Good Friday morning, Gary, Frankie, and Thad!
Gary, your Holy Men won, beating Georgia! I know, it's strange for them to call it the Gator Bowl. Perhaps the name came from the days when the Florida Gators seemed to play there just about every year, because their record didn't qualify them to play in a better bowl.
Well, my house has been decked out for Christmas time, with two artificial trees, various knick knacks, and a poinsettia that I "won" at the Rare Fruit Council Holiday potluck dinner several weeks ago (they gave us tickets and had a drawing to give away the decorations on the tables). Anyway, that poinsettia has been dropping leaves, petals, and clumps on my dining room table, and it already looking leggy. I'll put it outdoors and try to grow it in a few weeks, but if it's showing signs of weakness and illness already, it will probably die in the Florida heat if it even lasts that long.
I had a good Christmas and New Year's, with a friend treating me to lunch at Denny's the day after Christmas. The neighbors across the street have been giving me candies and cookies and leftovers. They even gave me this big tub of what looked like scraps of frozen ham and chicken or turkey, all thrown together, and another bag of stuffing. I think they "dumped" their leftovers on me. I have plenty of food, so I figure that I'll leave all that in my freezer until next week and figure out what to do with it all. Probably I should just throw it into a big soup tureen, except I don't make homemade soups.
And, oh yes, the Venezuelan lady invited me over for lasagna on Christmas night. She kept begging me to go with her and members of her family to North Carolina. I figured no, it's going to be cold up there, I've only met her family once and I don't really know them, traveling with strangers is an invitation for misery and trouble, and besides, after hurricane Helene, I don't believe the the place will be as nice as they think it will be. Maybe Thad could attend a Carolina Hurricanes hockey game, but I can't think of much else to do up there. And she keeps saying to me that I can talk to her fire captain son-in-law, the guy that hides and never talks to the family in their big gatherings. I'm thinking, if he won't talk to you, what makes you think he'll talk to me? "You can talk to him, he speaks English," as if that's sufficient reason. The world is filled with English speakers that I have no desire to talk to. Anyway, you can see how my nerves are always frazzled when I visit her.
Though she did send some beautiful pictures of snow in the mountains. And it did remind me of a trip I took to the Great
Smoky Mountains in winter many years ago, which remains the only occasion in my life that I've seen a real winter landscape.