Another wet December morning in Kaaawa.

And almost the end of another year.

Notice the negative spin there? Why didn’t I say, “almost the beginning of another new year”?

The latter is really the way we view the world in practice. The former is what my keyboard just produced.

“Just lay down on the couch, Mr. Lind, and tell me all about it.” No, let’s just skip past that for now.

I got this picture by resting the camera on the low wall at the front of Swanzy Beach Park. It was too dark to handhold the camera, and the wall was handy. The rain that you see reached us within minutes. The combination of rain and the failure of the glucosamine placebo to keep knee pain away combined to cut our daily walk a bit short.

Today’s rain gave us our first opportunity to deploy our new umbrellas, end-of-year gifts we finally gave ourselves. Mine is a green & white UH model. Meda’s is a black “Storm Dude,” also from the UH bookstore. Really. We carried them around yesterday, but they weren’t needed. Today was different.

The photo shows my old umbrella and its replacement. My old umbrella was broken. It would not close. If I didn’t keep it wrapped and held in place with the velcro strap, it would pop open. It had at least one broken rib, and a tear in an inconvenient spot. It was moldy, rusted. But I didn’t have to worry about it breaking, or losing it somewhere along the way. That’s happened to me before when I put an umbrella down while taking pictures and then forgot to pick it up again before walking on. But we’ve decided to enter the new year with new umbrellas. The last time we tried this it was with a pair of lovely new umbrellas from Costco. Both broke the very first day because of a little wind with the rain. Perhaps that’s why we’ve been slow to try again.

But here we go. End of year. End of old umbrella. Time for something new. We’ll see.