Only one load of wash. It turns out that I can dry outside after all, but I didn't notice that until after I'd committed to not washing the king-size sheet.
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Had the laundry in, folded, and put away before nap time.
After sunset, but while it was still light, I dug up the volunteer potato. I got one very small potato and four tiny ones. I had found marble-size potatoes twice, while weeding or harvesting onions.
Then I weeded the entire winter-onion row. I didn't leave it clean, but it's much improved. I also collected three clumps of fat bulbils that had fallen over, or were on broken stems.
I don't think yesterday's rain amounted to much. We shall have to water the garden again.
Chore cascade: I went out to push the cultivator around the garden, but before I could do that, I had to fill in the hole where I'd dug the potato, and before I could do that, I had to pull a couple of bushels of weeds off the end of the compost heap where I intended to get the dirt, and by the time I'd done that, I felt that I'd done a days work.
I did push the cultivator for a few minutes before naptime. Then I found two potatoes I'd overlooked yesterday and brought them and a cucumber Dave had found into the house, washed them and put them into the fridge, and that was that.
I also found two pea-sized potatoes, which I buried in the winter-onion row.
Well, I missed that entirely.
When Duck, Down & Above announced curb service, bad weather, other appointments, and so forth kept me from taking advantage until I got my nose whacked up, then for a month and a half doctor's orders were "don't even bend over", then I had to work my way back up to being able to ride that far, then on my final trial run I fell off my bike and had to work back up again, so today everything finally worked together, I downloaded the Wednesday e-mail, and was perusing the specials trying to find something that would restore my long-faded enthusiasm when I noticed the first paragraph: You can now go inside and they are no longer doing curb service.
When I went into the kitchen to prepare supper, I looked out the window and saw Brett hand-raking the part of our lawn that he plans to seed.
David Gales spent the whole day cleaning our eavestroughs, and plans to come back tomorrow to wash the outside of the gutters in front.
Linda plans to drop off some stuff from Aldi tomorrow.
I'd say the young folks are taking care of us very well.
Dave got a checkup and a new prism, and is seeing much better.
I didn't do much today at all. I may have pulled a weed, but I'm not sure.
I dug up a seedling oregano plant and moved it to the south wall of the house. I don't want seedlings getting confused with my Italian oregano. I plan also to move the offshoot, just in case seedlings hide among it. (And the main plant is more than plenty.)
We settled on barbecue ribs from Wings to celebrate our anniversary. We are going to have sweet corn and tomatoes with it.
I should have bought two boxes of the little tomatoes; we have been going at them as though we hadn't had any since last August, and they won't last until Monday.
The smaller of the two slicing tomatoes must be cut into today; I appear to have bruised it on the way home.
I observed the courthouse market from a distance, and stopped at the teller machine on the way home. I used my pinkie fingertip to push the buttons, and poured water over it before putting my money away.
I paid for everything at the Farmers' Market with quarters. It's hard to get small bills, but Dave had collected a quart of quarters.
Kathy and Dave are cleaning our gutters.
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Wow! They washed the entire front of the house!
Dave B. promptly ordered a bottle of the cleaner they used — Dave G. said that it worked almost as well as the commercial said it would.
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My first thought was to set the table with Mom's fine china, then I reflected that delicate china doesn't go at all well with barbecue and went hunting for my Blue Denmark plates. I concluded that I'd either found someone who wanted them or I'd found a really, really good place to keep them. (Eventually, I realized that there is a stack of plates under the chopping bowl.)
But while hunting, I found some plain white ironstone restaurant plates that neither Dave nor I remember acquiring. Perhaps Linda left them behind when she moved out. Whatever, white ironstone is perfect for barbecue, and restaurant plates make it more like going out, so I washed them and put two of the good ones on the table. (Some are chipped or crazed.)
Now the corn is in the steamer and I'm waiting for Dave to get back with ribs, fries, and cole slaw.
I sliced up an apple and put it on the relish plate. Hope I remember to put the relish plate out!
