New Years’ Eves I have known….

I’ve been pensive because a week or so ago I came to the realization that it was 20 years ago this month that I called my first boss at my First Job as A Grownup, got his wife, chickened out on actually speaking to HIM, and told her that I was leaving for Hawaii in two weeks and I wasn’t going to be coming back.
And, of course, I’ve been pensive about the state of American politics. If, by ‘pensive’ you understand that I’m saying “scared shitless of”.

I have, and probably will continue, to drone on and on and on and on and on about what a shithead Dr. First Boss was and what a horrid job that was. I’ll try not to here.
I was terrified. An assload of student loan debt, no job prospects despite having been looking for several months, and, thanks to Dr. Shithead, pretty much convinced that I shouldn’t be a veterinarian.
New Year’s Eve 1996 was spent on Oahu. That may have been the year we walked down the block and joined in at a party that one of Joan & Tony’s neighbors was holding where a _very_ many things were going kaboom. Or it may have been the year that we bought a lot of things that go kaboom ourselves and annoyed the snot out of the neighbors as well as scaring the living daylights out of a very young Caitlin (here’s a photo of her firstborn, Calvin, by the way)

with sparkly spitting ground bloom flowers that went kaboom at the end. Scared the piss out of me too, the first time one went BANG when it was done spitting sparks.
Despite death, medical issues, moving, and general chaos, though, 1997 turned out to be a pretty decent year.

Let’s try another decade back.
Hm.
New Year’s 1986
I’d finished my first quarter at Evergreen and had the world ahead of me. I probably spent the evening with The Trompler Foundation burning things in Eric’s driveway and dancing around chanting ‘UBI’.
Halfway through Regan’s second term and hopeful that we were at least not going to get another four years of THAT when the next presidential election came around.
I loved being at Evergreen. The learning environment was exactly what I needed. I was excited by what I was learning (if not, precisely, the mechanics of learning it…. #readtoodamnmuchFreudforanyone’shealth) and planning for my future. A lot of things are possible when you’re 18.

New Year’s 1976?
Sheesh. Carter’s set to take the White House and I’m simply *aching* to get out of third grade. I probably tried to stay up until midnight and then was ticked the next morning when I realized I’d fallen asleep.

2006? Home. Family. Friends. A good fire, sacrificed Spam, and knowledge of the year to come. A little trepidation, a new job in the offing, two more years of Shrub, and the conviction that we could stand together and keep going. And we did, and I did.

Which, if I think about it, is an echo of where I’m at now (minus the ‘new job’ part)

Happy New Year y’all. Let’s see if we can at least achieve that.

Our hummingbird feeder had water in the ant moat which promptly froze overnight Friday night. The ice cracked the housing in which the hook is seated which meant that at any time the feeder might come crashing down out of the grape vines.
When we found this on Saturday morning we moved the feeder so it was sitting on the grill under the grape vines where it usually hangs, but that was only a temporary solution. We didn’t want the hummingbirds to get used to the feeder being there (seeing as we sometimes, y’know, actually USE the grill and would prefer not to be harassed when we have to move it), nor did we want the grill cover to become covered in hummingbird poo.

And it was a fairly urgent problem. We have Anna’s hummingbirds. Anna’s don’t migrate out of the PNW during the winter and they are, by far, the most stubborn, pig headed little feather brains I have yet to run across. If the feeder isn’t there we literally have birds hovering three inches away from the back door and in front of the kitchen window giving us the stink eye. Leave the feeder down for too long and the little idiots will dive bomb you when you go outside.

So Saturday afternoon I trotted down to our local Wild Birds Unlimited to get a new hummingbird feeder.

I walked into the store with eyes focused on the back corner where I knew the hummingbird feeders were displayed.
I was no more than about three steps into the store when I heard “Hi Peggy!”. A nickname I’ve not used in 30 plus years.

Screeching to a stop I looked around and saw a guy at the checkout counter. A nondescript dude, a little taller than me. Dressed in jeans and a jacket, some type of facial hair, maybe a hat, and probably an ear plug in his right earlobe (I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to details).
I stopped, fumbled… “Oh, hi! Um…..” I thought he looked a little like one of the Scotts (there were two or three dudes named Scott that hung in my group in high school) and I was about to say “Scott” when he chimed in with “Casey”.

Casey.
Right.
I mumbled something to him about it having been a long time, then was distracted by one of the bird groupies with whom I had a discussion about hummingbird feeders. By the time I got to the checkout he was gone.

Casey.
Casey? Maybe K.C.?

This was obviously someone I knew from junior high or high school. He can’t have been someone I knew from my summers as a camp counselor because I was going by Margaret by the time I was working at Sealth.
Saturday evening I trotted out my Bellevue Beacon (“Go Wolverines!” *GAK*) from 1986.
There were no guys named “Casey” in my graduating class from high school. I didn’t think about K.C. until later and I’ve been too busy to go back and look if there’s someone I knew with the initials “K.C.”. And I don’t think I’ll _ever_ want to have sufficient time to go back through the entire damn student body to see whether or not there was someone in one of the lower classes that I knew named “Casey” or with the initials “K.C.”

So Casey (or K.C.) from Burien Wild Birds Unlimited, if you’re out there I’d appreciate knowing who you are and how you know me.
There are some people from junior high or high school with whom I’ve lost contact that I’d like to contact again. Since I have no idea who you are I doubt you’re one of them, but either way I’d like the answer to the mystery.

Oh not much.

Just this:

just this…

The dog’s head is on your right off camera. Ignore the blue stuff, that’s our surgical scrub.

Basically I removed the weight (and nearly size) equivalent of a gallon of milk off of this dog’s abdomen and thigh this morning.

When she went outside a couple hours after surgery to have a pee she was walking funny. I don’t think she knows how to walk without that thing in her way.

God I love surgery!