Merry Christmas from the Geiger house. 🎄🎄🎄 December 2025
Greetings to all relatives, neighbors and friends. To all a Merry Christmas and a better year to come!
Sad, sad news, break out the black arm bands: My favorite coffee shop is closing😞. It has been a wonderful place to go every morning. Amanda, the owner, opened the little shop about four years ago. For 20 years, I had been going to a coffee shop 2 blocks down the street until the owner, Steve, passed away unexpectedly, and it closed. A group of us used to meet there every morning to solve the world's problems. The place was a college of knowledge. Just a bunch of guys and a couple of ladies. Not a fancy place, just coffee. When it closed, we were at a loss. Where were we going to meet? Besides the fact that Steve was a neighborhood and a close friend to many who went there. Then, as luck would have it, one of the guys found us a new home, the Tazza Café. Amanda is a great gal, and it didn't take long for her to adopt us old fuddy-duddies into her family, and our circle of old farts got a little bigger. New friends, and some younger. New people to impart our knowledge upon. Amanda and her sidekick, Jen, also introduced us to new “foods”, vegan, (yuck), but most of it was pretty good. But, I don't think many of us will give up our normal diet anytime soon. Long story short, we are now searching for a new hangout, but the Tazza will be hard to beat.
I've been completely retired for a year now. This is going to sound sad, but my day consists of getting up, going to the coffee shop, then home to wait for nap time. After that, the big decision is what to do for supper: stay home or go out. Going out to eat seems to be our entertainment. Once that is completed, we spend the evening in front of the boob tube. We should be going to places or seeing the world we were too busy to see when we had jobs. Oh sure, we could spend our winters in Florida, but what we would do there would probably be the same thing we do here, so what's the point? Maybe I just need a hobby. Or, I could write a book, "The Life and Times of Alan Geiger," or a cookbook, with recipes on Geiger's Goop, Slumgullion, Roundup Bean Pot, and “Six Mistakes When Barbecuing Chicken.” Cindy could probably write a novel about the many different things that I've broken or screwed up in the last 54 years. She could write one on how to spoil um-teen little dogs. You'd think by now I'd learn from my mistakes, but apparently not. I'm not even good at hiding them. And I know Cindy has a list of things I should do, or should have done, but I've put them off for so long now, I don't see any reason to start now. She also has a list of things I'm not allowed to do, one of which is washing the dishes; apparently, I don't do that right. We've never had a dishwasher, good thing, or I'd really screw it up too.
I can't believe it, but I managed to get through this whole year without doing anything stupid. I might have even managed to get something done, with help of course. Our back patio was overgrown with grass and weeds. I wouldn't have been surprised to find a forest animal living back there. If you don't know, we don't have a backyard. What we have is a courtyard, 30' by 40', with a 6-foot-high brick wall around it. (our patio). It had been a pretty nice place to hang out, but I neglected it for 2 years, and then nature took over. Some weeds were 5 feet tall. With the help of grandson Chase, we (he mostly) got it back looking good. I also made a new, bigger fire pit, one that you can cook over. I really didn't build anything. I just bought the rectangle thing from the store and put some bricks around it, no talent required. Also, Cindy now has all her flowers planted again. It’s nice, gives the place some color. She cheated this year and bought artificial ones, no watering or waiting for them to bloom, cheaper too (I think). Another accomplishment, again thanks to Chase, we now have electricity in our garage. For the last 20 years, my solution was just to run an extension cord out there. The next step is to put up some lighting, then I'll be able to polish the Corvette after dark, ha ha.
"The pride of home ownership." We had our furnace guy do his annual inspection, and guess what, no more fixing it. We had to buy a new furnace. The old one has been there since 1987. Lordy, why do home repairs have to cost so much? Plus, we had to get a new water heater and a new air conditioner. More big expenses are on the horizon. My golden years are turning to pewter. But we will still have each other, right?
On a good note, we do have a new sort of slave. He can help me do some of the stuff I have neglected to do, or was too lazy, and procrastinated on for too long. Our grandson Justin moved in with us. Justin is 26, and he's been wanting to live with grandpa for a long time, plus he just couldn't find a job in Monroeville. So…he is here, to help, especially with the heavy lifting. Justin, like Chase, thinks things should be done the right way. Me, I'm kinda the shade tree mechanic approach, if it works it is fixed. Besides now the doctors have told me not to do anything strenuous, or lift anything heavy. My back is all screwed up, and it seems I'm in for a new heart valve come summer. So…it is good Justin is here, he is also good at doing laundry and helping Brian who is still in his mancave. Brian is a walking encyclopedia about movies and all the actors. He could be a good movie critic.
I wonder what the next year will have in store for us. Till then, Merry Christmas from all of us.
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