Cut The Body Loose!

My Dad was just three days younger than my Mom, yet he survived her by nearly ten years.  Dad was born in Bowden, Alberta Canada on this Dec 30th day in 1924 and died at Calgary, Alberta Canada April 17, 2007 aged 82 years.  Of course I loved him and I miss him, the same is true of my sister and others who knew him.  I saved this as a draft and when I returned to it I discovered that I’m not yet willing to share feelings about this topic in such a public forum.  So will just mark the date and move on.

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My Mom was three days older than my Dad, she claimed senority in some matters because of it.  Mom was born at home in Nanton, Alberta Canada on this Dec 27th day in 1924 and died at The Bethany in Calgary, Alberta Canada Dec 5, 1997 aged 72 years, days short of 73 years.  Of course I loved her and I miss her, the same is true of my sister and others who knew her.  I saved this as a draft and when I returned to it I discovered that I’m not yet willing to share feelings about this topic in such a public forum.  So will just mark the date and move on.

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Being Canadian, and Canada following British Commonwealth tradition, I know about Boxing Day and was surprised to find that here in the USA it is not a national holiday.  When I first started talking about Boxing Day to SueBaby, she thought maybe there was some kind of a prize fight in Canada on the 26th. of December.  The story goes that the British Aristocracy had lots of hired help, peasants living in little English Cottages where the animals slept indoors with them.  On the day after Christmas (which was an exhausting day for hired help), the help got a day off and were sent home Christmas night with boxed up leftovers from the feasting and maybe a little Christmas bonus.  Thus was born Boxing Day.  I put two and two together, and realized this also meant a rare day for the Aristocracy, when they could have the run of their castle with no hired help watching, and could run half naked through the rooms playing with each other, or play with Christmas toys, or do some napping and eating of leftovers.  Drinking too.

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New Orleans, LA – We are hurtling around the sun, and soon it will be Christmas, ready or not. Yet, it is currently 67 deg. F. outside and we probably won’t see more snow for another three or four years after last Thursday, a week ago now.

Due to the climate and weather here, I still find that Christmas doesn’t quite sink in with me until we are mere days away from it. (Similar to the way it is hard to fear a hurricane while the weather is still lovely here.) Suddenly it has dawned on me that its about time I got with the program, hitched up my sleigh and made Merry preparations.

Yet, I am mired still in bookkeeping and year end stuff which is also important to do.

So once again, I am on the cusp of a change, needing to slow down the bookkeeping and begin preparation for Christmas. So, unable to decide if this is the exact moment to switch those gears of if I should keep on hurtling a little closer still to Christmas without panic I chose instead to make another blog post. Also to sip a bedtime smasharoo of Glenlivet Scotch.

It amazes me to think through the years so far about Christmas past. I grew up having Christmas in a house where my breath at night froze on the wall if I faced it, now I sprawl under the ceiling fan here. My Dad and I both had dozens of parties where we wore red suits, I have both suits in the attic now. I have witnessed both the feeding of a tart and later the self defense killing of a wild weasel on Christmas day! In my time I have literally scrambled on icy roofs to make tracks or hang lights, but now I go ouside most times in a short sleeve shirt at Christmas.

Such a contrast in Christmases and my roles in them over the fifty some years of my memory. One day when I’m older and get to stay home more, I’ll have to write a different post every day through Advent about a Christmas past. No time for that this year!

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A member of our family totaled his car by driving down a New Orleans street and hooking the undercarriage of the violently bouncing car on a protruding man hole, bending the frame.

Myself, I had $500 damage to my Grand Marquis just by dropping a wheel in a deep pothole on Fleur de Lis Drive in Lakeview – who knew it would be so deep.  I was going slow, trying to get to my Church, it slammed the car into the ground so hard it broke the bumper and tore the shroud off the radiator fan.  There are NO PLANS to fix that road, although it is major enough to have a neutral ground and streetcar tracks on it.

The same car had the entire exhaust system torn off it by simply backing out of my Algiers driveway and catching the tailpipe in dirt where a street used to be.

The City has a lot of Grand Marquis and Crown Victoria cars which must be meeting the same fate on a regular basis at tax payer expense.  These cars are unsuitable to drive in New Orleans period, never mind taking them home.  If a City employee needs a take home vehicle, it would be best to give them a take home dump truck that is built for driving here.

I think given the condition of New Orleans streets, there should be a bylaw preventing New Orleans City owned cars from being driven on New Orleans streets.  Its just plain destructive of public property to drive a government car in New Orleans, during working hours or not.  The city owned cars need to be kept in adjacent parishes where they have actual roads to drive on.

We should NOT make exception for the city politicians and bureaucrats who have had the roads leading to their houses repaired, even though those roads are now reasonable to drive on without wrecking the car.  I guess thats why the politicians here can’t get the roads fixed, or let the roads get this way in the first place.  The roads they live on are in good shape, and since they don’t have to pay when their government vehicle is wrecked by driving in Lakeview or Algiers then its really no skin off their nose if the rest of us are wrecking our vehicles to get home.

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I picked a fine time to start a blog.  Now its the middle of December and I’m late doing a lot of important things already.  Let me tell you the two things that drove me to start it now.

First, I often have a lot to say.  In fact, sometimes I am said to “rant”, to write “essays”, and to “lecture” people.  Perhaps a blog will be a good outlet for me to express myself and get comments from the handful of people on the globe who care to read it.  Just maybe I can even learn to write more better starting with being more concise.

Second, I need to learn some new things.  WordPress is one of them.  There is a long list of others.  My livelihood depends on me keeping up with new technologies and tools so I can consult, recommend and support clients on what they need now.

I’ve actually been thinking about starting this blog for several months now, and finally made a start.  I won’t be able to spend a lot of time on it until at least after Christmas though, so it will be a while before either the content or the presentation amounts to much.

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