XMas Season 2010, Part 1

It is definitely the XMas season.

The weather has been bitter cold for the past two weeks, intersped with a wet but relatively warm weekend. That has forced me to use the Interstate to get to work more often than not. It also forced me to apply caulk along the top of the counter around the kitchen sink.

Why? Ants!

My house is such that the crawlspace is warmed by the house above. That keeps my pipes warm during the coldest winters. It also keeps the ants warm during the coldest winters, too! And they have been wandering the kitchen sink, the utility room and the bathroom sink in search of food and water. I will have to call a pest control firm to deal with them once spring comes next year.

I helped Madre get her XMas tree up. It is a plastic tree that comes in three parts and comes with its own string of lights. Later I put the decorations on the tree, and also set up the fake pine boughts and wreath over the fireplace. The living room looks XMasy now.

I have already wrapped up gifts for Madre, my sister the editor and one of my nieces, Megan, whose sister Erin (mentioned in a previous entry) is in Korea. Her mother (my sister the teacher) will visit Erin during the XMas holidays. I will feed her cats while she is there; that is my XMas present to her, although she is not yet aware of this.

I have been getting and sending XMas cards this week. Most of cards come from people that I do business with. I just mailed out my own XMas cards.

A visit by one of the retired workers from Educational Resources — the library unit that circulates everything related to instruction, from software to diaramas to puppets and mannequins to costumes to Dell and MacBook laptops — got me thinking about the mother of one of my few friends from my student days. Back when I worked for the Bank, I used to visit her to find out how my friend was doing. And I got a lot of news about her, because her mother was very talkative. A couple of years after I was hired by the library, she retired. Her retirement party was the last time I saw my friend.

Then, her mother suffered a stroke. I would visit her while she was at the hospital. The stroke ruined her ability to communicate: She could still hear, and she could still understand. But she could not reply, not even in writing. But somehow she got her meaning across to me from her facial expressions.

The hospital was the last I saw her. But I inquire about her from time to time from her co-workers. It has been years since that stroke, and apart from simple words like yes, no, and I can't, she still cannot speak. But she still gets around. Much as I do not like to rely on hope (I tend to think of it as the ancient Greeks do, and as having nothing to do with the Christian ελπις), I still hope that she at least gains the ability to write again.