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And now I'm stuffed into a stupor. That dinner would have fed three amply, and we ate most of it. Only two ribs and a little cole slaw left.
Dave remarked that the plates were diner plates. Now I remember! When those plates were in style, restaurants were for when you couldn't eat at home, so diners were where one would go.
When the lights went out, I shut down my computers, looked at a piece of cloth draped over the electric sewing machine, thought that I could finish that job by turning the handwheel, then remembered that I need a good light to guide the stitches.
Much, much later I remembered that the lights on my sewing machines run on batteries.
Dave hooked up the generator to the freezer and fridges, and watched over-the-air television. I sat under the fluorescent light that hangs over the freezer and finished _Miss Seaton, by Appointment_ by Hampton Charles. It's a pretty good book, and I hope I stumble across another in the series someday.
One of these years I'm going to have to buy a laptop. Hope it works out better than the phone I bought because the connection to the monitor on my old one is getting flaky. It's been lying in pieces on the card table for weeks because the instructions are printed in teeny-tiny blue letters. And the information I need is buried in adverspeak.
If it's even in there. Nothing promising is in the table of contents.
Al is in Dave's office chair, aggressively relaxed.
I just got back from the Boathouse, where I handed over a package delivered to 1700 Park Avenue instead of 700 Park Avenue. The receptionist was thrilled; must have been important if the whole staff knew it was missing. Could be the manager was filling in, but he looked rather young.
On the other hand, I'm forty years older than I was when I saw student nurses crossing the street and thought I must be near a Catholic grade school.
Every step of the way out, I wished I'd ridden my wheelchair bike, but I walked easily on the way back. The package must have thrown off my sense of balance, which doesn't have as much margin as it used to have.
NIPSCO is doing something in a large hole in Park Avenue not too far from the bridge. When I came back, someone was standing in the hole and all I could see was his yellow hat.
I don't think it's the gas main, but nothing else fits any better.
Now they've dug up the sidewalk in front of the hotel, where there used to be a branch leading to the piers. Or thereabouts. It isn't NIPSCO.
There's a rectangle of gravel where NIPSCO was working, and I think I saw a gravel square in the middle of a lane somewhere downtown.
Today I went to Sweet Corn Charlie and bought a hybrid melon, a slicing tomato, a pint of small tomatoes, a jalapeño, and a probably-sweet pepper that looks like a ripe poblano. Much shorter trip than I expected: I'd remembered SCC as being in the second intersprawl, and it is in the first, the first thing I see upon exiting Sprawl One.
Well, the second thing; the first, practically in Sprawl One, is Flavor Freeze. I noticed that they are open to old ladies — but not before noon. The next time I go to Sweet Corn Charlie, I may go at lunchtime and have a pizza burger.
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Today's food column: "We're getting back to our roots! Here's a hundred-year-old recipe for crock-pot apples!"
The front page: Some sort of cross-country parade went through town yesterday. The hospitality Warsaw showed them (free meals and whatnot) is "hypocritical" because it didn't extend to giving them a free pass on blocking the town's aorta.
I guess that nobody involved in the route planning knew what a sore spot U.S. 30 is around here.
I scored four ears of corn, two green poblanos, two kinds of little tomatoes, and two slicing tomatoes.
Then I took a lap around the courthouse market just for the exercise. I didn't see any booth selling masks, but I could see a T-shirt booth from Buffalo Street, so they must have lifted the ban on artisans.
The dug-up place is a bit south of the branch of the sidewalk that leads to the Hotel piers.
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"Woman I never heard of praises daughter's fashion sense" — why is this a headline in News Now? I clicked, and still don't know. She's some sort of actress, which explains why her daughter's fashion sense is important to her, but doesn't explain why News Now thought it was important to me.
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Supper was half an ear of farmer's-market corn each, and hamburgers with slices of the tomato I bought last Thursday. My slice was a tad crunchy; I left the tomatoes I bought today at room temperature even though they are redder than that one was.
