New Year Chill

What a remarkable holiday new year transition! Low key and non-stressed was the flavor of the season.  Mary and I watched most of the big holiday movies, Alice came to visit for a week, the Petersons enjoyed a soup Christmas and we finished one 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle and started another.  We had a wonderful overnight gluten-free visit with the Willey clan down in Kalamazoo where among other things, they surprised Mary and I with a very moving presentation of a couple of wool sweaters, inspired by a metaphor I used in my blog entry a half a year ago and resurrected a few months later.

Good must always be balanced with some bad and tragedy struck when one of my WMCAT students, Noe Parra, was killed at the Mexican border in a car/pedestrian accident.  (Technically he was the boyfriend of one of my students. She was with him on this trip.) He had originally signed up for my class but was denied because he was a seriously good soccer player and would miss the first two months of classes because of the soccer season.  But he had been auditing the class after the soccer season ended, helping his girlfriend with a stop-motion project.  I got to know him a little and like him a lot.  I had planned to ask the powers-that-be whether we could add him back into the class in the new year. All the kids at WMCAT are shaken up through this exposure to mortality.  Life can change in an instant:
TV News Story
Newspaper Story

The story gets a little stranger for me because right before the break, MLive (The Grand Rapids Press) came in to WMCAT to do a story about the program. They photographed me working with a student.  Guess which student?  The story came out in the print edition yesterday.

http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2014/01/wmcat_developing_grand_rapids.html

To make it even stranger, the video we were working on involved a stop-motion car race between Noe and his girlfriend, Mercedes. At one point, Noe's cardboard "car" flips over and Mercedes' character goes back and pulls him out of the wreck, gives him CPR and revives him.  It is the last thing we shot before break. Two days later, the similar real life incident had quite different results.

And the of course we had the "polar vortex" experience which added two days of vacation at the end of the holiday break for Marlee.  It was cozy indoors and I was grateful for the decision to insulate the house in 2013.  We built fires in the basement fireplace and watched numerous Netflix movies.

We did experience frozen pipes, too. So we had some fear of the possibility of pipes bursting.  The hot water line in the upstairs bathroom sink was completely blocked.  I went in the basement to try and figure out how to shut off the water to those particular lines (should they burst) but found that the only way would be to shut off the water at the meter, coming into the whole house.  Then we tried to figure out why they had frozen since we just had the house insulated and eventually discovered that the pipes passed through the ceiling of an outside overhang above a door.  Mary figured this part out.  So there was a thin, plywood panel separating a five-foot stretch of water pipes from the outside elements. Sticking my head through an access panel, I discovered that the pipes had burst there once before.  I witnessed sawed off lines parallel to some newer lines.  I also discovered an electric pipe wrap connected to a cord sitting next to an empty power outlet.  I plugged it in and shortly the water was flowing again.

And of course, now that cancer seems stabilized, it's time for the iritis to kick in.  I'm back on the steroid eye drops.  I'm also thinking about booking another esophageal dilation.  I think it has been has been a year at least.  Just starting to notice some swallowing issues.

At Meijer they are gearing up for Valentines day so I know that time is rushing on.  The days are getting lighter and longer and spring will be here in no time at all.