MERRY CHRISTMAS

I'm back! A combination of holiday preparations, Charter Communications problems, and I guess blogger fatigue have kept me off the computer. But it's Christmas morning and I'm back. I had talked about the possibility of a "Brown Christmas". Forget it! It's White and it became White with a vengeance! The latest figures I heard was the that the storm which hit the Wausau area caused over 30,000 people to be without power for some period of time. My wife and I had no power for only about 8 hours but many people had no juice for better than a day. For us it was long enough to remind us how dependant we are on that flimsy spiderweb of wires covering our nation. We are much better prepared for lack of power at our cottage. Up there we encounter power outages every month of the year because of the huge number of trees, all of which are capable of being toppled by some violence of natural forces and bringing down power lines with them. We make preparations when storms are forecasted, are ready if they hit, and react without panic or x%z!*# type of words when it does hit. Often the candles, the fire in the fireplace, the snuggling are fun - even romantic. But when we assume our citified personalities the outages are major problems.

Well, that's over and the recovery came in time for us and friends and relatives to enjoy a fine Christmas Eve Celebration. We exchange gifts at this time rather than on Christmas day, and Santa was very generous this year. We ate more goodies than we should have, but that is always just a small step backward to launch us into that annual weight reduction program that begins on January 1st. (Or is it right after all the bowl games are over?).

In any event, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you all. I've got a backlog of items to post which I hope will be of interest to some if not all. Keep coming back. I invite you to make a comment or two.