The small tomatoes I bought aren't as good as they were before I chilled them, but they won't keep long warm.
Today's News Now says that if I'd just veered to the right a bit when I was leaving the teller machine yesterday, I'd have seen the Owen's sign being replaced by a Kroger sign.
The gap in the sidewalk in front of the hotel had been filled with wet concrete. I noted that the digging had extended to the water's edge, and deduced that a storm sewer had been repaired.
My teeth passed inspection, and are now very clean. I'm paying special attention to the inside of my lower front teeth when I brush. Have been for years, but I'd gotten a bit perfunctory.
The dentist had asked whether I was getting enough exercise, so while waiting for him to come back, I meditated on places I can't go, and was ruling out Pisgah Marsh — been there done that, and there are three closer boardwalks. Then I reflected that all three closer boardwalks are now off limits, and thought that enough motivation to pack a lunch to eat on the boardwalk.
Then at home I checked Google maps, and found that there is no comfortable place to cross US 30, the rest of the route isn't inspiring, I would have to use a chunk of Old 30, and an unbridged creek across the logical route would make me go around three sides of a square. But I think I'll pack a lunch next Saturday, and eat it at Tippy Park. If there are other people there, there's a good place to sit on the abutment of Chinworth Bridge.
BORRRRRRING, but I can pass by The Farm and verify that is no longer in operation.
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I stuffed the green peppers that Kathy gave me with canned corned-beef hash topped with raw sausage and baked them, and it came out so well that I did the same tonight with the poblanos that I bought at Sweet Corn Charley. They were green enough to be bitter, but pretty well buried in other stuff. I dumped a bit of left-over taco meat and a lot of V-8 in the chopped celery filling the spaces between the peppers, and covered the raw sausage with Our Family Original Salsa Medium.
While watching a Korean baseball game, Dave said "I like this a lot better than Comcast, and it costs half as much."
Today I packed a lunch to eat in Tippy Park on my way home from the farmers' market.
It was tough buying things at the market because people with shorter social distances kept getting in line in front of me.
But I got two poblanos. I'm going to stuff them with ground beef this time.
I've no idea what the "holy mole" peppers I bought are. They've got to be zingier than the "jalapeño" I bought at Sweet Corn Charley. DuckDuckGoed: "holy mole" is much milder than jalapeño, and was bred for making mole sauce. The page also says they must be ripe, and these are definitely green. I shall try mincing one into the poblano stuffing. And "mild" *is* zingier than that "jalapeño; we couldn't taste it at all.
I saw something peculiar on the Chinworth Trail. Along the right side of the trail were a few beaten paths leading into the woods, with a sign in the middle of each one. By the time I got to the last one, I was curious enough to stop and get off so that I could read the sign.
It said "no trespassing" — to people who want to go from privately-owned land to the recreationway. I wonder whether the guys on the other side of the windbreak hired somebody who got the instructions backward.
Ah, well, here's motivation to take that ride again and look closer.
There is now a picnic table and benches on the recreationway side of the Tippy, close to the Chinworth Bridge. The table looked as though it had been in that spot for a long time. I continued to the shelterhouse beside the canoe launch anyway.
I ate my entire lunch in one sitting and spent the next few miles regretting it.
Not only is The Farm still not open, even the "closed" sign is gone, so there is nothing to look for on 200N. But I can come back by Crystal Lake Road at least once. The Crystal Lake route doesn't require me to use any of Lake Street, and I haven't been on Parks-Schram in ages.
A lone seagull walked around our house, and seemed rather tame. Rabies or an escaped pet?
Today I went out to harvest bulbs from winter-onion clumps that had too many stalks. I got carried away and pulled fourteen, which was rather more than I wanted to clean. Probably a good idea, though, as the fattest bulb has green sprouts. I saw another sprout, and passed that clump by.
There was a marked tendency for pulling on one stalk to uproot the whole clump. Sometimes I saw that in time to abort the mission; when I didn't, I planted bulbils in the disturbed earth.
