Another morning, sufficiently frozen to walk around the ponds…the upper one, anyway,
as it was really the morning to close up and set off
down the roads – Smoke Creek,
CR 447
SR 447 past The Lake
and on into Wadsworth for some of that Reservation Gas
just before 80, on which we glimpsed an apt augury for the future – a cheap looking horrendously overpriced dumpster on wheels [ask any racoon] brought to you by a cheap racist South African apartheidian trumper who seems to have out-trumped Trump at fucking over
America even before their New World Ordure assumes control to officially hose down Demockery and how the petulant three-year-old brat-in-waiting will handle being upstaged remains to be seen. Anyway that was 80, slimy over the hill and foggy through the Valley
to Benicia where the Good News was a beautiful box of Harry and David’s pears
[a Christmas tradition of Kirk and Brenda’s] as the weather remained unrelentingly grey and the bad news was…really bad. A new heater, industrial grade, to go on the roof, costing thousands, needed immediately if not sooner. I took Wednesday off to be off the feet, Thursday we had
a most enjoyable dinner at Gabby’s with Gregg and Kathryn and Friday, though Cal-Bay seemed disconcertingly inept at intramural communications – wrong address not once but twice, not showing up until mid-morning by which time the street was, as we’d warned them, totally
packed – but with the most compact mobile crane we’d ever seen it all went entirely according to plan and by 3:15 the new unit was up and running hot, all’s swell that ends swell.
In the interim I biked down to the waterside, struggling with the 40′ elevation gain
between there and home, v. out of condition…something to work on through the imminent
Solstice, which slipped in wetly and quietly, the last day
of the actual year, dark and damp, which
ended with dinner across the street at Aroma followed by a quiet time among the Christmas lights in the library [not shown] as we awaited, Old Folks at Home, the sun’s eventual-we-hope return.