Part 42 White powder and black oil


I awake to an overcast sky, and stay home today. Television proclaims sad news – a huge oil spill has occurred off the Louisiana coast, and massive environmental damage is projected. The implications for the state’s lucrative seafood business are grand. And my Florida vacation this summer may be in jeopardy.

Our family has planned a trip to the white powdered Gulf coast of northern Florida, one of my favorite spots. I am already anticipating the trip, as May will be here tomorrow, which means summer, my favorite time, is almost here. I will still have to hold on until July for the vacation. But with a huge oil mass hovering in the Gulf, there are worries about what the beaches will look like in the very near future. The prospect of gobs of gooey, inky oil splotches all over that pristine area horrifies me. I long to rush there now, before the landscape is ruined for what I hear could be years. But some of us are still working, some are still in school, and some of us are still not healed yet, so the trip will wait.

Brooke is up crying at night, afraid of the geckos she sees outside crawling on the window above her bathtub. Bree has all “excellent” marks on her school progress report. The ups and downs of daily life go on. We go buy a new television the next day, since we discover we have no sound anymore on our set in the den. While out, we stop for Mexican food. Not only do I sit and watch, but I have to get up repeatedly to spit out mucous. This is miserable, and makes me want to avoid restaurants altogether. At home, we set up the new TV and watch the Astros play before checking out the Kentucky Derby. I watch a race on beautiful green grass, only to realize that it is a warm up race on another track. The actual Derby is run on a muddy turf, and I wonder how the horses maintain their footing at all. To my dismay, the sound on the new set also goes out, and I am exasperated spending time trying to find out why. At night, I sleep in bed for the first time in several days, and rest well.

Feeling refreshed the next morning, I am greeted by my family returning from church with a basket of cards and gifts for our entire family, sent by church members. I call Sony about my new set, informed that by simply turning the power strip off and on the problem is corrected. I realize I probably purchased a new set for nothing, but it is new, after all, so I simply plug the old unit into a bedroom outlet to watch in that room (the sound is fine). Sometimes there are no concrete answers for life’s dilemmas – you must simply unplug then re-plug the power strip.