In a deep and dark December

Mrs. Poolman and I are staying home this Christmas season. Both our children live here in town, so the most important family is right here.

This is Mrs. P’s year to work Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It takes a lot of the merriment out of her holiday. Unfortunately, they can’t just send those preemies and other sick babies home with their parents and tell them to bring them back on the 26^th.  I’ll take care of Christmas dinner and hand her a vodka & tonic when she walks through the door around 7:30 pm Christmas evening. It won’t make up for having to work the holidays, but it will ease the unhappiness slightly.

We did make a trek north to visit some of my family in Pittsburgh earlier in the month. My father lives there, along with my youngest sister. We picked up another sister, Maggie, along the way and my brother, Dave, and his wife drove over from Mechanicsburg for the weekend. So Dad had four of his five children there for the weekend. The missing sister had visited just the week before.

We arrived in Pittsburgh just as the day-long rain was turning to sleet and ice.

This is the front of my Dad’s townhouse. Brrrr!

My car is not used to snow.

By Pennsylvania standards, this was not even a minor inconvenience, but Mrs. P and I were reminded of how happy we are to live in coastal Georgia. I am really glad that many of the people who live in the northern states enjoy it there. Otherwise, things would sure get crowded down here.

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A wonderful day at the beach

Living here on one of Savannah’s coastal barrier islands, Mrs. Poolman and I are only about a 15-mnute drive from the beaches on Tybee Island. We have always loved taking chairs and an umbrella and just hanging out at the beach with a book and a cooler of drinks. When Mrs. P and I first met, I was living in a beach-front house in Neptune Beach (suburban Jacksonville), Florida.  Ever since then, the joke has been that someday when we are rich and famous, we’ll get to return to the lifestyle we had when we didn’t have two nickels to rub together.

For some reason, we have let about half the 2012 beach season pass us by without our presence on the sand. Sunday we decided to change that. We headed out relatively early, around 10am, because that is the only way to get a parking space. We prefer the relatively less populated, residential section of the island, as opposed to the crowded, life-guarded, close-to-the-bathrooms section frequented by most beach visitors. Our friends Matt and Dana met us there.

Mrs. P and our little piece of heaven

We had one minor crisis, our nurses, Mrs. P and Dana handled well. The mother of a family seated near us came running up yelling that her 8 year old son had been stung by a jellyfish and she didn’t know what to do. “Do I need to take him to the hospital? I don’t know what to do!” Mrs. P reached into her bag and pulled out her bottle of Jellyfish Squish. She pretty much sprayed the kid all over his body and it seemed to help. Jellyfish Squish is a locally developed product that was originally tested by a couple of the scientists where I work. It is a lidocaine solution that works fairly well.

Once mom and son were calmed down, they packed up and headed off the beach, with the young son claiming “I’m never going in the water again!”

Although the high tide shortened the depth of the beach, we weren’t overly crowded. One bikini-clad young lady lay down on her towel directly in front of us. When she stood up to talk on her cell phone, I noticed that she had blotchy globs of sunscreen on her back. I mentioned to Mrs. P that the girl needed a boyfriend to rub the sunblock into the back. Mrs. P asked if I was thinking of volunteering my services. I said “no.” As noble as the gesture might be intended, I didn’t think either the girl or Mrs. P would approve. Mrs. P agreed completely, and suggested I stop worrying about the girl’s sunblock.

“Remember, I know where you sleep!”