Oops. I just sent the November Banner with October in the subject line.
The refund check for the money we paid Comcast by mistake came. At last we are done with them!
Or we would be if I could catch all the people and mailing lists that have our old addresses. The e-mail accounts will stay active as long as they get mail.
Nobody ever gets off a spammer's list; even if the "stop sending me mail" button honestly works, the next mailing list the spammer buys will put it right back on. Spammers must make most of their money by selling each other obsolete mailing lists.
Dave cleaned off the ground rod we pulled up, and found that it is labeled "UL approved", and it's copper clad.
Now to cut up the rest of the chicken. Since I was delayed a day, I'm going to make chicken ala king instead of chicken salad.
It was delicious, and I also baked a loaf of bread — it didn't come out of the oven until time for my bedtime snack, so I zapped potatoes to have with the chicken.
Another busy day today: Moore came and got the lawn mower, and the board for repairing the shelf (and three other packages) will be delivered.
I used most of the calcium when I packed my pillbox, so Dave sent an order to deliver a bottle every five weeks. I'm washing the black clothes I forgot last Monday, and expect to get at a mending job that I started over a week ago.
And I've put away the clothes that were on the rack.
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While I was napping, Dave made a new shelf for the cupboard, using a newly-purchased blade in his sabre saw. I have put the pitchers and glasses back.
An amazing amount of space is left over — three of the pitchers are on the Goodwill shelf in the garage, and I intend to wash the dust off two mason-jar mugs and take them to Goodwill on Saturday. Neither of us has any clue as to how we acquired them. Unlike most mason-jar mugs, the threads around the mouth are functional — one can screw a lid onto them.
When I was almost done with the mending job, I reflected that the fabric was easy to handle because I had starched it to who-tied-it, then wandered off to look up "who tied it" in World Wide Words (it isn't there) and never got back.
Checked my supplies — between frozen food and canned goods, we could stand off a siege without even changing our habits, except for milk and produce. And at the moment, we have a week's worth of those.
I finished the mending job and my plissé mask this morning.
I intend to ride to Goodwill tomorrow, so I wrapped two beer glasses in newspaper and put them in my insulated pannier. They block my access to the food bars, but no way I'd get hungry on a five-mile ride, and the bag of bags I plug the pannier with keeps things from rattling around.
One load of wash today, probably because I forgot a quarter load of blacks last Monday, and washed again on Thursday.
Dave is doing a move-everything dust-everything cleaning of the living room, and washed the lamp stand and the "doughbox" end table with furniture polish.
This led to the discovery that I keep the sheets for the futon in the doughbox. If you come to stay the night, remind me of that. I think the sheets for the loveseat were laid on the bed and folded up inside it.
Dave commented that the Ethan Allen furniture we bought in New York has held up very well, which makes me wonder what we did with the two television stands in New York. (One is the above-mentioned lamp stand, and the other is a tower-and-monitor stand for JOY98.) I vaguely remember buying a second television stand for the microwave, but there was no space for any furniture in that kitchen; it was only a narrow passage between two walls covered with stove, sink, broom cupboard, etc. And I'm not at all sure that we *had* a microwave.
Perhaps we (gasp) put a television on one of them.
I put the Youth Hostel sheet sack with the twin sheets, after re-folding it to fit into the doughbox. That loosens up the linen closet, and it's conceivable that I would use it for a guest on the floor. (Take it home with you; I'll never use it again.)
I had a good ride on Saturday, going clockwise around Center Lake. It took just under two and a half hours, and I wasn't tired when I got back. But I was very late for my nap, so Dave made his own supper. I did the whole ride on my big ring (which meant walking more of McElroy Hill than usual) because it's a bit hard to shift back onto the big ring, and I'd rather get off to walk than get off to fiddle with my derailleur. I think that McElroy was the only place where I had to walk; I had some luck with stop lights. (If I have to come to a foot-on-the-ground stop just before a high-crowned road, I have to walk to the other side because it isn't safe for me to strain hard enough to start on a steep upslope.)
Resupply time: Dave is picking up the Martin's order tomorrow, and Linda is coming on Friday.
Dave will have to meet her, because I'm going to be in Dr. Darr's office at eleven. My appointment is at ten, but I doubt that I'll get back in time to meet Linda.
I'm not at all sure what I did with today, except for making tooth powder and helping to put the groceries away.
I wasn't lost in a book.
I did warm up the pre-cooked pork ribs Dave bought, on a griddle in the oven, with a small shallot and three very small zapped potatoes. Ten minutes in the oven at 400° is just right for a shallot. Dave said it didn't taste at all like onion. I'm glad that I have several more.
