Ed is watching Jurassic Park, a movie I have not seen in its entirety, only occasional scenes. I am exposed to it because, whenever it is on TV, Ed watches it. I have seen enough to know that these are people I would want to slap around if I knew them in real life. They are maudlin, self-involved, precious and, ultimately ignorant. I feel the same way about Jaws, that Ed loves because he roots for the teenagers to get eaten by the shark.

Yesterday we visited a very nice couple Ed knows through his volunteer work as an ombudsman for the elderly. The wife is also a volunteer. They have a very elaborate home (marble floors) in Punta Gorda. It was a pleasant afternoon, and, for a change, I found several other people to like.

I heard a distressing story from a friend, Sherry, a while back and here it is. Her son, Silas, 18 years old, has a girlfriend he is very fond of. They are friends with another family and Silas along with his girlfriend, joined them in the boonies, gunning their trucks through mud flats. (That is to me an incomprehensible way to spend any time at all.) The 14-year-old daughter of this family has a major crush on Silas. He explained to her in a big brotherly way, that if he was still around when she turned 17, he would be happy to see her, but right now, any dating was totally inappropriate.

This child approached Si’s girlfriend and said (approximately), you like being out here so much, you should really enjoy it, and pushed her down into the mud. When Silas, who had been deliberately distracted so that this could happen, went to help her up, some male macho friends of this family tried to stop him. Apparently her father had encouraged her to assert herself as in “Go for it.” Silas told the child she was a spoiled brat, collected his girlfriend and they left. The 14-year-old has earned his perpetual animosity. I doubt she thought things through that far. She can’t be happy about it. The father appears to be emotionally retarded.

Sherry and husband and Silas have since refused to take phone calls from this family who, up to this episode, had been pretty thick with them and had had them over for Thanksgiving. A story like that really gets to me. And, what is amazing is this family thinks “it’s no big deal” and that Silas et al are “overreacting.”

Here is an update on my friend whose boyfriend took off just before New Year’s eve, thus avoiding rent money due on the first, and abandoning her for the big holiday. He showed up several days later, said he’d like to come back, and she took him. Then he disappeared again, the motivation, apparently being, that he just wanted to prove he could get her if he wanted her. Another friend and I jumped on her 15 ways for being so gullible. How much will it take, we said, for her to get permanently pissed off?

An associate of Ed’s from the Chamber of Commerce, who is quite ill, won’t be with us much longer. We think we have found a home for her kitty, Toots, an all-black female looking a lot like Chewy. I can’t handle any more animal chores, otherwise we’d take her.

Some Christmas lights are still up and I don’t know if it is sentiment or the chore of getting lights off a 40-foot high palm tree. The entire little house next to it is all lit up still and looks like a gingerbread house.

Instead of walking this morning I got on my hands and knees and scrubbed glued-on kitty litter off the tile in all the corners of the tiled areas. How many calories do you think I burned? It took two hours. I am noble. I am looking for a really effective mat to put under the litter boxes because tracking has become a big problem.

Ed watched me with the Swiffer and opined that it really didn’t help much so I should be using something else. The Swiffer vac picks up all the cat hair off the tile. It is best for that. One still needs to sweep what it doesn’t get and then one uses the Swiffer mop, and that doesn’t get the glued on stuff (hence my floor chores). I explained to Ed that the reason there were so many floor cleaning devices on the market is that they keep coming up with new ones and not one has that magic, one-appliance-does-it-all-you-are-not-tired-afterward-it-is-a-snap-to-keep-clean-and-once-around-the-floor-is-all-you-need function. Without me to tell him, he might believe clean floors are a miracle, and no, we can't have that.

xx, Teal