Dave tried to order groceries to pick up at ten o'clock tomorrow, but Martin's insisted on five o'clock today. I guess it doesn't count as shopping on Sunday when working on Sunday was the other guy's idea.
The morning news report included Friday's fatal crash on US 30 at 350 E even though there are still no details. As is usual, the passenger died and the driver survived, which is very sad: no matter what the facts are, he is going to spend the rest of his life feeling that he murdered his companion.
Oops. I'm washing the niqab that I wear when hanging out clothes. But I washed the furoshiki niqab last week, and it's opaque.
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There was a peculiar mistake in yesterday's Martin's order. The default substitution is "best comparable" — for example, instead of the Our Family whole-wheat bread flour I ordered, I got King Arthur whole-wheat bread flour, which is quite reasonable.
It wasn't reasonable to give me a similar scent of hand soap of a different brand, rather than a different scent of the same brand — but how were they to know that I was buying the *bottle*?
BUT by what stretch of the imagination did someone conclude that countertop cleaner was a reasonable substitute for thick-gel toilet-bowl cleaner?
Ah, well, we'll use it up eventually. I put one bottle under the sink and the other one on the shelf in the laundry room. Dave is sufficiently annoyed that he's thinking of ordering toilet cleaner from Amazon.
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Yum!
Poblanos are even better stuffed with ground beef. I thawed an oversized hamburger patty — Dave tried a new method (rolling them out and cutting into squares), and the first try didn't come out as uniform as his previous weigh-and-patty method — then I kneaded in an entire holy mole pepper (chopped fine), most of a winter-onion bulb (ditto), a teaspoon of Malt-O-Meal, and an eighth of a teaspoon of salt.
I broke the meat into four pieces, stuffed four half-poblanos, and covered the beef with Our Family medium salsa. I added a dab of left-over taco meat and a pinch of beef bouillon to the bed of celery, and poured V8 in until it was nearly up to the pepper rims. 350F for an hour.
For dessert, half an ear of steamed corn each, then several slices of melon.
Sigh. My new phone has been cluttering a table in the parlor for weeks because I couldn't figure out how to activate it. Finally, I realized that the instructions were not in either of the booklets labeled "instructions", they were on the "red card" — and all I had to do was to go to a Web site and follow instructions.
And just as the instructions got to "send us a text from your old phone", the old phone finished dying.
There's a phone number to call "from another phone", but I'm going to have to rest up for a while before trying. I've never in my life had a good experience doing business over the phone.
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Wonderful news!
After we dumped Comcast, they transferred one more payment from our bank account than they had coming — well two, but Dave caught the second one before it went through. The bank was able to claw back the mistaken payment, and we thought all was well, but Comcast kept hassling us for non-payment even though there was a disconnection fee right there on the bill. After a while they threatened to cut off our service if we didn't pay up! There were many, many phone calls but they just couldn't hear that we were no longer customers.
This upset Dave beyond all reason; he kept saying that it shouldn't bother him so much, but it was keeping him awake at night.
Today he thought of calling Brock, our financial advisor. Brock called Comcast, and they not only agreed to stop harassing us, they apologized!
But we're suspending our jubilation until the apology check arrives.
Next time we must remember to call in professionals *first*.
Which we totally plan to do with respect to the patio door, which has gotten very hard to open and close.
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Woke up from my nap to find a bag of yellow plastic envelopes with gray stripes, probably 3M's retroreflective stuff, on the table.
Turned out to be Dave's new neck gaiters that can be pulled up to serve as a mask. I don't think he's going to want to wear those before late November. But his sunscreening shirt looks the same, and I've seen him wear it on hot days.
Our new air compressor arrived while I was in bed, and is now in service. Dave is thinking about repairing the old one and putting it in the shop.
The instructions are intimidating; they assume that you will inflate tires and use air hammers all day, then unplug it and let the pressure out of the tank before you lock up the shop for the night.
