Space Race

Hello World,

Well, for all of us who have survived the holiday maelstrom up to this point, we find ourselves at last at the very brink of Christmas Eve, and pretty soon it will all be over bar the shouting, as the saying goes. I have to say that the holiday started looking a whole lot better for me since I left work early on Monday, and had the entire rest of the week off, and next week also, which turned out to be a good thing, because I was obviously never going to get anything done otherwise, and Christmas morning would have been a bleak and paltry affair, I can tell you that. Fortunately nowadays, the shops all open early and stay open late (if they ever close at all) as well as online commerce at any time of day or night, plus the wonders of overnight shipping around the globe, for those procrastinators among us who need all the help we can get. So while I would not give the elves at Santa's Workshop the absolute highest ratings of all time, heaven knows, with considerable last-minute exertions, at least Santa's reputation will not have been ruined beyond repair, and that's not just a lot of sugar plums, believe me.

Kicking off the holiday week in style, of course, we celebrated our seasonal services of Lessons & Carols at church, which now sports the "politically correct" moniker of Christmas Carols Sing-Along, to eliminate all possibility that we might be trying to teach anyone a lesson about The Nativity, heaven forbid. There's not much left of the old Lessons & Carols anymore without a full-time music director at church, but some of us old-timers still try our best to spice it up just a bit (at least for the sake of the videotaping crew, so it's not exactly the same thing year after year) with extra musicians, duets, and special music that hearkens back to its glory days of yore. It must be said that this often does not pan out as expected, and this time around, I would have to describe it as something of a mixed success, but everyone seemed to have a good time anyway, and that's the most important thing after all. Perhaps not to the late and esteemed J.S. Bach, after the injuries done to his beloved Christmas Oratorio, in spite of good intentions - and we all know where the road goes that is paved with those, by golly, and I've got the hand-basket to boot.

Speaking of the holidays, we have our friends at http://www.folkalley.com/music/holidaystream/ to thank for their seasonal streaming music for everyone to enjoy on their computers or mobile devices, so you can all get your elf on with all the ho-ho-ho you can muster, by jingle. They played a song I hadn't heard before, from country singer Kathy Johnson, called "Let's Keep Christmas in December," and with which as you can imagine, I could not agree more. Actually, I'm okay with getting a jump on the season in mid-November or so, but heck, not August - and certainly not June, which is when the holiday music catalogues start to arrive at church, which is enough to make a grown person weep, and I ought to know. In fact, it was last month that we received one for Easter music, of all things, and I would point out that Easter in 2012 is not until the 8th of April, so that tells you something right there. Of course, I'm always the one to say there's no wrong way to celebrate a festive event, in spite of the Holiday Police, but having a little bit of Easter Bunny with my Thanksgiving turkey is an idea that I am simply never going to warm up to, no matter how early they want to send out their catalogues, and that's not just a lot of marshmallow peeps, believe me.

And while we're on the topic of bad timing, I recently found myself on opposite ends of a chronological anomaly, that made me wonder if the Theory of Relativity had worn out its welcome, like an irritating relative that you wish would go home. Of course, we all remember Jean, the irrepressible bookkeeper from work, who was complaining loud and long about the weather over the last few weeks, which was so quirkily unpredictable that you just about didn't know what to expect next. Now, it must be said that the weather vagaries were nowhere on a scale of the Biblical plagues, and we didn't actually have to look out for an infestation of locusts or raining frogs, or even fire and brimstone, so it may have been annoying, but it was scarcely epic. But it seemed like every day, I would bump into Jean in the hallway, and she would regale me with the weather reports, and as an added bonus, the traffic conditions as a result of the weather's impact in various areas, such as coastal or high-altitude, or the region's highways and bridges. Now, this all came as news to me, since I figure that I work too close to home for the traffic and weather reports to have any real significance in my life, but then it dawned on me - inasmuch as Jean actually lives on campus, you would think that this information would be even LESS relevant in her situation, instead of scouring the updates with the rigorous scrutiny of someone planning to launch a manned rocket ship to another planet, where this data would be of vital national importance. I mean, the fact is that Jean can literally walk from her office to her front door in about 2 minutes flat, regardless of whatever the traffic or weather might choose to throw at us, including locusts and frogs, or even asteroids and black holes, and that's not just the space cakes talking, believe me.

On the other side of that Theory of Irritating Relatives, everyone knows that I work less than a mile from home, as the crow flies, and if I went out on the roof of the hospital with the rest of the crows, I could see our house from there. I can walk the distance in about 25 minutes, and it takes around 10 minutes to drive point-to-point on the average day. Well, it was anything but average a couple of weeks ago, when I left work as usual after 5:00, only to find surreptitious Police activity impeding progress several blocks from my destination, and finally, forward movement stopped altogether in the direction of where I needed to go. Trying to make the best of it, I turned in the opposite direction instead, and attempted to circumvent the blockade by coming at it from a different way around - which turned out to be more difficult than it sounds, since our neighborhood backs on the water, and there is no way to sneak in from behind it, except by boat, and which I had to admit was impractical under the circumstances. Taking another swing at it from a different route, I found even more Police activity blocking the way, only this time when I turned away from the impediment, there was no other avenue of escape open to me except to get on the highway, going even more in the wrong direction towards Connecticut, which was about the last thing I expected to be doing in my usual drive home from across town, I can tell you that. I got off the highway in the next town over and circled back, basically ending up right where I started at the hospital, so I stopped there and called Bill to let him know what had been happening for the last hour since I left work. I had half a mind to just park the car there overnight and walk home, and save myself any more aggravation, but I was determined to take one last desperate stab at it before giving the whole thing up as a lost cause and calling it a day. Once again going in the opposite direction from home, I drove all the way down to the outskirts of the Bronx, crossed over the streets where the Police activity seemed to be centered, and then skimmed along the waterfront on the far side, just barely making it to the safety of our neighborhood before hitting the snarls of traffic stuck on the other side of the same emergency, whatever it was. You can believe me when I say that walking in the front door of the house was not something I took for granted at that point, that's for sure. In the end, my ordinary and very routine 10-minute commute from work to home took over an hour and a half, through four different towns and an inter-state highway, which I not only could have done faster if I had walked, but heck, could have done faster on a pogo stick, and blind-folded to boot. I suppose I should have been glad that the weather was perfectly fine, or it could have been even worse (although I honestly don't see how that could be possible) but I can tell you that I did spend the entire time wondering where was Jean the bookkeeper with her traffic reports when I really needed her, and that's not just a lot of space cakes either, and I ought to know.

Elle