Wow…over a month with no post and that’s a rarity for me…but the reasons will become a bit clearer shortly.

First up though…it’s Christmas Day and here in SW FL we’ll have a 76 degree overcast day and duck breast is on the menu. Neil already made some really tasty cinnamon buns for breakfast and precooked the carrots as well as unwrapped the duck a couple days ago and put it in the fridge unwrapped so the skin dries out…that helps make it nice and crispy. He’s got some sweet potatoes to cook as well and they’re having a nice bottle of wine and then a mint torte from Swiss Colony for later on.

Anyways…happy holidays to all and we hope that all of you have a great holiday celebrating with family and friends. We plan to do so although it will just be Neil and Connie…but that’s the way it is.

Churn…well as one of Neil’s internet buddies who writes a blog as she goes through treatment for a brain stem tumor says…is the ability to write about basically nothing and make it interesting…so Ima gonna give that a try 

So…what’s happened resulting in no postings for a month?

Easy answer…December happened. After their combined anniversary dinner and Organ Symphony trip to Scottsdale last month Connie at least hit the ground running with music things…and they both had a lot of Elks things to attend to. 

First up was the Elks Friendsgiving pot luck at the lodge so some effort went into building a nice dish to take along…he decided on sweet potato casserole…but not the gooey sticky sweet kind with the marshmallows on top, that’s pretty disgusting stuff he thinks. Instead…he went for bacon and spices including some smoked paprika to add a little heat It musta been good since none of it came home afterwards. Then the next week she got hot and heavy into rehearsals for her Mastersingers Christmas concert with the Gulf Coast Symphony and doing Christmas shopping. 

Meanwhile…Neil got involved with helping a fellow photographer who lives up in NC make the switch from her Windows machine to a new MacBook Pro and get her Lightroom catalog and images moved over. She is a member of one of his forums and asked about switching there…and got a bunch of recommendations to both stick with Windows and also to make the move. Neil told her that her biggest problem was really slow drives she was using for her images and that switching to SSDs with no moving parts would solve most of her issues…and he offered to help her offline if she decided to switch. Her original decision was to buy a high end Windows laptop but it continued to give her problems so a week or so later he got this email that said “my new MacBook Pro arrived today…what do I do now?”. They ended up having 3 or 4 phone conversations and another half dozen emails back and forth but eventually she got everything moved over and is happy with her move although she’s still working on figuring out the differences between Windows and macOS…they’re not major but there are some things she needs to learn a new process for. 

Then there was the Elks farewell party at the lodge…the building we’re in is being redeveloped so management has been searching for a new place ever since February or so. Unfortunately they have a champagne taste and a beer budget and there was constant disagreement amongst management about not wanting to go to a “not so nice neighborhood” as opposed to “not wanting to overpay. Add in that management is adamantly against having a kitchen because the same 6 or 8 people keep doing most of the day to day work. We realize that and can see their point…but after having seen probably 75 lodges around the country in our RVing days the successful lodges have food available and are open more than 4 evenings a week. Our lodge is pretty small at 250 or so members and while everyone in management talks a good line about increasing membership the fact is that the Elks like every other membership organization is struggling…and they’re not interested in doing what might put more people in the door. A full service restaurant is out of the question but they’re even resistant to having frozen pizza and pretzels and other bar food which would let people get a bite to eat and sell more cocktails which is were every place that serves alcohol makes their money.

Anyway…we have to be out of the building by the end of the year so we also spent a day packing, taking TVs down off the wall, removing decorations and related tasks. Then we were supposed to be notified when the PODS storage container would arrive so we could go help actually pack it but nothing heard so far. We removed ourselves from trying to micromanage their schedule but told them to email/text us with when it was happening…and dead silence the past 10 days.

The lodge is closed for now…and management is advertising to people that we’ll be in the new location by March 1…Neil sez Fat Chance. It is leased of course and needs new flooring installed as well as some internal construction for offices, liquor room, and the like…and Lee County is very slow getting permits. First off they need to finish the plans, then get permits and when we moved into the current place each of those parts took a couple months…and then there are the inspections and that took 3 months for the current place. Last time it was 10 months before we could move in and we know that nothing at all will happen on the new place until at least mid January since it’s the holidays. We’ll be surprised if we are in there before June and even that Ima not betting on. We’ll just go to the American Legion post or our old Elks Lodge 2742 or the one up in Punta Gorda in the meantime. PG’s was completely destroyed in the 2 hurricanes that went by but they’re already back up and running with a kitchen and tent and making money…they’re open almost every day and with food that puts butts in seats and cocktail sales in the register…but nooooo, we can’t have those sorts of nice things at our lodge. Of course…they have a lot more members than we do…and their location on the waterfront really helps…but the biggest part of their success is food and more days a week. I understand the reluctance to put more work on a few volunteers and officers at our lodge…but complaining about shrinking membership numbers and telling members to go bring in their friends while ignoring the question of what do those friends do when they get here and refusing to do anything that will actually help solve the problem is just nuts. Neil and Connie have essentially become social members only…they’re happy to help out with specific short term projects when needed and when asked but neither of them is interested in the clique politics of management and neither is interested in coming part of management for the simple reason that officers are expected to to be there every day the lodge is open and spend some time on most days doing Elks things. We have other things in our lives besides the Elks.

