February trip to Illinois, Best: a visit to Mom, who while still not completely recovered physically from five months of various illness, still has her spirit, sanity, and beauty intact. She is and has been the most resilient and remarkable woman I have known personally, and even at ninety-plus, the rock of our family. Just being with her is calming, reassuring, and entertaining as well. Also "best", seeing my ever-accommodating nieces Abbey and Kim, along with their ever-entertaining children, Catcher, Dakota (Abbey and Eric's twins, now three, and Cameron, Kim and Brian's son who had his first birthday last November) and in Kim's case, my stalwart nephew-in-law, Brian the Younger. Dakota is so like her mother at that age, determined, very smart, with lots of opinions. Catcher speaks exclusively in exclamation marks, as in "I'm a BIG boy now!" or (my own favorite, told to me by Mom: "I took a HUMONGOUS poop!") Cameron is just starting to talk in English (he's been babbling in his own language for quite a while, we just couldn't get it), and amused us all by pointing to every photo in Mom's apartment and repeating "baby", no matter what was in the frame, and then pointing to the TV and saying "hockey" over and over. He also decided that Mom's cane, turned upside down, was in fact a hockey stick, and is surprisingly accurate at anything and everything that serves him as a puck - sometimes including his own mother (if she's on the floor and he's in the mood).
Worst: would have been getting delayed two extra days due to horrible weather, but the taxi to the airport won over the weather by the proverbial mile. Beginning with the driver not being able to work the walkie-talkie (or whatever device has superseded it these days) and spending the first ten minutes not looking at the road AT ALL, so that I had to rather forcibly remind him that the light was red and he really had to stop, and continuing as we careened onto the tollway, where I watched every single vehicle pass us as if we were standing still, while he informed me that there seemed to be a small problem with the motor, culminating with our running out of gas (due to the small problem, I assume, but maybe completely unrelated) and coasting at a snail's pace to the first safe spot anywhere near my terminal. Travel is always so interesting, in the Chinese sense.
The Westminster Dog Show at Madison Square Garden, Best: we went thanks to our generous ABR buddies Daniel and Tim. We drove out in (once again) terrible weather to the train station, ate our sandwiches aboard, then met up with the guys and Tracey and Lynn (Brittie's mommies and leaders of the pack of eight) and Sue, my ABR state coordinator, with whom I've exchanged hours of phone calls and emails but had never met face to face.
The dogs were just amazing! I've never seen a big formal dog show before, and I was in heaven! Of course the Brittanys were adorable, and we all noticed that these show pups were about half the size of our equally adorable but much less pampered rescue dogs. When I had the chance to go "backstage" to the benching area, I asked around to the various breeders and handlers, as to why that might be, and got some insight about it all. The most coherent answer seemed to be that show dogs have to conform to breed standards very rigidly to be shown at all, but the "backyard breeders" are just trying to get as many pups as possible as quickly as possible, so are often not aware, and almost always don't care, that the breed standard is something like 22 inches and 35 pounds. Even my smallest foster Bonnie was bigger than that - not that I love any of them any less, but it was interesting. Fickle heart that I am, I fell in love dozens of times, as dog after beautiful dog locked eyes with me across that crowded room and insisted I come over and chat. I must admit my most favorite of all the hundreds I saw was a spectacular English Setter - wish I had a photo to share, as words really can't do him justice. But as Brian and I couldn't find out whether or not we could bring digital cameras, just that unofficial videos were forbidden and those cameras would be confiscated, we decided to leave ours home. We were the only persons in attendance that made that decision! If we go again (I hope so) we will definitely bring a fully charged digital.
Even the breeds I normally don't care much about, like the Italian Mastiff (the Harry Potter three-headed dog was originally one, and I think they are just inherently ugly to my Brittany-loving eyes) looked adorable, and were so perfectly groomed even I had to admire their shiny coats and well-trimmed nails. And walking down an aisle of Great Danes and Bernese Mountain Dogs and Mastiffs is just incredible. There has to be another word than huge to describe these dogs that are WAY bigger than miniature horses (and in some cases bigger than regular ponies). Two of the Mastiffs were lying down in the aisle, already crowded with people and dogs more than LA freeways are with cars, stretched out to somewhere between seven or eight feet from head to tail, surrounded in both cases by a dozen little children petting them everywhere. They just smiled and wagged - which occasionally knocked down either a kid or a brush. No wonder they are considered such great family dogs!