I wanted frozen corn, and selected a huge bag that will last us for months. When we unpacked the groceries, there were *two* bags. I can't be sure my finger didn't twitch when I was ordering them, which makes me nostalgic for just picking up what I want, reading the back of the package, and dropping it into the cart.
And this morning, we got a call from Martin's saying we hadn't picked up our order. Seems somebody forgot to take our name off the basket, and somebody else put something in it. I do appreciate a store that admits to mistakes!
When I could shop there in person, the checkers wouldn't ring up eggs without opening the box to make sure none were broken.
But you don't want to pick-up order anything that leaks if not kept upright. I doubt that any store could manage that, particularly since a milk carton doesn't look as though it would leak.
It's time for lunch, but I just finished breakfast. I looked at the ceiling clock this morning and said "This time yesterday we were both in doctor's offices."
Dave to check up on his heart, me because it had been six months since Dr. Darr looked at me. I was also due for my annual session with Stephanie: Count backward, can you remember this address after I ask a bunch of other questions; do you have loose rugs in the house, etc. And I had some blood drawn on my way out.
I asked for another flu shot, since the first one was in September and the flu season hasn't started yet. The news suggests that it will be April before I need it, but folks will stop huddling indoors when the weather gets warm, and the "It's all a fake" crowd should have caught and recovered from the flu by then, each of which will help limit the number who can spread it to me.
Dave still needs stents, but it's still "not yet". I hope he can keep "not yet"ing until something comes of the research into reverting stem cells.
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I noticed today that there is still parsley in the herb bed, so I went out and ate a sprig. Curly parsley, but we also have flat-leaf. I let it go to seed one year, and haven't had to plant any since.
It was so cloudy that it felt like late evening all day.
I woke up at half-past six; before seven, I realized that I was up for the day and got out of bed.
Perhaps if I make a habit of shutting down the computer at eleven even when in the middle of something, I can make a habit of waking up before lunch time.
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It took me only ten minutes to walk home from church today. That's primarily because when I was leaving for church, I thought that I should go back for a scarf and a jacket — and I didn't.
I was up until midnight yesterday — Al didn't nag me for his eleven-o'clock feeding until eleven forty.
I baked Banquet fried chicken for supper. I made some potatoes duchesse, then stirred a bunch of parmesan cheese into it. I'm also baking two small potatoes in case I messed up the duchesse, a piece of carrot, and a piece of sweet potato. There's canned creamed corn left over from yesterday, and I'm going to put two shallots onto the griddle ten minutes before it's due out of the oven.
Lovely warm day. It was a bit nippy this morning when I rode to Our Father's House to drop off some stuff that doesn't fit us, then went to the court house to work out on the steps, but when I took the garbage out this evening, I didn't even put on a hat. Helps that there wasn't a breath of wind.
Dave reports that there is little sign of the bonfire, not even bones from the squirrel he cremated.
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I forgot to serve the creamed corn, which is just as well — all the dishes were very carby, including the chicken. Everything was delicious.
I'm frying left-over baked potato for breakfast. I plan to stir in left-over shallot and an egg after it browns.
While riding on Main Street yesterday, I noticed streaks of molasses and thought "Uh-oh! The street department knows something!" Sure enough, the lawn is white this morning. The snow isn't thick enough to hide the grass, but it's still coming down.
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I thought our grocery expenses doubled when we went to curbside, but Dave made Quicken show me a report today, and we have actually spent less in 2020 than in 2019 — and we aren't going to spend much more before New Year.
I suppose I thought we were spending more because we shop less often — I used to get one gallon of milk per trip, now I always order two, and we don't order again until we are nearly out of milk and eggs.
Then he called up a monthly report, and that had no pattern at all, save that unusually-short bars tended to be between unusually-long bars.
While I was preparing stuffed peppers this morning, I cut up all but two of the jalapeños and froze them. Then I learned that calendula cream instantly stops stinging in the newly-found defects in the skin on my hands. I had known that there was an irritated spot on my left index finger, but the jalapeños found more.
The anaheim pepper is hotter than I expected it to be when I cut off half to put into the stuffing. So I put half of the chopped pepper into the sauce. The sauce is one can of petite diced tomatoes, anaheim pepper, over half of a stalk of celery, and four carrot slices. It all fit nicely into my second-smallest skillet.
The snow still isn't deep enough to hide the grass, but it's sticking.
Breakfast this morning was sausage and fried patties of left-over potatoes duchesse mixed with some canned cream corn and three jumbo eggs. Had to add a third egg because I put in too much potato and corn. I'll season up a corn-and-potato cake for my lunch.
