Gopher Gulch: Celebrating the New Year

Just one more day and 2008 will be over. We have one more night of drunken revelry to survive, and I intend to do it by remaining safe at home with a good movie, a can of cashew nuts and a bottle of sparkling juice.

There was a time when drunken revelry was right up my alley, but even then I stayed home on New Year’s Eve. New Year’s Eve is for amateur drunks. They don’t know how to handle their booze and can be downright dangerous in all sorts of ways, including driving, hitting and other unacceptable behaviors.

My guess is that the coming year will bring with it some things I know how to handle and a whole lot of others that I don’t.

One of the things I do know about is all those frozen plants. There are fuchsias and princess plants turning gray and drooping, looking as if they’re dying of the cold. Your best chance of saving any tender perennial that appears to be frozen is to leave it alone.

It’s gonna look awful for a while, but if you prune it now, you’ll encourage fresh, tender growth. The poor plant must work so hard to keep its roots alive that the added struggle of protecting new foliage may be more than it can take, causing it to drop dead on the spot.

Let it look bad for a while. There is no rule — yet — that your yard has to be perfect in January. Around the first of March, or when it seems the chance of a hard freeze is over, prune off all the dead material, clear back until you hit green. The plant will probably survive.

The tender plants that concern me most at the moment are the nasturtiums. No plant looks more pitiful when suffering from frost damage. The thing is, they’re an important part of my diet and a primary source of greens. It’s gonna be chickweed and miner’s lettuce until the nasturtiums sprout again.

And already here’s something I don’t know how to handle. Those of us who use computers and the Internet are familiar with spam. Not unidentified meaty stuff in an odd-shaped can, but uninvited email advertisements.

This week I began getting a lot of spam offering me all sorts of sensual opportunities. Ordinarily, I’d simply delete them, but these are a bit different. They appear to come from me. Some hacker has snatched my email address. They may have figured a way to get into my address book, and if so, you could get an obscene suggestion from me.

Please understand I really have nothing to do with it, nor do I know what to do about it. My technological skills consist of being able to write and push the “Send” button.

Take good care of each other as we leap from 2008 to 2009, like jumping from a boat to a dock in rough surf. Drive sober, and if you’re drinking away from home, have a designated driver.