Mary, Did You Know

A cappella group Pentatonix is known for their Christmas albums. This song of the day is 2014's Mary, Did You Know by Pentatonix. There are many recordings of this song, sung by various artists. The oldest version I know of was recorded by American Christian singer and record producer Michael English in 1991. Since then, hundreds of singers have covered the song.

Christmas 1915

I've posted this before, but inasmuch as we're approaching Christmas, I think it's appropriate to post it again.

The song of the day is Christmas 1915 by Irish singing group Celtic Thunder. The song is about a Christmas truce that occurred on the front lines during World War 1.

Auld Lang Syne

One of my readers left a comment to remind me of another Christmas song, traditionally sung at midnight as the year ends. I'm talking about Auld Lang Syne, and it is one of my favorite Christmas and New Year's songs. Thanks to LL for the reminder of this great song.

According to Wikipedia,

The text is a Scots-language poem written by Robert Burns in 1788 but based on an older Scottish folk song. In 1799, it was set to a traditional tune, which has since become standard.  ... The poem's Scots title may be translated into standard English as "old long since" or, less literally, "long long ago", "days gone by", "times long past" or "old times". Consequently, "For auld lang syne", as it appears in the first line of the chorus, might be loosely translated as "for the sake of old times".

And so, 

The song of the day is Auld Lang Syne sung by singer, songwriter, and actress Lea Michele (Lea Michele Sarfati).

Last Christmas

Christmas is a week away.

The song of the day is 2022's Last Christmas by a cappella group Pentatonix featuring Japanese YouTubers Heikin and Seikin.

Consequences

If you're of my generation, then you remember vacuum tube radios. You remember vacuum tube televisions. You remember turning on a radio or TV and having to let it "warm up" before it would work. The vacuum tubes literally had to heat up before they would work. 

Then along came transistor radios. They were amazing; they produced sound the instant they were turned on, no warm-up required. I bought my first transistor radio from a mail order company named Olsen. I paid for it with money I had earned by delivering the morning newspaper. The radio had six transistors, as it proudly proclaimed on the front of the case. I bought a rechargeable battery for it, too. It was shaped like a regular 9 volt battery, but when the battery ran down, you could plug it into a little charger that came with the battery, then plug the charger and battery into a wall outlet. It was cheap but it worked.

One day when I was 15 or 16, I left my radio in my dad's car while I helped him work on an old house he had purchased to be rental property. The house wasn't in a good part of town, and so when we came back to his car to go home, the radio was gone. It had been stolen.

I bought another radio. This one was slightly better (and larger) and it contained 8 transistors, a fact that it, too, proudly proclaimed on the front of the radio. Still, there was a place in my heart for that 6 transistor radio. You only buy your first transistor radio once. 

But frankly, I would never have stolen a cheap transistor radio, because at age 15 I had too much self-respect to make myself into a common thief. What's a common thief? When you steal billions of dollars from investors with a bitcoin scam, you're a financial genius. When you steal a cheap transistor radio, you're a common thief. Plus, I didn't know for sure if there was a heaven, but I knew that I didn't want to throw away my shot at getting there on an act of petty thievery. I should note that this was neither the first nor the last act of petty theft I would experience.

The world is full of thieves, and it's full of good people, too. There are people who will give their lives to save yours, even though they don't know you. Maybe the petty thieves I've encountered later woke up and learned to have a little self-respect, so that "petty thief" won't be the only item on their life's resume. I hope so, because, as the preachers and the philosophers have pointed out, our actions are balanced by consequences. Ignore that fact at your own peril. In the end, you only get what you give. It's called karma.

House Ghost

The time was about 1:30 AM. I was in bed. The house was dark except for a dim light in the living room. That light cast its incandescent glow down the hallway to my bedroom door. In the dim light, I saw Nuria get up and walk around the end of the bed and through the bedroom doorway. I watched as she opened the bathroom door and entered the bathroom. I could see her clearly.

I thought, "No one is going to believe this." The reason I thought that was simple: it was because Nuria was lying beside me in bed, and my hand was touching her arm. I could feel the warmth of her skin. I almost awakened her to tell her, "Look, Nuria. It's you!" I didn't because I knew it wasn't Nuria. It was just a kind of apparition of Nuria. 

I kept thinking that anyone I talk to about this is going to accuse me of just dreaming, yet I was awake and I  knew I was awake. A few minutes later, I got out of bed and went to the bathroom to use the facilities. I was wide awake, not sleepy at all, so I didn't return to bed. I sat at my PC and began perusing the news.

