Sylvia's Journal

This will be my first entry after being weaned from Caringbridge. As you can read in the last entry on Caringbridge, Saint Nicholas himself (or Christerklaas as we ought to call him) announced that it is time to move to a new blog site that is no longer in the realm of the crippled, sick and injured, as Caringbridge is. “It’s actually better, you can search the site,” said one of Sint’s helpers. And you can leave comments, much like the good wishes in the guest book, so that I can hear from you (which is always wonderful). Saint Nicholas has gone virtual indeed. He’ so with the times!

So here we are. Sint painstakingly transferred all 200 entries from Caringbridge to this site so you can still catch up if you have missed any of those. You can search for words like “pain,” or “broken,” or “patience,” if you feel such a need.

Like thousands of little boys and girls I am up early playing with my Christmas toys. Actually, they are Sinterklaas toys, as we celebrated our traditional Christerklaas last night, or rather, earlier this morning. In good tradition we started after midnight on Christmas Eve, so it was already Christmas day. This is not really intentional but a simple fact of life; no one is ready to start rhyming and scheming until after dinner. Axel was the last to be ‘ready,’ at about 00:20 AM. We were done by 03:00 AM, when everyone traipsed along upstairs with us to our bedroom, just like the early days after our hospital homecoming, to see the last present that was hung over our bed. It was an Illustrator-made reproduction from a family photo we made in the late 80s on the rocks of Penny’s (now our) house. We are awed by the graphic skills of this Christerklaas. We were also awed by the sewing skills, quite unexpected, of another Christerklaas who made both Tessa and me a queen size quilt that is colorful on one side and warm on the other. There were other amazing poems, and some that were quite modern, in that they did not rhyme at all, but beautifully written. I will post that one later.

So now that I have been moved to a site for the normal and healthy, I don’t have to write as much anymore about my muscles and tendons (there’s not much to report other than the same-old same-old this morning), and instead I can write about the shit load present I gave to Axel for Christmas.

I am not kidding. Yesterday I wrote a check for $600 to the company that pumped out our septic system. The ‘honey truck’ carted out 5000 gallons of shit to a dump so that we could flush toilets and take showers again.

Abi had just completed my weekly massage and started to work on Axel when our neighbor Ted shattered my immediate post-massage euphoria with a most dreadful message: sewage was backing up into his washing machine and flowing over into the cellar and making its way to ours. A few years ago something like this happened in March and led to a week long evacuation of the house, and a complete emptying of the cellar. We have a picture of Axel and Ted in white hazmat suits, trying to smile. I was away in some faraway place and missed the entire nightmare. Having raw sewage in your cellar is a really bad thing to have, at any time of the year, but especially on Christmas Eve.

I wanted to let Abi finish Axel’s massage but after a second appearance of Ted’s grim face I rudely interrupted his enjoyment. What happened was a confluence of factors: a severe rainstorm over packed snow and frozen ground filled the overflow tanks that were not able to drain into the frozen ground. The sewage had no other exit than to go back into the house.

The rest of the day consisted of preparations for our Christmas Day meal, baking and writing poems and wrapping presents. Axel, with thousands of other men across the US, went to the shopping mall; this is something that we sensible women would never even consider. Tessa and Axel, who have both worked in retail, remember this phenomenon. It’s good for sales of items that haven’t moved, as the guys, in their last minute shoppers’ desperation, will get anything that is recommended to them.

Sita and Jim went to his dad’s house for dinner while Axel, Tessa and I had a quick meal and went back to writing our poems; a task that everyone in our household always underestimates. Thence the late start.