The Weather Warms

This was the sky yesterday morning as I prepared to go to work. It was still cold -- about 22º F (or -5.6º C) -- but you can see a thin layer of clouds beginning to drift past the moon. Those clouds built up over the next few hours until we had snow right around lunchtime.

Fortunately, as the clouds increased, it got warmer, so "Operation Guacamole" began to wind down. When I went to work I reluctantly left the heater running inside the avocado's shroud, because of the extreme chill, and all morning I had visions of the house burning down in my absence. But I came home at lunch and disconnected all the electrics, wound up the extension cord, and left the avocado covered but without supplemental heat. The snowfall was minor -- maybe half a centimeter -- and melted quickly, and it didn't freeze last night. I think we've passed the critical period. All the low temperatures in the coming week are in the 30s, though some hover right around freezing. With more snow possible, I'll leave the shroud on the tree.

Blogger Meike made an interesting observation in the comments yesterday -- that my attention to the avocado might be "a bit of an Olga replacement, caring for a tree like you did for your dog." There may indeed be some transference going on there, but I also think, as Ms. Moon said, protecting the tree simply became a challenge for me. I enjoyed trying to figure it out.

Remember the envelope of photo negatives I retrieved from my stepmother's house -- the ones labeled "Stephen's pictures"? Well, I got them scanned, and here are some of the results. That's my stepbrother, above, in the living room of the apartment where he lived before his mom married my dad. It would have been 1975 or so. I see Phoebe Snow's first album leaning up against the record cabinet, and that came out in 1974, which helps date the picture. And of course Jim is giving us "Fonz" thumbs, so we know it's from the era of "Happy Days."

Here's my stepmother's mother and grandmother, whose family nickname I cannot for the life of me figure out how to spell. It's pronounced like "yeah," the informal word for yes, but repeated twice with Ms replacing the letter Y. So "Meahmeah," or something close to that. That's my stepsister on the floor to the right.

Here's the real mystery -- my stepsister on the beach with some man who none of us can identify. Even my stepmother said she doesn't know who he is. As my stepbrother said, "It was the '70s, when rando hairy guys in Speedos could jump into any picture."

Anyway, although they are labeled "Stephen's pictures," I'm certain I didn't take that last one, and I doubt I took any of them. Maybe my stepmother just assumed they were mine because the negative format matched my camera. But they are from right around the time when I first met my step-family, and I visited the apartments in both of those first two pictures.

Remember how I pledged to do "Dry January"? Well, between running "Operation Guacamole" and having a very busy day at work, I was in sore need of a glass of red wine last night. Let's call it "Slightly Damp January."