With Grandkids, 1/5/2020: Tubing, Movie, Icy Walk and Clean-Up

The ski day Sean and the kids had planned gave way to something closer to home. Tubing. I decided to go along. Made it three times down that icy slope and quit. Too hard on these old bones, all the bumping and stretching to keep my butt off the bottom where it would be pummeled and possibly break my tail bone!

I walked around instead while they continued for a few more runs. But I must admit, the entire endeavor felt to me pointless and painful. No real learning involved. Just a brief adrenalin rush. Maybe 30 seconds per run? “Like a roller coaster,” said Drew. Exactly. Don’t see the point of it either. Never did.

I can understand inner tubing down a nearby hill, and did so, as a kid. But commercial tubing, at $35 for three hours per person? Give me a break! No, don’t give me a break! The reason I stopped early is I noticed my body feeling weak and vulnerable after only three runs.

Then the movie. Little Women, which the three of us enjoyed (Drew got to go to another movie) except for the editing. Why do they cut back and forth in time like that? Not necessary to advance the storyline, and puts the audience through contortions just wondering which era we’re in at any point in the movie. Dumb.

(And then, I must admit, I found myself wondering which of the actors are or have been pedos. Especially wondered about the kids in the movie. Have they been trafficked to Hollywood big wigs? P,S. check out Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes. He outed Hollywood, and the squirming in the audience was palpable. And note the perp walk by Harvey Weinstein today. They scapegoat him, when there are likely hundreds just like him.)

Last night, dinner at Sue’s with kids and partner Kurt. That’s when I found out that Boston has now the worst traffic jams in the U.S. during weekdays. Kurt drove two and a half hours the other day just to go 20 miles. . .

So Kiera and I decided to change plans. Instead of trying to go into Boston four days to visit permaculture sites, we decided do that one day and hike in various wild places the other days. Plus, clean up the mess she left on her art table in Sean’s dining room area, a mess that has been hunkering and proliferating since she was five years old!

And when we do go, we’ll take the train into the city. Probably tomorrow. Not sure yet. Will visit old friend Nancy on Wednesday with Sue driving with us the hour north to Essex.

The walk we took today, on forested paths, was mostly icy. Even young, fit Kiera found it slippery. My 77-year-old bones did not like it. So we ended up walking the back roads.

Here’s a few shots in the middle of the clean-up. Amazing, how long that mess has stood there, like a gigantic pile of shit in the middle of the house, between the kitchen and the dining room. There’s no way to avoid it. The sight has made me sick for years.

And yet I remember what it documents, the detritus from her intense creativity, pouring out of her since she was a tiny child. Even a 19-year-old can look back through time quite a ways, when faced with treasured and forgotten relics of her past.

Notice, in the second shot, that the floor under the table is now cleaned up.

But what is this? Some kind of abandoned project. Intensely weird.

Tonight, out to dinner at a farm to table Mexican restaurant alone with Sue.