Holiday Greetings from Beneath a Florida Palm Tree

With everyone’s reliance on Facebook its difficult to provide any tidbit of news that hasn’t already been posted, reposted, and commented on a thousand times already.  However, it never hurts to summarize those Facebook posts and add some levity to a few of them each holiday season.

When we were kids, we were all in such a rush to grow up but 2019, like too many other recent years, proved that we thought growing up wouldn’t happen so quickly.  Unlike 2018 with its heart attack and a brain MRI, with one exception 2019 was sanguine in the health department.  The only major issue we had to deal with was the ever-present fact that aches and pains pop up in all sorts of places we never thought before we had a place. 

For Cathy 2019 was spent with her ever-watchful eye glued on her grandson Channing who seems to be growing like a weed.  At nearly 3 years old he seems to get smarter and quicker with each passing week.  If not his body then certainly his vocabulary.  He spends about 4 nights a week with us as his mother Charlotte completes a degree program and works in a job I covet – beer manager in a restaurant.  When not in heavy Grandma Cathy mode, she is busily pumping out knitted clothing at almost warp speed. Her sights are set on retirement as everyone’s should be once they reach 40 years old.  Hers is now within a few years of arriving.

Craig’s passion for teaching SCUBA diving came to a crashing end in early August when a student refused to follow instructions underwater and blasted for the surface at an unsafe rate.  As a result, Craig wound up in the emergency room with blood drawn to test for an air embolism (an air bubble in the blood that lodges in your brain) and was sent home from the ER on a 24-hour stroke watch!  Quickly accepting that his life was worth more than some idiot student who wouldn’t follow instructions, Craig hung up his SCUBA teaching fins and now only dives recreationally. 

Like most years since we met, this one was filled with travel.  Together we returned to Cathy’s favorite island Roatan off the coast of Honduras in February for her birthday SCUBA diving trip.  In July we traveled to the Pacific coast of Costa Rica for a week of diving and were met there by Craig’s childhood friend David Hennekens.  In late October for Craig’s birthday we spent a week on Barbados where the highlight was discovering that skipping out on a traffic ticket 28 years after the fact isn’t something the authorities keep in any database. Whew.

When not traveling with Cathy this year Craig made a solo trip to the Dominican Republic in January where once again, he failed to add Double-striped Thick-knee to his West Indies bird list. April took him to Alaska to pester his grandson Garrett for a few days and to add a few more craft breweries to the list of Alaska craft breweries where he and son-in-law Ryan have quaffed a brew.  June saw a return to Alaska to take Garrett to Barrow, the northernmost town in America on the Arctic Ocean on an unsuccessful search for Polar Bears. Maybe we will find one in 2021.   

In late June there was a trip to Minnesota to pester grand daughters and count prairie birds followed by another trip in September to the land of that purple football team to hang out with granddaughters again. Meanwhile in August, Cathy escaped to South Carolina with her kids to attend a niece's wedding and reconnect with her Carolina family.

With 2020 fast approaching we already have plans for Dana, her husband, and the 3 grand daughters to escape Minnesota winter in early February and spend some time with us in the sun.  In late February, Cathy and I will spend a week on Grand Cayman island diving with one of Cathy’s colleagues and her husband.  April will find Craig in Fairbanks working on visiting more Alaska State Parks, and back in Barrow Alaska in June to count birds.  Before that trip there will be a return to Minnesota to camp “up north” with Dana, David, 3 grand daughters and 1 grandson.  Then in July we fly to Venice Italy for a 10-day cruise of the Adriatic and Aegean Seas aboard Norwegian Cruise Line.

There should be a trip or two to South Carolina to see Cathy’s family somewhere in 2020.  With luck we will be diving the Red Sea off the coast of Egypt in October, and who knows what else may pop up to fill the year.

Whether you are Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Atheist, Hindu, Buddhist, or a follower of Isadora Duncan, we hope the 2019 Holiday Season finds you happy and healthy and looking toward the future.  With luck I will be writing a similar letter a year from now and with more luck you’ll be here to read it!

We hope you enjoy these season’s greetings sent from beneath a Florida palm tree. Actually, from beneath three of them.

Cathy and Craig