Gimme an N..M..C.. I!! ...Hold the "N"

Somehow those 4 letters seem to have been providing me no end of aggravation. No need to recount the impact of the full version, but what about the “hold the N” part? Well, that leaves you with MCI. For one, they’re the telephone people that provide me with land line long distance service. I have no idea what it stands for, but they send me a bill every month. Then there are the folks who provide my cable, HD, and occasional internet connectivity. I pay a princely sum to Metrocast Communications Inc., for the various digital and HD packages. But, when you watch the Masters on that big LCD with sparkling colors, you don’t regret a penny (at the moment). Anyway, last Friday revealed yet another combination of those letters that affects our psyche.

We did attend the lecture at St. Mary’s College on “the Aging Mind”. We were expecting a light hearted look at losing the car keys, or forgetting the name of the person you met 3 minutes ago, finding your glasses on your head, with maybe some tips or exercises for offsetting the onset of those types of things. Of course, “plenty of time” turned into being late, and the presentation had started by the time we arrived. Opening the door to Cole Cinema revealed an almost full house, mostly populated by obvious students with laptops and note pads. Uh oh. The was a viewgraph on the screen which at first appeared to be a bowl of oatmeal, but we had never seen oatmeal with arrows labeled “hippocampus” along with others pointing out arcane names for various lumps of the oatmeal. What followed was slide after slide comparing rats to humans, clips of rats trying to find a platform in a swimming tank, together with a load of acronyms and phrases which were foreign to us. And, then, to cap it all off, there it was. Those same three letters, M, C, & I. You know what? We have Mild Cognitive Impairment. We sure were glad we went…

What else? Well, I spent most of the weekend making the beds by the gray lagoon fit for a (planned) planting of ornamental grasses, and MFO toiled to get the screened in porch fit of habitation and consumption of cocktails this evening. The boat traffic behind the digs was almost at summer season high, with all sorts of water craft scooting, planeing, plowing, plugging, tacking along. The opening of the Tiki bar might have had something to do with it. Speaking of which I just went to a local on-line newspaper article on the opening of: “the Solomons Island iconic Tiki Bar” and it claimed that people “around the globe flocked” there. My goodness. Around the globe? Wow. They also included some 103 images of the revelry, giving you 103 reasons why you don’t want to be there. Profanity laced T shirts, lurid shots, mostly containing pictures of cans of beer, my goodness. Journalistic integrity?

After spending the day mucking about in the dirt, scrubbing tile and removing spider webs, we scrubbed ourselves and took dinner at Brome Howard Inn. We enjoyed a lovely leisurely paced dinner with gracious service, good conversation, and along the way confirmed that IMHO (remember crab cakes are subjective) they still serve crab cakes that rate right at the top in the area. Consisting of lump meat, just enough filler to hold them together then finished in the broiler with a nice brown surface with succulent white crab showing through. Nice dish. We also met some a couple from Wisconsin who were staying at the Inn, and it turns out they were VanSweringens! Alert readers will remember that Garrett VanSweringen played a big part in the early days of St. Mary’s City, and was further depicted in that wonderful HBO series “Deadwood”. They greatly enjoyed their visit to Historic St. Mary's City. A very rewarding evening. Good food has it's rewards.

Did you see that our (1 and 10) local baseball team actually took the field the other day in uniforms with “Natinals” emblazoned on the front? No further comment required.

And, I can’t help but comment that sitting in your bed Monday morning with the laptop propped on your lap while the wind driven rain pelts the windows is better than going to work


maintain your resolve to DFD