St. Patrick's Day and Tax Time

St. Patrick’s Day was the inspiration for another fun theme week here at the continuum care complex. It followed another theme week I didn’t write about because I’m not into “churchy things” like doing the Stations of the Cross, Ash Wednesday. Lent and a series of classes to study Bible events leading up to Easter. I didn’t even do the buffet for Mardi Gras night because while I like some Cajun music I didn’t trust the iconic food that goes with it not to kill me with hidden shell fish. I did, however, love the paczki’s served on Fat Tuesday before Lent started and the Mardi Gras beads that were free for the taking draped all over the public areas. Best paczki’s I’ve ever had in my life and we used to have some great Polish bakeries in my area.

St. Patrick’s Week started on Monday with a viewing of a PBS documentary The Ireland’s Wild Coast and it featured what they called the most beautiful coastlines in the world. It had some breathtaking photography of a chain of Man-free, wild islands with millions of nesting birds and ancient ruins that are surrounded by waters filled with breaching humbacks and other sea life. I’d love to see another video on how they filmed such amazing close-ups of hatching birds and mating animals. At one point one of the guys shouted out as two seals were mating, “This is my kind of movie” and I mumbled, “Oh gross, you’re into animal porn!"

Irish Happy Hour was my favorite happy hour so far but then I said the same about the Hawaiian Happy Hour. They served my all-time favorite alcoholic drink---Grasshoppers. Back in my dating days when someone would take me to a nice restaurant I always ordered a Grasshopper for dessert which is made with equal parts of ice cream, crème de menthe liqueur and crème de cacao liqueur served in a cocktail glass with dark chocolate power on the edge of the glass. I hear tell they mostly sell Grasshoppers as shooters today which hardly seems worth the effort to get the blender out. I was so hung up on Grasshoppers back in my day that I even made them at home. After awhile I narrowed it down to just the crème de menthe over ice cream and called it good enough. Anyway, the theme happy hours here are bringing back some great memories. Wouldn’t it be fun to be young again, especially if we knew how short-lived our carefree days would be before adult problems would take over our lives.

They also put on an Irish buffet with the best tasting, most tender corn beef I've ever had in my life. (My mom used to boil the flavor out of it and it still cut like leather.) And yesterday afternoon's entertainment was filled with live Irish music, a fiddle player who was really good and he sat in front of a large screen while drone footage of Ireland played in the background.

This week I also managed to run errands and I put more miles on my car that one day than I did in the entire month of February. That’s a fact verifiable by Google because they track me where ever I go in case I decide to take up the hobby of writing reviews of, say, the car wash I went to, the shoe store, the CPA’s office or the bottom of the river that I used to fear I’d end up in some icy winter day where I used to live. No river to fear down here and I managed to navigate the streets and traffic I’m not used to doing just fine. I’m going to take a page out of another blogger’s life (Living Richly in Retirement) and declare one day a week when I explore my new area. The jury is still out on whether I should get a GPS app. I usually just google where I’m going, then print out a map from point A to point B. I have a smart phone but it's maxed out on apps so getting a GPS presents a problem.

Tax Time: I get my income taxes done by a CPA and have for as far back as I can remember. It’s over-kill now that it’s just me and no businesses. But old habits are hard to break and the idea of doing my own taxes is not worth the worrying about making a mistake and going off to tax jail. Ya, I know, that’s not going to happen. We once knew a tax evader and it took seven years before the IRA came crashing down on him and, boy, did they come after him with literal guns blazing. Damn fool tried to hold off several law enforcement agencies in an armed attempt to hold on to a large farm with his underground bank of guns and ammo. Damn Fool could have sold off some acres to cover what he owed but instead he lost it all and earned himself prison sentence for his siege.

The inside of his house was a hoarder situation. A well organized hoard with one room dedicated to just post cards in filing cabinets so close together you could hardly walk down the aisles. At the time we saw the house I was trying to build a set of woman’s suffrage cards and had been at it for several years. I had just one card left to complete the series of 12 and the guy (one of Don’s work friends) invited us out to see the card. He had many duplicates of the exact card I needed but even offering him $200 for the 1909 Dunston Wellers postcard that, at the time, usually went for $100 wouldn’t get guy to part with one of his. 

