, which is only $1 and is a fundraiser for the food bank. Many people contribute either food or money above and beyond their dollar to the food bank, which is great. There will be quite a few people there that I know, including our newly-elected South Kitsap Democratic county commissioner, Charlotte Garrido, who will be helping to serve food. It's a family party, with people of all ages there. They do this on Thanksgiving as well, and that's where we wound up this year. It was fun. But if I can't get to downtown, it's going to be pretty hard to get to Moondogs. I really hesitate to ask Jim to give us a ride on Christmas Day, especially as he has to come from Bremerton, but it may well come down to that.
Maybe if we have a second shovel Charles and I can spend some quality time shoveling snow off our driveway, trying to clear it for a tow truck to come up and get his car moved. Unfortunately, it won't be a snow shovel, since we do not own one of those. I believe we have a second shovel in the barn, this one a flat-bottomed shovel best suited to shoveling cement. We will make do with what we have as best we can.
Charles's car wound up where it is because he thought it would be a good idea to take his car to the airport. It is smaller, much more gas-economical, and does pretty well in lousy conditions, since it is front wheel drive. However, it foundered in the deep snow on the driveway, which I estimated at at least one and a half feet deep based on watching how far it came up Charles's leg as he walked around trying to figure out what to do. I suggested he get a shovel and try to shovel a pathway for the car's tires. They'd been frozen to the ground by fruitlessly spinning them to get it out of the snow, as he had me do. He went up the hill and got my car, and tried to push his car with my car, putting a blanket over the back of his car so it wouldn't get damaged. The only thing that did was get both cars stuck so close that the technique of rocking back and forth couldn't really be applied. I had suggested to him that he go heat up some water and pour it around the tires to melt the ice. He reached into the back of the car and got some antifreeze, figuring that antifreeze would certainly melt frozen stuff. That may have worked if there was more of it, but there wasn't, so we were still stuck. I suggested he get a couple of two by fours and place them under the tires so the car could drive out on them. That's a technique I remember a tow guy using on my old truck after Bob decided to park it in a snowdrift one afternoon. Charles went up to the house and came back with two two by fours. He put them under the front tires and hit them with the shovel to try and get them a little farther underneath. I tried driving the car out onto the two by fours. It was apparently frozen solid to the ground. Charles tried shoveling more snow, and we tried again with the two by fours, but got nowhere. I got on the phone with my mother, telling her that we were snowed in and stuck on the driveway, and it looked like we were going to miss our flight. She consulted Maury, who has spent much time in Montana, and he said to get a bunch of hot water and pour it around the tires to melt the ice. Charles went back to the house and started heating up water. I tried to call a tow company, and managed to get one. The tow guy came out and looked at my driveway and attempted it in his tow truck, but the snow was too deep for the tow truck and we never even caught sight of it.
I eventually went back to the house and was the household half of the hot water brigade, filling up a pan as soon as Charles brought it back and handing him another one that was all ready to go. I had two big stockpots and a large regular pan filled with hot water on the stove, heating up to boiling. Charles had the silicone mitts and was using them to carry the water-filled pots down to the cars. He worked on my car first, and after a long time, managed to get it freed, and backed it up the hill back to the parking area, where it remains. He took a break, then decided to try to free his car. I stayed in the house and watched as he managed to get a little headway or back it up a tiny bit, but no further, over and over. He backed it up for a few feet, then went forward to try to make it through the snow so he could put his car behind the barn (where we had determined it would be out of the way best). No go. He backed up again, but suddenly was moving very fast and stopped with the car sideways on the driveway, with the front towards the culvert where the driveway slopes down towards it. One of his wheels is pretty dug in, he says, and there is no way anyone can drive the car out from where it is, not even after thaw.
And there it stays, and here we stay. I have to find out how much it will cost to fix my car, then we have to figure out what we can sell or how we can save up the money to do it. I may have to close one of my last two emergency reserves. The very last one is my IBM 401(k), which I suppose has lost a great deal of its value, not that it had much to begin with. The one I will probably have to sell is Bob's Microsoft stock. He got it on the employee purchase program. It didn't come to me, because he didn't have me listed as the beneficiary, unlike the rest of his accounts. I need to send them his death certificate (a certified copy), the statement that I got from the court naming me as his executor, a certified copy of my name change court paperwork, and that should enable me to get it transferred into my name. From there, I can sell the stock, taking whatever tax hit that entails and doing so in this market, and that may be enough to get the car fixed. It's not a very big account but it's something. Other than that, if that's not enough, or if there is damage that we can't discern that only becomes apparent once it's being worked on, we will have to sell something else. I don't know what, but it will be in the form of actual things that we value. Maybe a lot of our old LPs would be a good start.
We have no tree this year, because we anticipated being down at my mother's and helping to decorate the tree there. We had no Holiday Feast, because we frankly couldn't afford it. There will be no touring around Port Orchard to look at the lights this evening. There is nothing to give each other, because Charles was so depressed on Monday that he insisted I open my present at that time, which is a lovely blue iPod nano 8gb. I have nothing to give him, because his present is being custom-made and won't be here for some weeks. He knows what it is, because I had to measure him for it. It's a kilt belt, 3" wide as he wanted, in black leather, embossed on its length with fancy Celtic knotwork and with carved beaded edging top and bottom. The belt maker comes highly recommended as a master craftsman, and he makes one belt at a time. But that still means that I have nothing to give him tomorrow, and he has nothing to give me.
So I'm just plain down. I've been keeping up a cheerful front since late Thursday or early Friday, and much of that until Monday afternoon was because I was looking forward to seeing my family, especially the kids. After that, it was just holding it together, and looking forward to getting out to Moondogs on our own power on Christmas, and maybe being able to help out in a soup kitchen food line as well. I was looking forward to some of our more quiet traditions at home, like a big fire in the fireplace and sitting together watching the fire, and like going out to see the lights on Sherlyn Avenue. But none of that is to be. The fire is out, because there is a big dining table in the living room that has been there since last year's Holiday Feast. It came out of the barn and really should go back there - in fact, it should have gone back a long time ago. We've been using it for gaming, but there's no reason we can't use the coffee table as we used to. There will be no fire this year with that table there taking up most of the room by the hearth and the coffee table underneath it.
So the big excitement on Christmas Eve this year is unclogging the drain in the bathroom sink, which is now done (thank goodness) so that the sink once more drains freely. We are anticipating some more snow sometime tomorrow, which will just serve to make Charles's car even harder to get out. And as you can see, I am depressed, and while I'll probably snap out of this sometime very soon, I really needed a chance to air my disappointments. I'll get my act back together because I do that, and because I have to for Charles. There is nothing that can set him off being depressed like my being depressed, so I can't afford to wallow in this. He is someone who gets depressed, really depressed so that nothing can cheer him, fairly readily, so my triggering him is not something I am willing to have happen.
I hope your Christmas or whatever holiday you celebrate, be it Yule, Chanukkah, Kwaanza, Festivus, Santa Lucia, or anything else, is joyous, merry, spent with friends and family, warm, dry, everything that you wanted it to be. May your days be merry and bright.
Happy holidays, everybody.
River