Worst: the weather, which was non-stop sleet/snow from the time we left our house to the time we got back on the train. We left several hours earlier than planned because we were both getting anxious about the drive home from the train station. Fortunately by the time we got back to Middletown, the snow had stopped, but we (and all the other commuters) had to dig, sweep and shovel our cars out, all of which were now indistinguishable mounds of snow. Yikes!
The Big Storm: Worst - our power went out on Thursday February 25. We had the generator and our downstairs woodstove to help out, but by Friday, still without power, roads unplowed, and the generator rapidly running out of gas even though we shut it down completely at night, I was really getting worried. Brian called the road crews, to find out why even the bigger feeder road to our private road was untouched, and was told their crews couldn't get there because there was a tree down on the road entangled in wires, and that they, the road crews, had called the electric company to notify them their crews had to deal with it. We then called the electrical company and for the only time in five days, got a human being, who seemed surprised at that information, surprised we had no power, said they couldn't get crews in because the road wasn't plowed, and that he'd switch the call to the appropriate line and then hung up on us. Friday night as I was talking to Sue to find out what was going on in NYC, the phone line went dead as well. I was up most of the night anyway, stoking the fire and going to the window in hopes of seeing some sign of a plow.
Saturday morning a plow finally got through, and Brian went out in search of gasoline for our generator, and another five gallon container for even more gasoline. He'd been shovelling many many times a day, just paths to the car and the generator, but it was exhausting. The snow was wet and heavy and endless, the first two days I couldn't even see our own car out the window, just white blurry snow. When he made it back, he reported that one mile away the power was back on, and we were hopeful. Ha!
Late Saturday our phone line came back on partially. We have a phone jack that came with the house, like so much else that makes no sense, conveniently located against the wall next to the refrigerator in such a way as to make it almost invisible, and very hard to plug a phone into. It's always been the one line that worked even without power, though the feedback is impressively deafening. So I began to call the electric company emergency lines every two or three hours hoping to get some real information. Again, ha! By Sunday, one of the two "emergency" numbers was telling me when I dialed that it had been disconnected, no other explanation and no prompt to go anywhere else for information. That left just one annoying voicemail number to use. The electric company has cleverly figured out that there's no point in talking to any of us crazy, cold, frantic folks, and no longer allows access to humans, just voicemail and endless loops of how one can conserve energy.
When we drove out Monday afternoon, March 1, to pick up gas and Brian's pitifully small check for the school bus driving (he'd been snowed out of work along with everyone else for most of one week and part of another), the crews were already within blocks of our house. I had some faint hope that when we got back, we'd have power. But not. Then, later, when I staggered out to the mailbox, the crews and their two enormous trucks were directly across from our house - but we still had no power. When I saw them beginning to drive away, I flagged them down and told them that - they seemed really puzzled, as they'd cleared the line all the way down Roosa Gap, and we could all see that there were no trees or lines down around our house. I guess I must have looked pretty deranged, because they followed me on to our property to check the electric meter, to be sure it wasn't running. They were very nice young guys, from out of state (that's why they were so nice, I believe) but said they had no explanation as to why we weren't back on the grid. I pretty much pleaded with them to be sure and let the ever-unhelpful folks at O & R know that for sure, as I'd already gotten their annoying voicemail line telling me the restore times were hours after I was calling. That had been happening for days.
Why it went back on when it did, about four or five hours after we were able to speak in person to real human beings, I'll never know for sure. But it was a real delight to actually cook a meal Tuesday night at last, and to go to sleep Monday night with at least a reasonable hope that neither of us would have to get up every few hours to tend either the woodstove or generator.
These photos were all taken BEFORE the extra 30-plus inches of snow fell - the little shrub was completely covered when it was over, as were our forsythia, many of which were bent completely to the ground by the weight of the snow, and lots else. And, these were not supposed to be black and white, they were shot with color (theoretically) but these big storms just reduce everything to a very limited palette.
Best: It's over! I did get out Tuesday and carefully liberated our only surviving lilac bush, and was relieved to find it was only bent, not broken. But as for the snapped evergreens, the forsythia, and I'm not sure what else, we'll just have to wait until the snow melts at least a bit more to assess the damages and do some pruning.
