The Three of February

Robert’s review: Good things come in threes they say, and this month has been no exception.  So, enjoy this wonderful review of February and I will try to think what the other two good things were.

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February has been a cold month here at the Hobbit House, despite those ground-hoggish predictions.  I’ve been busy keeping to my carefully planned activities…well mostly getting things done when I felt like doing them.  It’s so easy to put off “clean bathtub” when I could be watching Dharma and Greg on Hulu.  It’s been raining too.  This has kept me mostly indoors interrupted by the occasional trot around the block with the dog.  That doesn’t mean February has been without passion, drama and personal injury.

It should go on record that Valentine’s Day 2021 was the quietest one ever.  And ever includes all the Valentine’s Days when I was single and lonely and bored on the official day of romance.  I got lazy.  I could have stopped at the store on the way back from my mammogram to purchase a nice card and some tea or chocolate, but I didn’t.  I could have walked to the nice little Mexican grocery store nearby and grabbed something fun, but the weather depressed me.  I should, at least, have made a card using my online graphics program.  I don’t even remember why I didn’t. 

This was our big celebration:  I made crepes for desert after eating our boring old bean soup.  Actually, looking back, we ate those goodies all week.   I inadvertently extended my Valentine treat, that delightful chocolate-peanut butter spread, strawberries and toasted coconut crepes, for several days.  My sweet man delivered a card and some Reese’s peanut butter/chocolate hearts before we had the crepes.  We seem to have had a theme going.  Come to think of it, I could not tell you what we did or where we dined on the 30 Valentine’s Days before this one.  V-Day 2021 will be remembered as the sweetest as it followed some pretty exciting doings here at our mountain casita.

A little over a week before love’s holiday, my husband found a gun in our compost pile.  He grabbed the kitchen veggie scraps container and headed out to the fenced-in area at the back of our property to dump it and give the pile a good turn.  Upon opening the fence, he spotted what he thought was a toy gun resting on top of our composting materials.  He reached in and grabbed it, thinking it belonged to the boys next door as he often retrieves wayward toys that have found their way into our yard. 

It was too heavy to be a toy.  He put it down again where he found it and I called the police.  The monotony of the previous 11 months, having been spent in the relative quiet of our home, had set the bar pretty low for provoking our glee.    We were suddenly experiencing the highest level of excitement in quite some time.  This was CSI level intrigue.  The police were coming to our house.  We would most likely be questioned!  I knew it was too much to hope they would use the siren or pull out the pepper spray, so I brought it down a notch by concentrating on the fact that my husband’s finger prints were now on a gun most likely involved in some heinous crime. 

APD showed up in the form of a single officer who, after being ushered into the backyard and shown the gun, asked a few questions and returned to her car.  Two nights before, my man and dog were walking at 10:00 at night, the usual pre-bed potty walk.  A police car pulled up alongside him and an officer asked if he’d seen someone running through the neighborhood.  He did not.  When man with dog came around to the street behind ours, he encountered several more cop cars with lights flashing and much commotion.  So, when a gun was recovered from our compost pile, naturally we asked if the two were connected.

The officer returned to the compost with gloves and a paper bag.  I watched from the back deck as she lifted up the gun, gave it a look over and placed it into the bag.  When she stood up to carry it back to her car, she explained that the department believed the gun had been tossed there two nights ago, when all the commotion took place.  A traffic stop had occurred at a nearby intersection in which the passenger of that car opened the door and ran off into our neighborhood.  Ah ha! We exclaimed as we used our Sherlock brains to piece together the two incidences.  The perp had not been apprehended.

I felt a bit of relief over this news.  The guy with the gun had not been committing a crime in our little neighborhood, but through a random occurrence, had found himself desperate in our vicinity and used our streets and a little stone shed in the yard behind ours for cover.  We listed our reasons why he might have skedaddled when the car he was riding in was pulled over.  Gun was stolen, gun had been used in a crime, gun was not legally registered.   In any event, he did not want to be found with this weapon in his possession.  I feared he would come back for it.  But of course, he’d had that one night, when nobody knew the gun was there, when he could have sneaked back and grabbed it.  I hoped the driver of the car, who stayed put when pulled over, had ratted him out.  We might never know the outcome.

A few nights later, as my husband and dog were gearing up to go for the last walk of the night, the officer who had removed the gun called us.  A DNA sample was requested to rule him out from any other DNA found on the gun.  This was a tricky request.  My guy didn’t want his DNA to be kept after being ruled out, and he made this known to her.  The police never showed at our door that night, nor on a subsequent night when they called to ask if they could come to collect.  Perhaps they just didn’t need it after all.  The grip of this exciting mystery was waning as other more pressing matters were afoot.

The monotony of our winter days was interrupted by some lovely sunny weather and a tai chi teachers’ course I participated in online.  On the second afternoon of the workshop, my husband took advantage of the warmer temperature to split some logs he had been keeping in our outbuilding (sometimes called a garage, but not convenient for parking a car inside).  During the course of that activity, a log fell on his foot.  It swelled up like the Goodyear blimp and turned all sorts of shades one might associate with a boxing match.  He refused to go have it assessed by medical professionals.  He put ice on it.

Our daily ramblings were curtailed for a week as he waited for the swelling, pain and purple rainbow to go away.  As things eased up a bit, he decided to get it looked at by his GP.  After seeing the x-ray, the doctor said it was not broken.  The next day the doctor called back to say he had gotten a colleague to review the screening and lo!  there was a broken toe after all.  What a see-saw.  One orthopedic visit later, the unfortunate foot was booted and prohibited from hiking and from using the foot-powered lathe in his workshop.  He’s been hobbling around the block with the dog as this is his only form of exercise.  I’m thinking stationary bike in the basement, impromptu tai chi class or chair yoga, but these are not yet on his radar.

We’ve had a few other moments of happiness in the month of February.  We are in the process of buying a new (used) car and had some folks in to give us an estimate on the home improvements we have been putting off.  None of this has gotten far yet.  We’re shifting those things into March as we’ve had enough excitement for February.  We need to judiciously parcel it out until we get our vaccinations and we can both literally and figuratively romp about the countryside.

Awaiting that spring-time mojo,

Cheryl   

Guest Editor Robert has much more time on his hands now.  Those two extra good things started in February and will come to fruition in March.  He has recently sown the seeds of some edible delights and is patiently watching for signs of life.