After the siege everything he own was auctioned off for pennies on the dollar to pay his debts, losing a farm that had been in his family for four generations. He didn’t believe in paying any form of taxes; he had owed the county, state and federal governments back taxes years before they came prepared with a coordinated effort to haul him off. Oh, ya, I never get past tax time without remembering that crazy, old fool. ©

I did finally complete my set, framed them and now my suffragette postcards are hanging in my half bathroom. Their values have fallen in the past five years---thanks, Marie Kondo---but I still love the memories of hunting for them. (Sorry for the poor quality photo. The colors are bright like the ones at the top. I grabbed that picture off an auction site.)

A Mouse in the House

`Twas the night before Christmas when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not ever a mouse. Nope, I caught the little sucker and I didn’t even need to rent that flame thrower I was vowing to do. It’s been decades since I’ve had a mouse in the house and when I went to the store to buy me some traps I could only marvel at the new invention d-CON had come up with. Bait it from the bottom, turn the dial and in theory the mouse goes in the side door, it slams shut behind him and you never have to see the little squatter again.

A few hours after setting it, I heard a clicking sound come from the trap. Sure enough the red mark had moved indicating that a mouse was shut inside. But worry wart that I am I got to wondering if maybe a vibration could have caused the trap to spring and it was mouseless inside. I was wishing there’d been a window where I could see the little varmint mouthing the words, “Help me!” So I got out my postal scale and weighed a trap I hadn’t set yet, then I weighed the other. Sure enough it registered just under an ounce difference. But wait! That was on the heavy side for a mouse according to the internet. Oh, my God, I’d probably killed an expectant mother and broke up a family just before the holidays! In case I was right, I set the second trap where the first one had been thinking if there a daddy widower mouse was wandering around I’d see to it that they got buried together in the same batch of trash. It’s the least I could do.

When I was growing up my folks had a summer cottage and it wasn’t unusual to find mice when we cleaning it out in the spring. My first memory of seeing a mother mouse with a litter of nursing babies was a teachable moment for my mom. The nest we’d found was in a dresser drawer and the panic-stricken mother mouse was so devoted to her family that she didn’t even try to run away when she saw three pairs of eyes starring down at her. My mother, though, didn’t have the heart to kill them. No, she told us kids to take that drawer out to the woods and find a safe place to transfer that nest. “All baby creatures deserve a chance to grow up,” she said. Over the years there were other nests with babies that got transferred to the woods and there were many more adult mice who died by d-CON. But of all the memories of have of my mother, one of my favorites is of her chasing mice around with her trusty, mouse killing broom.

When Don and I first met he had a cracker box of a house that was so “porous” there were tons of places mice could walk right in and hang up their Home-Sweet-Home signs. He was brought up on a farm and barn mice, to him, were no big deal. I’d tell him, “Don, you need to get some d-CON. You’ve got mice in your house” and he’d say, “They don’t eat much.” This went on for a few weeks until one day when he was lying on the floor reading the newspaper and he finally decided it was time to declare war on the mice. Two of them chasing each other had run right up his pant leg! His cat, seeing them go up was determined they weren’t coming back out the same way they’d gone in. It was off to the hardware store within minutes of stripping off his pants and Don set up a trap line that would have made Grizzly Adams proud.

Another memory my mouse-in-the-house triggered is one of an old bachelor Don knew from work. He lived on a farm that he’d inherited from his folks and he was a postcard collector. At the time I was trying to build a set of woman’s suffrage cards and had been at it for several years. I had just one card left to complete the series and Don’s work friend claimed to have several of them. He wouldn’t sell one, he said, but he’d let us come look at his 1909 Dunston Wellers.

This guy turned out to be a hoarder---but a hoarder with a purpose to his madness. Every room in that old Victorian farm house was filled with filing cabinet after filing cabinet full of postcards. In many places you had to turn sideways to pass through but sure enough, he had a whole drawer full of the exact, elusive card  I needed and lusted after. At the time they were valued at upwards of $100.00, but even the offer of $200.00 wouldn’t get that guy to sell us one. After the haggling ended unsuccessfully he invited us into the kitchen for coffee. Oh, crap! And I’m not cursing; it’s a statement about what we saw. There was mouse droppings every where and it was thick from lord knows how many months/years of build up. Mice were running back and forth on the counter top and when the guy saw me watching the mice he said, “Oh, don’t mind them,” and he pointed to a white sheet of 8” x 10” paper, adding, “as long as they leave that place for me to eat on, they can have the rest.”

I woke up this morning with a start. I’d been dreaming about a mouse that had moved a baby Jesus out of a manager in nativity set and was giving birth in it with a bunch of plastic animals watching. The first thing I did when I was fully awake was check the second trap that I’d set last night and I was ever so grateful to find it empty. ©