Thanksgiving Basket

Each year my folks send us a box of fresh citrus; oranges and grapefruit, to enjoy at the beginning of the holiday season. There’s some new rule prohibiting them from sending us Florida citrus from the Hale Indian River Grove which is just around the corner from them; so this year we got Texas citrus delivered to our door.

The mailman rang the door bell, holding a huge box from Harlingen and I shared a ruby red grapefruit for his efforts. I didn’t know there was a colorful basket in the box, seeing only the individually wrapped pieces which I started to enjoy right away. Lucy wanted the box for something and “wa-la”, a bushel basket to place in the center of our dinning room table as a center piece.

We’ve been cleaning and fixing things up for Thanksgiving Day, a bunch of work which is starting to show results. Lucy scrubbed the front entry way with Clorox and a brush until it sparkles; how about that, all this time we’ve had a WHITE terrazzo entry way. I replaced the light fixture in the alcove, another “round to it” which I finally got around to doing.

I got out an emery board and took each of the light bulbs from the chandelier, a little buff job on the contact solved the mystery of the “chandelier ghost”; that tricky little guy who we never could catch twisting one light bulb at a time so that one moment the lights were all working and then the next minute two, three or even four of them magically had gone off. We’d turn them a bit and they’d work okay; that is until the ghost returned and made them go off again. I think I’ve fixed that issue; they’ve been on for an hour or so now with all of the lights working steadily.

I did spend a couple of hours trying to figure out why one of our stereo speakers wasn’t working. I checked the wired connections at the back of the speaker; I’d had to move them when we put the polymer finish on the wood flooring, they looked fine so I wanted to look at the connections back behind the stereo unit. There was a mess of wires from all the components and it was impossible to tell what went where. I decided it was time to unplug everything and start from scratch; a risky option.

I never did find a loose wire; but with everything taken apart I had a chance to clean and dust, something that needed to be done. I got lucky and everything still worked; all except that one speaker. I re-checked the connections and this time looked at the fuse, which was in working order. It was then I noticed the snap in connection for the fuse was broken so the fuse wasn’t making good contact.

The fuse holder looked like it would come off with one small Phillips head screw; however, the bracket would not come off. I probably could have figured a way to install a new fuse bracket; but it was easier to simply connect the wires and bypass the fuse completely.

The rest of the evening we listened to Harry Chapin, Vaughn Williams, Samuel Barber and Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet ( on now ) to test the sound. Surround sound with a center speaker in our den is like going to a music hall, totally awesome! I may have to review all our collection of music again to make sure they still sound as good, wow!

The San Francisco Herb order is supposed to arrive tomorrow. Rather than put it in the living room it will go into the garage until after Thanksgiving. Lucy had put up several hundred pounds of wheat, Pinto and Black Beans along with several sacks of rice. Then once the Mylar pouches had shrunk down, the oxygen having been reduced, Lucy boxed them up to be hauled upstairs. William and a couple of his buddies stopped by this evening so we tapped them into hauling it upstairs; great timing, and thanks for helping out guys!

We take the turkey from the outside freezer tomorrow so it will thaw and the rest of the kitchen duties I’ll leave to Lucy. With any luck we’ll do some locksmith work, enough to make it look like we’re serious about paying our bills; but historically the week of Thanksgiving has been brutal to the budget so I wouldn’t count on too much.

In case I forgot to mention it, Thanks, Mom and Dad, for the basket of oranges and grapefruit. We’re planning on dinner around three in the afternoon on Thursday if you decide to jump on a plane I’m sure we could figure out a way to pick you up at the airport.