'Twas the Night Before

In which Mike does as little as humanly possible.

Photo by Jed Owen on Unsplash

Suquamish, WA - 24 Dec 2024

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.*

And here we are - Christmas Eve. I make a genuine effort to keep this as lazy a day as I can. Most of it is spent in preparation of tomorrow's feast. For today I just finished a three hour process of teasing flour, water salt and sourdough culture into a little round ball that will imminently become the staple for meals to come through the week, but most important to stand proud over the meal I have planned for tomorrow. In a few hours I will dry brine a substantial cut of beef which will be the main attraction at the table. Apologies to my plant based friends out there, but we are but mere humans and seek sustenance in our own way. The remainder of the day will be sorting through old letters, writing new ones and getting some reading in. But this activity was very nearly thwarted by the ornery ways of Mother Nature.

We have had so much rain lately that terra firma has become terra soupy. The ground has the strength and consistency of cold oatmeal which means someone sneezing two counties away would be enough catalyst to topple a fir tree. And that is just what happened the night before last. At approximately three am, just as I was emerging from a peaceful sleep, Puget Sound Energy dropped the load as a tree half mile away came crashing down from one side of the road to the other taking the power lines with it. Blackness and void surrounding me as a result. Wonderful.

Using my mind's eye as my only source of navigation I made my way to the kitchen. As much as I hate to admit it, if I don't get some coffee in me at the start of the day I am a hopeless junkie searching for a caffeine fix. So I found my headlamp and pulled out my camp stove, some coffee grounds I prepared from the night before and made up a cup o' Joe to settle my jangled nerves. From there it was off to my desk to write my morning pages, sorting out the morning's events and settling my wildly neurodivergent mind into a state of peace. Focused at last, I got caught up on some letters. All of these activities would be difficult to manage with the presence of electricity and the constant nagging of the demon Internet. A soul sucking menace to tranquility. But it isn't all peace. What about that ridiculously hunk of beef in the fridge? Will it go bad and wind up in the landfill? I prayed that would not be the case.

Some exploring and investigation proved that a solitary tree was the culprit and the power outage was limited to a small radius. The overworked folk at the electric company had us up and powered within twelve ours of the outage. Thanks to the hard working and little appreciated folk who work to keep us all out of the dark.

And here I am with my most powerful Amazing Kreskin mind willing the trees to stay put for another day so I can prepare for the much anticipated feast that awaits us. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and peace on Earth.

Keep on truckin'
-Mike

* Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol & other Christmas stories. CRW Publishing Limited, 2004.