I got an e-mail on Tuesday asking me to pray for the family of a brother of a friend of a member of the church. Then I checked Ink Free and News Now, and learned that the schools were on lockdown because the murderer was still running around loose. (She was caught pretty soon, and today's paper says the schools were locked down "briefly".)
I wonder how many churches were praying? I presume that the family's own church was, and the friend of our church member might not go to the same church as her brother.
Last I heard, the mother was treated and released, the father is in Fort Wayne but expected to live, and the son is dead.
I can't imagine lying in a hospital with your son on a autopsy slab.
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My lunch cake turned out to be a soufflé. I didn't know one can make a soufflé on a stovetop.
Dave read in the on-line Albany (New York) Times Union that there is good news and bad news for ski resorts.
All the slopes have a thick coat of beautiful powder snow — and so do all the roads leading to the ski resorts.
Yesterday, I got serious about finding the scraps from a dress I want to revise. It didn't take long to find them, but now I'm committed to cleaning *all* my fabric shelves.
The first shelf I cleared has a lot more left-over space than it did before I took everything off and put it back. I hope that that trend continues, but none of the other shelves are as untidy as that one was.
Without even taking the stack apart, I see three pieces that would make excellent everyday pants. Alas, I was very slow at sewing before I started sleeping twelve hours a day. It would take me a year to make jeans. Somewhere in Kosciusko County there is a skilled housewife who would be delighted to earn money without neglecting the children, and I have plenty of money, but there isn't a way in the world we could find each other.
I finally found the clothespin bag. It would appear that when I hung up my hat last washday, I hung the clothespin bag on the same hook.
There are other deposits of clothespins, but I got worried when I remembered the missing bag after I put a blanket in the washing machine. And then, for some reason, I looked on the coat rack.
I left the bag in the house when I took the blanket out: I had realized that it is easier to drape the blanket over the line than to fold it in half and put a pin every three inches. And letting the line make the crease prevents the surprise line of lint in the fold.
This blanket is one of three ragged synthetic blankets that I use instead of a mattress pad. A king-size mattress pad won't fit into the washing machine, and it's silly to send bedding out to be cleaned. Not to mention stinky, if it's dry-cleaned.
It's quite pleasant out, but overcast skies aren't conducive to riding around in circles just to be outside. I'll try to do an extra staircase tomorrow.
Maybe I'll walk to the edge of the lawn this afternoon.
Meanwhile, I'm sorting scraps to make neckbands and pockets for two jersey dresses. I just might need a dress before spring.
Nineteen minutes to walk home from church today — almost twice as long as last Sunday.
Everything went into one load today. While waiting for the washing machine, I read a few Usenet posts and the screen started to winkle. Then I realized that I'm having a visual migraine — it's been so long since I had one that I didn't recognize it.
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Some excitement at half-past four. When I turn the oven on, I always hang around until I hear "foomph!" or feel heat coming from the vents, but today I went on about my business, and when I came back to put the fried chicken in, the oven was stone cold.
Re-lighting the pilot involves taking the stove apart, but we got the job done in time to pre-heat the oven for a frozen pizza. Not a very good pizza; I don't want to buy any more of Jack's Mexican Style.
I put the chicken back into the freezer and put the greased potatoes into a dish in the fridge.
In the evening, the results of my blood tests came in. She said I get a gold star to put on my fridge.
It's a pity that I didn't realize yesterday that today would have been a good day to hang out dish towels and cleaning rags. By the time I thought of it this morning, I'd have been hanging out at time to bring them in.
The Martin's order took less time than usual to put away. Perhaps two weeks is shorter than the usual interval. [I looked it up on Quicken later: a typical interval is twenty days.]
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Our Banquet turned out to be a feast!
In case it's not a national brand, Banquet is a brand of very cheap frozen meals. I had bought Banquet frozen fried chicken because it was all Martin's had on their Web site. (Next time, I'll ask Linda to buy me a box of Aldi's own-brand fried chicken.)
After we didn't much like the first meal off it (good, but mostly breading), I decided to bake all that was left just to get the box out of the freezer, and have left-over fried chicken for snacks and lunches. After yesterday's sudden change of menu, I baked the chicken today, together with three small potatoes I had rubbed with chicken fat. I also baked a mini-griddle of carrot slices and chopped celery greased with corn oil for half an hour, with shallots and the crumbs that fell off the chicken added for the last fifteen minutes. And I warmed up a can of peas and some left-over mushroom gravy.
I ran out of covers for iron-skillet handles and scraped the vegetables onto the chicken griddle.
