Decorating the Tree

Procuring a Christmas tree each year and decorating it is not always an activity that I face with anticipation, especially since we haven't had children participating in the ritual for several years. However, after I heard a piece on the radio the other day about ugly ornaments, I thought I might offer a meager response. This guy was going on about how Christmas trees are continually held captive by young children with lots of energy and no aesthetic sensibility or some such rubbish. Crudely made formless ornaments from years gone by dragged out of closets and shown to the world year after year after year to everyone's dismay. Whatever.

Maybe the guy was using reverse psychology or some other angle to tell us that this was all to the good, but to me it was a bit unclear. The salient feature of using well-worn ornaments, in my opinion, no matter the condition or origin, is to preserve memory and make connections with past years. In our house that means the ceramic pigs from my mother-in-law's house. It means the soccer balls, baseball bats, and sleds from our kids' athletic activities. We've got a cat from a bookstore that's been gone for 20 years and a grass skirt-wearing Santa that I picked up in Hawai'i while attending a conference several years ago.

We have musical instruments: a French horn eventually gave way to the electric guitar. Everyone in the family knows that story. There are two glass birds that my wife gave to me in honor of my mother who taught us all to appreciate our winged friends. There's a metal spider and a blue whale from the years during which the animal kingdom was a dominant force in the household. A straw man with a sombrero riding a donkey from my wife's childhood. And atop it all are two angels colored in pencil with intricate care by our eldest many years ago.

I don't have any ornaments from my own childhood or my parents' legacy, but I'm glad that we have a collection of stuff that we've preserved and can hand down to our children at some future time. Anything that brings generations together is OK by me.

Oceanic Danger

AP Photo/Maritime New Zealand

There are two concurrent sea dramas playing out in the world as I write this. There is a Russian fishing vessel, the Sparta, damaged by sea ice and in danger of sinking off the coast of Antarctica.The Sparta is 157 feet long and has a crew of 32. The crew was initially evacuated from the ship, but have now returned and are awaiting rescue from several international ships. Supply and equipment drops have taken place from New Zealand, a 7-hour flight away.

photo courtesy of David Vincent

The other calamity is taking place on the southern Brittany coast in northwestern France. A cargo ship with a Maltese flag, the TK Bremen, has been pushed ashore by high winds and is threatening to deposit over 200 tons of fuel on the French shoreline. Winds in the area have reached speeds of up to 130 kilometers per hour and have caused power outages for over 300,000 homes.

Several years ago I was sailing a small dinghy with my daughter and got caught on a lee shore. It was frustrating and took some time to resolve, but ultimately, I got out of the boat in about 3 feet of water, grabbed the painter and physically towed the boat back to sailing waters. Not so easy to do in this case. All I can say is, "That's some lee shore!"

Is a Garage a Big Deal?

It can be if you don't have one. We moved out to 7409 19 years ago and accepted the fact that we had a house and a pole barn (we refer to it as "the shed"). For years we only stored stuff in the shed, but after a few hard winters we realized that if we parked our vehicles in the shed we wouldn't have to scrape windshields or possibly deal with dead batteries. The shed wasn't heated, of course, but just having the vehicles out of the wind kept them from freezing up.

Still, even though the shed offered our vehicles shelter during the cold months, we couldn't lock the doors or keep out the weather. Everything in shed was covered in dust during the warm months and much of the winter we had snow and ice coating everything within 15 feet of the doors. We kept thinking that we could improve on this.

Putting up a garage would not only offer us security for our vehicles and other belongings, but it would reduce the amount of driveway that would need to be plowed in the winter. In fact, if we built a garage, yours truly might not have to set up snow fences every autumn. Now that's enticing!

In early November we decided this was the year to deal with the garage dream. We hired Schmidt Homes to do the deed and it went off like clockwork. We were blessed with an incredibly late fall. Start to finish? Three weeks. Amazing.