Erica’s Blog

34 degrees.  Yupp.  That’s the temperature outside right now.  Still mondo frost all over the place.  Ahhhhh, I just LOVE living in “Sunny California”.

Hope you enjoyed Civil Rights Day yesterday.  That’s what we call it ’round our house.  Our take on it is that we think MLK shouldn’t be the only one honored b/c so many other people made valuable contributions, too.  Honoring just MLK tends to make him out to be more of a saint than he was.  So, here we call it Civil Rights Day so we can acknowledge everyone.  Hubby intended to give the Things a little lesson yesterday, teaching them the stuff about MLK that they don’t learn at school and teaching them about some other people, but he never got around to it.  Oh, well.  We celebrated Civil Rights Day by exercising our right to relax.  Not realizing that it was a holiday, I’d made a dental appointment, so I had to do that in the morning.  Later, we hung out, took the whole fam to the park, then hung out some more.  After dinner, Hubby went to go help one of the older ladies from church with some stuff around her house.  It’s pretty funny b/c she & her daughter always shanghai him — he comes over to fix one thing, and they end up having him work on three or four other things while he’s there.  He doesn’t mind — he figures he needs to use his God-given talents to help other people, not just for his career — but it’s pretty funny.

Some of you know that Poppa has been good friends with their former neighbor, The Earl.  The Earl was 92 years old, a retired lawyer and Stanford grad (we liked him despite this) who used to be the choir director at Grace Cathedral in the City for many years.  Not long after my family moved to the neighborhood, The Earl lost his wife, but he managed to stay in his rabbit warren of a house until just a couple of years ago.  Poppa used to go have “tea” (read:  happy hour) with him once a week or so, even after The Earl moved to a retirement home.  Not long ago, The Earl took a spill and broke his leg in two places.  After the surgery to repair his leg, he ended up with pneumonia and high fevers.  Sadly, it was more than his 92-year-old body could handle, and Auntie called yesterday to say that The Earl had passed away.  Please say a prayer for Poppa and The Earl’s son, daughter, and son-in-law.  The Earl was a crotchety old curmudgeon, but he will be greatly missed.