These kind of things have happened to me a number of times since I moved into this house. I've written about them previously on this blog. Here's one example: Go Figure. Here's another example: Odd Stuff. It's the kind of thing I've learned to shrug off. Maybe these kinds of things happen to everyone and other people simply don't talk about them. Maybe I shouldn't either, lest people think I'm daft in the head. I don't know—the world is a strange place sometimes.

Entering the Labyrinth

This morning I drove Nuria to the Battlefield Park Auto Salvage company to visit with her Camry. She told me she wanted to get some things out of the car before something happened to them. She named the items she wanted to retrieve, and when she said "my parents' rosary beads" it almost went by me, but then a part of my brain said, "uh, what? Rosary beads? In your Camry?"

I had thought her walking away unhurt from that collision was exceptionally good fortune, but maybe there was something else, too. Maybe there was something in the car that protected Nuria. Maybe. I can believe that.

Also in the car was a well-worn coin purse filled with quarters. I thought that was a good idea—for toll booths and parking meters, a coin purse filled with quarters in a handy place where she could easily reach it. Though more and more toll booths take credit cards.

She took the floor mats and the windshield sun shade that she had bought for the car. She took it all and bid farewell to the Camry. 

The gal behind the front desk of the salvage yard said that if they could station a tow truck at Walmart, it would be busy all day towing cars from accidents. A woman sitting near the shop's front door told me her car was hit by a truck entering the Walmart parking lot as she was trying to exit. She could see the collision coming and began backing up to avoid the truck, but a vehicle behind her prevented her from backing up enough, and the truck scraped her car. The truck driver should have stopped but didn't seem to care. He told the investigating officer that the accident was the woman's fault—that she had hit him. The cop knew the truck driver, and so the cop wrote the accident report as being the woman's fault. Fortunately for the lady, a witness stepped forward and ultimately the report was changed to put the fault on the truck driver where it belonged.

We ended up back at Walmart and bought groceries. We left Walmart and pushed the shopping cart back to my Jeep and put the groceries into the cargo space in the back of the Jeep. A bitterly cold wind swept across the parking lot. We came home and carried many bags of groceries into the house. For dinner we had baked fish, mashed potatoes, and red, white, and orange baby carrots. Then we took a break before eating homemade pumpkin pie with whipped cream.

The wheels are just beginning to turn on the auto insurance. There are many threads that must yet be woven together. I've had an auto accident myself, but it was long ago. It was my fault. But that's another story of another time and a very different VirtualWayne than the one who lives today. I hope none of my readers have to go through the auto insurance labyrinth due to an accident. It's not fun.

Nuria - Part 2

Yesterday's post was about my domestic partner, Nuria. Today's post is about Nuria, too. But mostly it's about her Toyota Camry.

Nuria bought her 2009 Camry in July. It was the first vehicle she had owned in years. She was so proud of that car, even though it was used—or, as they say on the TV adverts, "pre-owned." She would go out in the mornings and wipe the dew off the Camry's windows. She would clean the dust off the roof of the car.

This morning, Nuria told me she was going to the library to make some copies. Ironically, I recently bought her a copier/printer because she had been going to the library so often, in order to print and make copies of immigration documents. But she had to print 21 pages and she didn't want to use up all the ink in the printer, so she drove to the library. And that's where this story should have ended. But—

The library was closed. On Saturdays it opens at 10AM and she had arrived at about 9:30. So she decided to drive to Walmart and pick up a couple items. She made it to Walmart and had stopped on the road, waiting for traffic to clear so that she could make a left turn into Walmart's parking lot. She was in the left turn lane with her left turn flasher blinking. In the rear-view mirror, she saw a car approaching fast from behind her, but she assumed it was in the adjacent lane and would pass her Camry on the right. 

Suddenly, Nuria felt a terrible jolt and her car spun around in the middle of the road. The approaching car had rammed the back of her Camry. Her beloved Camry appears to be "totaled." Meaning: un-fixable, too badly damaged to repair. The rear of the vehicle was caved in, and the chassis was warped enough that Nuria couldn't get the driver's door to open.

People immediately stopped to help her. Nuria wasn't hurt, but an elderly man who had been driving the other car that hit her car had blood on his shirt and pants. Bystanders called 911. Within five minutes, police and an ambulance were on-scene. Nuria called me and told me she had been in an accident. I told her to be sure to get the other driver's insurance information.