GoComics is redoing their site again. None of the funnies were visible yesterday, and today it crashed my computer.
Time to warm up a TV dinner for supper. This has been a very busy day, and yet I did nothing. I'll chop some lettuce for a salad.
Saw Dave trying on one of his new neck gaiters. He hasn't worn it outside yet.
Dave says that Brock's technique was to keep saying "he returned your equipment, how can he be getting service?"
The clerk at the UPS store had warned Dave to keep the receipt for one full year.
I used the new air compressor to blow dirt out of the Roomba this morning.
That was after lunch. As soon as I was dressed this morning, I put some canned corned-beef hash into a little skillet over low heat and went to call the 800 number on my red card. About eleven o'clock, I had an egg steamed over corned beef hash. In addition to the usual "almost speaks English", we had a terrible connection.
On the plus side, the corned beef was brown and crisp and exactly the way I like it.
On the minus side, I *still* don't have a phone. The last call said that it would take some hours, and that I'd know the new phone was in service when the old phone quit working. You may recall that I bought a new phone because the old one doesn't work.
But I suppose that the new phone will show the correct time when it gets connected.
One thing that I don't like about the new phone is that it has an extra monitor for burning up the battery — perhaps that is why it promises six hours per charge when the old one would hang in for a week.
Way back when I was shopping for a substitute for the newly-unavailable pocket watch, I wanted the external clock. But after using a phone without one, I learned that having to open the phone to see the time is a distinct advantage: I have to take it out of my pocket *anyway*, so a flip isn't any extra effort, and when I open it, if I've received a text, the phone will tell me.
The ad for the phone didn't say it had an external monitor, but if I'd known, I'd have chosen it anyway because it was the only flip phone available. The instructions also don't mention the external monitor, or give any clue as to what turns it on and off.
The new phone is wider, thicker, and longer than the old one, but I can still get it into the phone pocket on my jersey.
I hope this one doesn't die any time soon, as the next upgrade won't fit. Why is it that when the chief virtue of something is that it doesn't occupy much space, the first "improvement" to every new model is to make it bigger?
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The paper says that Mentone is holding a make-up for the egg festival this Saturday, but I'm not whining because I can't go. The one time we did go, I was greatly disappointed because not one of the snacks on sale contained any egg.
I *would* like to attend the flea market and garage sales, but probably would not have deemed it worth the trip.
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Now *I'm* over-reacting. We got an e-mail, sent to Dave because this phone is the replacement for the replacement of the phone Dave gave me when he got a "smart" phone. The e-mail said all was done, make a call and when it goes through, send 611611 a text. If it doesn't go through, wait a few minutes, reboot, and try again.
Which is where matters stood when it was time for my nap, and I couldn't sleep.
When I got up and booted, it showed the correct time and date, which I took as a good sign, and eventually I managed to call the house phone. The interface is "intuitive" which is adverspeak for "we won't tell you how it works."
I'm not sure the text worked as intended — I couldn't read the reply — but I can send texts and make calls, and I can put spaces between words in my texts, and I've found the setting to display twenty-four hour time, so I've got all the vitals. I do need to re-enter all the phone numbers the upgrade erased, but Dave's cell is on my "contacts".
And I found a PDF file of the manual and downloaded it. It's in the same pale-blue print as the quick-start guide, but the pages are narrow enough that I can boop the magnification way up. The letters get a little fuzzy, but not *too* fuzzy.
According to the radar, the hurricane is well inland and, as near as I can tell from only an hour of images, headed north.
I hope it keeps going; deprived of the ocean's heat engine, it won't take it long to degenerate into a much-needed rainstorm.
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Latest report is that the hurricane is weakening.
We saw a lawyer this morning and will have all our stuff in a living trust soon. We also need a new will, called a "pour-over will", in case something isn't in the trust. Our new will will split our estate among our nieces and nephews instead of our siblings.
And just as I was thinking this takes the stress off our executors, he told us we need a power of attorney and a health guardian, in case we both become incompetent.
