Well another year has flown by. It’s raining and 45 degrees here on the second to last day of November and we’re hoping for a few nice days so we can hang the boxes of Christmas lights. We also need to plant a few bags of tulip bulbs very soon. With a very warm October and rainy November everything is falling behind.
Interestingly enough, we planted around 100 tulip bulbs last year but had no blooms. I didn’t know that we had a mole problem until February, when I walked through the beds and noticed all of the pock marks. After consuming nearly all of the bulbs, the moles got real uppity. We had 3 break ground, but not one bloom. Fortunately they left as soon as the tulips were gone, moles with very specific taste buds I guess. So this year we have to not only plant tulips, but also plant mole peanuts, and spray the yard with a mix that contains a lot of castor oil and sesame oil. From what everyone tells me, moles react the same way that people do when faced with castor oil - I’m not sure what the sesame oil is for, maybe they don’t like Chinese cooking.
This year was much much more normal than last year. No major surgeries, no minor surgeries. I did have 3 days in ICU and Phyllis had a 6 ½ month headache (yes one headache can last that long - and NO that headache was not named Darren, thank you!). An interesting little side note: if your stomach hurts you take a pill for your stomach, if you have congestion, you take a decongestant. If you have a headache, you don’t take something for your head, you take something for your headache? Seems like you would want to take something against your headache. This created some Marx Brothers moments “Is your headache worse?” “Yes” “That’s Good” (This is when I was hit by a shoe) “Well you don’t want your headache to get even better do you?” (the other shoe strikes me)…. The same is true with cough medicine. Cough syrups, cough drops, they don’t cause coughs…. Should be against cough drops I guess.
Anyway this year was a piece of cake after last year. No moving, no rogue deer attacking our car (oh and we are still getting 48-50 mpg with the hybrid). Phyllis is still in college, still upset when her ‘A’ isn’t a high enough ’A’, And really upset if she gets a ‘B’ which hasn’t happened often. After the winter semester she will be more than half way to her math education degree and we hope she can go to school full time in the fall of 2005.
Memorial Day Weekend we went down to Texas for the high school graduation of Troy and his stepsister Taige. I felt bad that we didn’t bring air horns to honk as did the friends and family of the other twelve thousand two hundred-fifty-eight graduates. (Okay so that’s an exaggeration but it was a big graduating class). Many thanks to Terry and Cheryl for the warm welcome and wonderful food that weekend. Two more years and it will be Tara’s graduation so there’s time to find an air horn - or maybe even a flashing light and siren!
Among the other experiences was playing DDR (that’s Dance-Dance-Revolution to the uninitiated) a dancing Playstation game. It’s sort of a noisy too-fast exhausting musical version of twister. Much more fun to watch than attempt - DDR is more of a workout than a cardiologist’s stress test.
We had quite a shindig this year for Fourth of July. Every year the church that is down the street has a big celebration, and about 10,000 people come to the pony rides, movies, music and fireworks extravaganza. Quite a turnout since there are only 40,000 in the city, and 100,000 in the county. (The turnout is bigger than the official Muskogee fireworks display which they moved to July 3rd because they couldn’t compete). We were fortunate to have Bobby & Lisa & Ethan & Logan, Donna, Jimmy, Brittany, Brooklyn, Sue, James and Sonja down for the Fourth. The fireworks started late, as usual -several neighbors entertained us by trying to burn each other’s houses down before the big show started - but well worth the wait. Once everything wound down, we discovered that our house can sleep 10 without much difficulty. We also found out that Ethan & I are the only voluntary early risers of the bunch. We had morning coffee -well I had morning coffee while he tried to eat every sweet in the house and go swimming again in the blowup pool.
In October, I decided to change out the light fixture in the bathroom (it only spent a year in the garage after we bought it). You would think that the all of the problems involved would be electrical - but no. First I took the old light off to find the sheet rock behind the fixture a loss (every time I tried to drive an anchor into the wall, it fell through). So as soon as Phyllis got home from work, we ran up to Lowes to buy a different light fixture, with a base that was broad enough to span the hole I made by repeatedly trying to put anchors in the sheet rock.
So we pick out the new light and it goes up piece of cake - then - I drop a battery down the sink. Skip to Sunday when I decide to get the battery out of the ‘P’ trap in the sink - 5 trips to Lowes later the sink is still out. It seems the former owners decided that they would use PVC cement on every piece of pipe under the sink. Also rather than use a straight piece of pipe, they used about 8 different fittings so that we had to cut everything out from the wall to the sink. And if that wasn’t enough, I managed to mess up the shut off valve for the cold water, and we had to cut it out and replace that as well. So we ended up spending twice as much in plumbing supplies as we did on the light fixture.
We apologize for being late with the Christmas Letter. In our ongoing attempt to confound the medical profession Phyllis contracted a non-contagious strain -No one has explained how you catch a non-contagious strain of anything yet - anyway Phyllis caught Whooping Cough. This threw our Christmas set-up plans for a loop and we didn’t finish the letter, or get the lights up. I did manage to get the bulbs in the ground so we will either have fat moles or tulips come April. Unfortunately you won’t be able to read about our 102 trick-or-treaters (who came on October 30, not Halloween we didn’t have any trick-or-treaters on Halloween), or the other adventures in landscaping we had when ripping some bushes out of the yard, or our inflatable decorations crazy neighbors who have 100+ inflatable and we featured on ’Out of Control Christmas’ on HGTV.
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!
Darren & Phyllis
Christmas 2004
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