After I got there, which took about ten minutes, an officer gave Nuria a card with the case number for the accident. The police will collect the necessary information about the drivers and what had happened. One man volunteered that he was a witness to the accident and he talked to the police. 

An officer gave Nuria his ID card with the case number written on it. When we left the scene, men were still sweeping glass off the street and the two cars had yet to be towed away. 

I took one photo of the Camry. The scene was busy with police, ambulance, maybe a fire truck. I was more concerned with making sure Nuria was alright and that we had all the information we would need.

Nuria is worried about her personal items that had to be left behind in her car. I think they'll be okay. The car should be locked, wherever it's taken. We've reported the accident to Nuria's insurance company and gave them the case number, and they'll handle the rest (I hope). I don't know if Nuria will have to go to court, but the courthouse is at the end of my street—easy to get to.

Now Nuria will have to start searching again for a good used car. That may take weeks. But there is no rush to get it done. 

So that was my and Nuria's Saturday morning. How was yours?

Nuria

My last blog post was six days ago. It seems longer to me. I guess I'm not doing much these days.

Sometimes Nuria (my domestic partner) gets quiet. She did that this morning. She was quiet a long time. I asked her if anything was wrong. She said, "No." Yet I knew something was wrong. Sometimes people don't know how to put something into words. Then I have to dig. I ask questions until I start to feel I'm getting somewhere, and then I drill down into that topic, whatever it may be.

I finally got Nuria to talk about what was bothering her. She misses her family in Costa Rica: her three daughters and her three grandchildren. There is Joanna, her oldest child, who has two children, a boy and a girl, "R" and Stephanie. ("R" is, of course, a nickname.) There is Maria, her middle child. And there is Mary, her youngest child, who has a son called Nick.

I can't replace her family, and as of now, she can't leave the country. She is applying for permanent resident status and she can't leave the country until August of 2023. It doesn't take much to entertain me. I can spend hours looking at YouTube. But Nuria is more of a "people person" than I am. She likes being around people. I'm not a people person. She had a family. I didn't; not a "real" family. She had a life with many friends. I had a life with a few cherished friends. She likes people. I tolerate people. 

(I just went to the door to accept a package—a large brown box from Walmart—addressed to Nuria. She's in buying mode. I never know what to get people. Humans of my milieu already have everything they need and really want. Trying to select a gift for them is like trying to decide what kind of icing you want to put on your red velvet cake, only infinitely more complex. My father couldn't do it, either—make my mother happy. As a child, I felt sad for my mother, who bought birthday and Christmas gifts for everyone in the family but received from my father whatever dregs remained on the drugstore shelves on Christmas Eve.)

I can't make people happy. They have to do it. I'm here if they need me. I can ask questions, but I can't always fix what is broken. Especially when someone is a long way from home and family. When people around me are sad, it makes me sad when I can't help them. But what will be, will be.

Soccer

Last night, Nuria and I were asleep in bed. I was dreaming. In my dream, I pinched someone, and I pinched hard. Then, both in reality and in my dream, I heard Nuria squeal, "Owwwww!!!"

I suddenly understood that I had pinched Nuria and I hoped she was okay. I wanted to wake up and ask her if she was okay, but I just couldn't wake up. I teetered on the brink of wakefulness, half awake and half asleep. Nuria didn't make any further sounds, so I assumed she was okay. I resumed my dream. The pinch and Nuria's squeal of pain are the only parts of the dream that I remember.

In fact, I had forgotten all about it until this morning, when Nuria said, "You pinched me really hard last night."

She said that my night was wild. I was rolling around in bed, and I was talking. That is not very unusual for me. I often roll from side to side in bed, lying on my left side, then my right side, then my left side, and so on. Talking while I'm asleep isn't too unusual, either. Nuria takes it all in stride. But I know I wouldn't want to sleep in the same bed with me.

Nuria is watching TV now. She's watching the USA play the Netherlands in the World Cup. That would be "soccer," which is called "football" in countries not named USA. Netherlands is ahead with 35 minutes remaining.  

I don't know much about soccer. I can watch it for a few minutes, but it seems like the most boring game humans have ever invented. Maybe that's because so many games end with the score 0 - 0 or 1 - 0. 

"Hey, VirtualWayne, let's go to the stadium and watch two teams not score any points for 90 minutes."

"Thanks, but I'd rather do something more exciting than watch soccer—like, take a nap."

But to each his own.