My guardian's job should be simple: If they don't think they can cure what ails me, then painkillers only and let my body follow my mind.
Rain! We had a nice little rainstorm in the afternoon, and the rain barrels are flowing over.
Must have been a small storm; I heard someone on the scanner say something about dealing with the rain, and the answer was "I don't see any rain."
I think I'll have to postpone the cultivator-push I'd planned for the garden this evening until tomorrow evening.
I got some sewing done today, and photographed it and wrote it up too.
And I stuffed one of the bell peppers that Dave bought at Sweet Corn Charlie. I cut a pepper in half lengthwise when I stuff it. I think I'll use the other one for seasoning; we've had rather a lot of stuffed pepper.
I tried to order some potatoes from Martin after putting the last three bite-size potatoes into the stuffed-pepper sauce. After about fifteen screens of TV dinners, canned stew, and frozen onion rings (and still no clue as to how many screens there were), I decided that I'd wait until after I find out whether the booth on the fairgrounds has any. If not, then I've got a good reason to ride my bike to Sweet Corn Charlie next week.
I've packed a picnic lunch to eat at Chinworth Bridge after going to the fairgrounds market tomorrow, and plan to come back by way of Crystal Lake Road.
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We got three-fourths of an inch of rain.
Mystery solved: I stopped at the first beaten path today, which had one of those big concrete blocks with a handle on top in addition to the "no trespassing" sign. The tracks made it obvious that a four-wheeled motor vehicle had been coming and going that way. Now that I was alerted to it, I could see that the other two also had twin paths.
Motor vehicles have no place on a recreationway, and I expect that the owner of the private park on the other side of the path would be even grumpier.
No potatoes. I bought four holy mole peppers, two poblanos, and three kinds of small tomatoes — one of them yellow italian. I absent-mindely bought a quart of the chocolate tomatoes instead of a pint, and I'm glad — they are delicious.
"Chocolate" tomatoes are yellow pear tomatoes with no necks and a brown blush on the stem end.
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Today's shower worked out much better than last Saturday's. I dislike the hand soap on my sink because the entire room stinks of perfume every time I use it, so last Saturday, I reflected that washing my entire body with it would use it up fast.
There were gummy spots in my hair, and I had to use liberal quantities of oil to be able to comb it at all. So I read the list of ingredients: active ingredient: benzalkonium chloride. Inactive ingredients: nothing remotely resembling detergent or soap.
I did use it to wash my comb. Suds work mainly to carry off what I scrape off with a wire-stiff toothbrush, and I took care of the loosening by soaking my comb in hot water while I was in the shower.
I stepped in a puddle when crossing the park on my way home from church, but we need a follow-up rain.
According to Weather Underground, we are not going to get it. On the bright side, tomorrow should be a good day to dry the wash.
There was something else I didn't notice at the south end of Chinworth Bridge: a sign saying that the previously-overlooked picnic tables are on posted private land. The seat I remember on the east abutment of the bridge is gone, but there is an even better one on the west side, and this one was built in, not the result of erosion, so I can expect it to persist.
I left a blop of potted meat on the footrest, but it shouldn't take long for the ants to clean it up.
I inspected the Lions shelterhouse before settling down, to see whether the box of free stuff was still there. The "free" sign had asked people to leave the box so that it could be refilled, so I thought it might be the start of a custom, but there was no trace. (I was sorta hoping to dispose of some of the stuff I can't take to Goodwill.)
I almost forgot that I had wash on the line.
Despite washing a king-size sheet, there were only two loads.
Oops! Just then Roomba finished in the hallway, so I went out to bring in the mat I'd shaken and left out to air, and noticed that I'd left four pillowcases on the line. Two king-size, two regular.
Summer is officially over, or will be next Monday — where did it go?
PC-Write is getting slower — this is the first time that I've seen the "writing" notice when I saved a document — and many have been much longer than this one.
Maybe it's time to defrag.