Connie’s concert went off just fine…and then we stopped by Pinchers for some steamed oysters for dinner afterward…Connie was the best dressed person there since she was in her black concert gown although she did change to a lighter weight top to go with the long black skirt.

Meanwhile…Neil hit the 2,000 mile goal for yearly bike ride miles last time out and also made it to 15,000 miles since he started tracking bike miles in 2012. Add in another ~26,000 miles from his run every day streak from 1996 to 2012 and he’s gotta lot o’ miles on dem legs…and a lot more to go he sez.

The final big even this week was Midnight Mass yesterday…but here in God’s Waiting Room (FL) midnight means 1600 in the middle of the afternoon since a large percentage of old people don’t drive after dark and wouldn’t be awake that late anyway. And frankly…it was pretty much a disaster. In years past the choir always sang a 30 minute or so concert before Mass but the new choir director reduced that to a single Christmas tune with none of the classical music they always did in addition to seasonal tunes. Then he brought in a couple of outside musicians…the violinist is a volunteer who’s played with them before and he’s decent…but the French horn/trumpet player was…well, however much they paid him was too much as he was literally terrible. The director had zero rehearsals of the choir ahead of time and then tossed in a song they had never looked it…Silent Night only they sang verses in German and Spanish. Connie said on the way to the car that it was the biggest Charley Foxtrot she had ever been around. Neil told her that was being too generous and that even train wreck was too generous but he figured that Demolition Derby on an ice rink was about right.

The worst part of the night was the poor 7 year old violinist who had obviously been volunteered by her parents to play a solo of Silent Night before Mass. The lass was practically in tears before hand and kept telling her father and the pastor she didn’t want to do it but they essentially bullied her into it…Connie and Neil both thought it was bordering on emotional abuse and should have not happened. 

We finished opening up our presents here…Neil got some bike shorts and jerseys, a couple of pairs of jeans that will fit his now larger butt, and a knife honing tool for the kitchen. Connie got a diamond bracelet, a couple pairs of shorts, and some books she wanted. All of that for both of them was pretty much what they told each other to get…these days after 52 years together there aren’t many secrets between them and mostly they buy presents they would buy anyway as it was needed stuff. They also went to Bealls a couple weeks back and got some things they needed…shorts and slacks for Neil that again were larger and a couple of tops and a nice dress Connie found for her. She had a 20% off birthday month coupon so we saved a bunch with that…and it’s an outlet type store anyway so clothes there are pretty inexpensive.

On the photography front…we’ve started seeing a little wildlife out back now that the summer heat is gone and in a month or two it will start to be breeding season for the birds and I expect they’ll get out and get me some images for ya. Neil got his tickets for the trip to Botswana next summer…and I gotta tell ya it costs a lot for a round trip biz class ticket that far…but it is what it is. At least he’s not spending as much as the lady on the forum who is going to Antarctica next month. 

On the political front…the President-elect keeps making outrageous statements about what he’s going to do and what the DOGE (department of government efficiency) is going to do…cancel current executive branch departments, cancel birthright citizenship, deport 11 million illegal aliens, take the Panama Canal back, annex Greenland. Anybody with half a brain and an IQ above room temperature realizes that most of what he says simply can’t happen…they are either unconstitutional, require approval of congress (and that means 67 votes in the Senate along with a majority in the House), or are simply something that the government is incapable of doing. But as Bette Davis said back in 1950 in the movie All About Eve…(well, actually this is another of those movie quotes that is famous but never actually happened)…”Fasten your seat belts boys, it’s going to be a bumpy ride”.  The actual line in the movie says bumpy night but just like “Play it again Sam” in Casablanca…it never happened. However…if you actually watch Casablanca which is a really, really great movie…it’s amazing the number of lines from it that are pretty well known…a few include the aforementioned Play it again Sam” misquote as well as “We’ll always have Paris” and “Round up the usual suspects” and “Of all the gin joints in all the world…” among others. Anyways…we’ll see what happens post January 20 and I’m quite sure that it won’t be nearly as draconian and immoral as one side will say it is nor as great and excellent as the other side will say it is.

Frankly…Neil doesn’t think that either side is actually interested in solving the major issues we face these days…abortion, voting rights, gun rights. Social Security, immigration, border security, et.al. They’re more interested in (a) getting reelected, (b) being against whatever the other side wants, (c) demonizing the other side, and (d) ignoring all attempts to compromise in order to actually get something done. Both sides raise money and political capital over their signature issues and neither side is actually interested in losing their signature issues on something as freaking common sense as compromise.

So…how did I do on making nothing sound like something? Let me know in the comments…and I’ll try to do better heading into 2025 and not go a month between posts.

Cyas.