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Hill Country Living
By Coulter Fussell
Well, it’s over. The longest Christmas Break in recent memory. I’m not sure if the break was technically longer than all the others but it certainly felt so. I enjoy a long holiday break as much as the next person but my bathroom scale has paid the price. Poor thing. If the holidays hadn’t ended when they did, I’m afraid my scale was going to have to make room on the little display screen for an extra digit.
I’ve made a New Year’s resolution to do a “Dry January” except having to do with chocolate. I don’t plan to never eat chocolate again or anything insane like that but, admittedly, I had developed quite the daily habit.
Chocolate entered my home like a Willy Wonka tidal wave at Halloween and never left. Instead, it multiplied like Gremlins over the course of the holidays until 90 percent of the edible food stuffs in my home was either pure chocolate or was chocolate-related.
The extent to which chocolate had infested my home was best exemplified yesterday when I stood at the kitchen counter explaining to my youngest kid how I was cutting out chocolate for a month and replacing it with healthier choices. To drive my point home, I picked up a grapefruit from the bowl on the counter and held it aloft in triumph. There was a whole Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup stuck to the grapefruit. The tell-tale orange wrapper glowed warmly in the morning sun. It was so beautiful. My kid walked off, unconvinced.
Anyway, I’ve gone six days without chocolate so far and it’s been miserable. I rate this New Year’s resolution a 0 out of 10. Would not recommend.
An experience I would rate much higher is the 2025 Crappie Drop! I went to bed around 8:30 pm on New Year’s Eve with my alarm set for 11 p.m. 2024. I got up, walked down the street to Pocket Park, almost got my hair lit on fire by a kid’s giant sparkler, watched the Crappie Drop, walked home and was asleep by 12:20 a.m. 2025. Easy, fun and efficient!
A most surprising and unexpected outcome of the Crappie Drop was seeing the EV charging stations accidentally dressed for the event! Their random blue LED track-lighting stripes that look so profoundly bizarre on any other night of the year were suddenly right in line, aesthetically, with the hundreds of giant glow necklaces that adorned the entire crowd at the New Year’s Crappie Drop.
Those charging stations were ready to rave! Vibrating bass speakers, a DJ spin table and a smoke machine suddenly appearing from one of them didn’t seem out of the question. It was sort of like walking into a party and seeing the class nerd doing a perfect keg stand.
If it weren’t for Crappie Drop, I would have never seen them in that context. Who knew they had a party mode? For the first time, I was entertained by the EV charging stations (outside of reading hundreds of comments about them on our Facebook community forum, of course!) I look forward to Crappie Drop 2026 when I will appreciate them again.
The winter storm has just arrived as I write this and I hope everyone stays warm this week! Drink some hot chocolate for me!
