Happy Birthday Nana

My Nana turns 96 on Halloween. This photo with my grandfather and mom was taken in 1949.


October 30, 2006

The leaves are falling, daylight savings is over, there's an early morning frost on the dormant grass. Soon puddles will ice over and I'll be wearing gloves. Earlier this week I was actually sitting at the computer with a jacket and scarf. For three days I froze, it felt like an ice box in my house.

I grew depressed not understanding how it had turned so quickly. Then I realized my heater was broken. I was just so busy, working on that Poets & Writers article, the studio was booked almost every day too. I knew something was odd, me and the cats huddled up at night, our teeth chattering.

The boiler conked out when I got a delivery on Monday. Here in the northeast it's oil heat. I've got a five-hundred gallon tank. The fresh oil stirs up the sediment in the tank and on occasion that clogs the system and it shuts down. I didn't realize until Thursday.

To top it off, I got the season's first heating bill -- over five hundred and sixty-three bucks. I'm fixed at $2.66 a gallon. Last year it was $2.16, the year before that: $1.69; it was 85 cents back in 1995. It's enough to make me sick, or at least wear two sweaters and throw an extra blanket on the bed.

I just bought a glass door for my fireplace. Once the fire goes out, the flue sucks out the warm air, and in the morning I come downstairs to a freezing living room and kitchen. This year I'll be able to close it off when I go to bed and keep the heat in.

I thought about getting a pellet stove, but it uses over five-hundred dollars in pellets a season, the stove costs two grand. I'd hate to give up my fireplace. There's nothing like the crackle of oak, the smell of mesquite wafting up through the house on a cold winter day. A half-a-cord of wood only runs a hundred-and-ten bucks.



My Nana, over in England, turns 96 on Halloween. She was born in 1910, the year of Halley's Comet. She's lived through two world wars, the invention of radio, TV, the Internet too. When she was a kid the only food in existence was organic food. Nobody paid a premium for free range chickens or eggs, that's just the way it was. It's hard for me to imagine what she feels like, given what she's seen. Happy Birthday Nana!



Thankfully, the election is coming to an end. Here in Connecticut the republicans ran an ad saying that Diane Farrell had befriended the Taliban. I mean really, Diane Farrell is no saint, but a friend of the Taliban, please, I doubt she could pick out Afghanistan on a map, let alone be in cahoots with terrorists. It made Shays look like an idiot, which to his credit, he admitted.

Catch any political ad nowadays and one can only conclude that all politicians must think that we the electorate are schmucks. Mudslinging has become a high art form. But since 9/11 there's an even more diabolical strategy: keep an eye on the terror alert color scheme this week. Also, look for gas prices to rise post election.