JAN-A-3
A SAGE
STUFFED WITH GOOSE,
(IN CONTRAST
TO THE VICE VERSA)
CONTEMPLATES
THE START-UP OF A NEW YEAR, ARBITRARILY NAMED 2004
January 4—5,
2004
I am stuffed. That was previously the status of a large bird, not too different from those that had been wheeling and cackling over me shortly ago as I ran along the Whetstone Lake in Montgomery Village on a Sunday afternoon that has hit almost the high of 70*--a rather atypical January temperature, even for the Maryland subtropics. This aberration has been almost enough to melt the large snow piles of heaped snow that had fallen a month ago in our “early winter” onset. But, today, I could drive to church for the communion service at DC CRC and then come back through Derwood to run with a tee shirt among a few hardier souls who tried it in shorts and singlets.
At Derwood, a supervisor came in and put up the heavy indoor scaffolding to install all the drywall for all the rooms on Monday. I compared notes with him, since he was driving a white Dodge Ram 2500 Turbodiesel pickup truck, one of three he owns. The 97 and 99 trucks have each got 200 K + miles on them and average 20 mpg around his work schedule in which they regularly haul around two tons in the bed. But he takes it on extended hunting trips, and in those times he finds it makes over 22 mpg, a good omen. I had calculated the Audi’s consumption at 26.7 mpg on the first measured tank full and it should do better on straight highway driving, but the truck would be a competitive option given the circumstances in which the drive would be made. It seems that the fast track of dry wall installation, now possible with the inspection approval posted in the window on the plumbing and electrical systems will have them paint before very long and closing in on the elusive target of the “walk-through” some time later than the rescheduled January 8 but sooner than the absences forthcoming in February. In the walk through, I will have to add an additional problem, brought to my attention by my neighbor Ed Lubers, about the heavy trucks running off the edge of the driveway at the entrance and crushing the steel culvert beneath their weight, which had dammed up the water course beneath the drive. The heavy rain of the other day has flooded over the drive washing out a lot of the gravel just applied. Further, the heavy trucks and ground melt have made the drive way look more like a furrowed field than a drive, which will have to be corrected before the re-freeze occurs in rutting it badly.
A fresh goose, stuffed before it ever made it inside a freezer brightened the post holiday lull, despite a general “downer” –not simply a post-holiday letdown. For one thing, I am still smarting over the heavy bill for the “tree service” still incomplete, but already exceeding in a few months the entirety of my take-home income for the year. It is ironic that the absence of a few trees which will not be very noticeable is a heavier hit than the entire furnishing of one of the major rooms, falling short only of the kitchen in the total expenses of the inside, devoted to an outside, for which no remodeling plans were expected. For a more important thing, I am still unsure of the whole of my coming year, a schedule for which by now I usually have a dozen confirmed itineraries, since all of my plans are still suspended, since they do not depend on me alone. The move back into the still to be finished Derwood is going to be part of a plan no sooner than late February, but it cannot be done without my presence, and there have been plans for that time already requested in Somalia, Haiti, and recently foregone in Mindanao, to which I cannot be returning again this year. February is also the month in which I will be receiving the galley p [roofs of my book on “Surgery and Healing in the Developing World”---all of a sudden a rush affair after hearing nothing from the publisher for over three years since I had finished it, not even getting a response to the calls to his changed phone numbers.
Immediately after that February combination of
academic and mission activities will be the Lake Tahoe Conference in
March. Then in April will be the trips
to
The immediate plan for the coming week will be a modified plan to visit Cumberland Island, traveling down by road, and arriving two days later than planned, limiting the excursion only to the hog hunt with a few new players, but no island idyllic retreat for the excursion around the island and the elegance of the Greyfield Inn for the Saturday night dinner, now canceled.
I have gone out for a run on New Year’s Day and the last two days as well, logging in some miles that ideally should be listed in my Runner’s Log. But, since it, like all other personal items, is locked away in irretrievable storage, I have not logged a mile in the journal since August when “the walls came atumblin’ down”. So, I should perhaps go out and buy a new one for the start of January, even though I had laid in a stock of new ones somewhere behind the locked storage room door. At least the weather has been conducive to a few runs, even though it is the January doldrums for most runners. I might even get in a long beach run at Cumberland, and am stretching out a few long, even if slow, miles here nearby in preparation for the later running season, even while sitting and digesting a good deal of the Holiday Intake, extending now to the fresh goose from the Chesapeake flyway.