It’s cherry blossom festival in our nation’s capital this week. Trees that survived the erratic winter are preening their all for hordes of gawking tourists who come from near and far to admire the temporary pink flowers. Meanwhile, chaos continues apiece in the Charest household eclipsed only by the magnitude of chaos in our centers of government power.
Winnie and I decided we needed to do something different for Christmas this year. Our Christmases past have normally revolved around either staying at home in quiet celebration, or visiting family. This year, we gave each other a Christmas vacation trip to Puerto Rico.
Back in December, Winnie decided that we needed to do some major home improvements. To be fair, our house is about 30 years old and needs some upgrades. So our plans were to redo the flooring in our basement den first, along with repainting. Then we’d move up to the main level and replace the old carpeting with wood flooring and be finished by April. Take off the spring and summer for more important boating and outdoor stuff, then replace the upstairs carpeting with wood flooring in the fall and be finished by Christmas 2016.
That was our plan.
Recently I was involved in another auto accident in which I was hit from behind while not moving. To add insult to injury Winnie was also involved in an auto accident, abet much more minor than mine, in another part of town just about one hour later.
Not a great day at all.
So yesterday we entered the time of year colloquially known as “Daylight Savings Time.” For those readers who live in a place civilized enough to not do daylight savings; the concept is that if you cut off the top two inches of a sheet of paper and tape it to the bottom of the sheet, you make the sheet longer.
The people who came up with this idea run the world.
Today is the first day of the Chinese New Year, ringing in the Year of the Monkey. Aside from being the biggest celebration of the year for Chinese people around the world, this year happens to be the year of my Chinese Zodiac sign.
I took another plunge this past week and went back to school. I started a “Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages” (TESOL) certification program at our local Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) Workforce Development system. My first day’s experience was pretty positive.
We’re currently experiencing our first major snowstorm since the “Snowmageddon” storms of 2010. It started snowing yesterday (Friday) noon in this area and has been snowing steadily ever since. I’d like to hang out in front of the TV and call for pizza delivery but with the roads covered in about 18+ inches of snow, I don’t think any pizza delivery person is going to be making the rounds for any amount of tip.
A few days ago I had the interesting experience of colliding technologies. I temporarily lost my iPhone at the same time Winnie (in a location far far away from me) had a low tire pressure alarm, and we experienced what I can only describe as a “First-World Nation” issue of confusions and missed signals. It’s times like this I wondered about life back in the BC (Before Cellphone) era.
In Honor of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr
Today is the national holiday honoring the birth of Martin Luther King Jr, the man who forced America to examine our history of racism for a short while. I was only 12 years old when he was cut down in the prime of his life, but I remember the day of his assassination just as clearly as I remember the day President Kennedy was cut down.
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