I ordered a bag of apples today because the previous bag had started to spoil. With fresh apples in the crisper drawer, I thought it time to start using up the old ones, so I cut up enough to fill a six-inch very buttered skillet that I had lined with thin ginger slices, emptied the cinnamon-sugar container over it, sprinkled it with the brown sugar that had been on the table for a few weeks — less than half of a half-pint jar — put several slices of butter on top, and baked it.
And after supper, we opened a pint of Ben and Jerry's vanilla ice cream.
Drool.
I rode my flatfoot to the entrance to look at the new right-turn lane from Argonne onto Winona. Some of the tarp over the new concrete had blown away, and I was tempted to try to put it back, but decided to eschew ignorant meddling.
The new lane looks as though it will improve traffic flow. I wonder why it meets Winona at a right angle, instead of blending like other right-turn lanes.
I got tired of pedalling before I got home, and meditated on the difference between a road bike and a "comfort" bike. Part of it is that one can't shift position, but that shouldn't matter much on such a short ride. Mostly, I think, that the position one is restricted to doesn't allow the big muscles at the hip to help the small muscles at the knee.
We pattied the hamburger this morning. This time, we wrote the date on the bags. But I wrote some and Dave wrote the rest, so it isn't obvious that they are all the same batch. Fourteen patties, each in its own square snack bag, we had supper and breakfast out of the package before beginning to patty, and there were two slightly-undersized patties left over.
The method, with real-life confusions left out: Dave weighs a quarter pound, forms it into a ball, drops it into a bag, and gives it a squish. I re-open the zipper at a corner, roll the meat out to the edges with the pizza roller (a wooden brayer), smooth it with the bacon press (a rectangular flat iron), and re-seal the corner. Makes a nice vacuum pack.
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Just before nap time, I scored eleven at Hexavirus. I think that that is a new high.
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While reading the comics, I sang "Deck us all with Boston Charlie" all the way through — and it *hurt*. Shows that I haven't sung in church for nearly a year.
This Sunday there are no services. I should climb all the staircases and sing a hymn at the top of each one.
I washed the enamel roaster; none of our iron griddles is big enough to bake the pork ribs on.
I opened the box of truffles today, but we haven't eaten any of them yet.
I can't say the same for the turtles Steve and Martha left on the porch — they are almost half gone. (Turtles are chocolate poured over caramel that's poured over pecans.)
They also left a cheese ball and a letterpress Christmas card.
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I clipped a recipe for sugar cookies out of today's paper. I don't think I've either held or attended a cookie party since the early sixties.
I had an Easter-cookie party once — at least I remember making Easter cookies. Perhaps I could organize a cookie party in the spring.
CenturyLink is down again. I'm beginning to think that downloading mail is a service they offer only in the evenings. Tomorrow is a work day; perhaps it will clear up then.
The ribs came out perfect. I pre-heated the oven to 400°, put the roaster in, reduced the heat to 250°, took the lid off after two hours, and baked another half hour. Dave put sauce on them when I took the lid off. And I dropped in a shallot, since those don't take as long as potatoes, carrots, and celery. I also baked a couple of apples for the full time; they were sauce long before I took the lid off, but didn't overcook.
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We cleaned out the instruction-manual drawer and threw away instructions for things that are no longer around, and now the drawer closes.
Dave says the coffee grinder we found instructions for is still around. When we remember where, I'll put the instructions in it and take it to Goodwill.
Which reminds me: you kids should not buy anything without first asking Aunt Joy to look into the backs of the cupboards. I found a meat grinder while I was hunting for a loaf pan the other day.
And we've got pitchers coming out our ears.
I woke up from my nap to find a chicken in the oven.
So I cut up a couple of potatoes, tossed them in oil in a six-inch skillet, and put them in too.
We slept until ten o'clock this morning. I don't think I'm going to get any lunch.
Our appointment tomorrow is at seven. I don't think I'll do much of the handwork I intend to sort out and put into the car today, or read any of the books.
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So I put down the back seat and built myself a bed in the trunk, using a wool pad that was intended for the back of the rocking chair, but always tore loose, a bed I made for Erica when she could no longer jump up on the furniture, and lots and lots of pillows. I might want to read or sew lying down, and that requires a thick pillow under each elbow.
I was going to put in the blankets I take off the bed when Dave's new fleece throw arrives, but it won't get here until tomorrow, so I'll have to get something out of the blanket box.
There are already a couple of shawls in the car.
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Since I plan to try to nap, I decided to carry a purse instead of keeping everything in my pockets. The purse got thoroughly scrambled the last time I carried it, so I put it on the bed and started sorting it out. Dave walked by and said "You're packing a bag?"
I didn't tell him I hadn't even started on the bag. I'm planning to take the tote I keep my to-darn pile in, after removing things that require thought or special thread. There are two niqabs and a worn-out pair of tights to be picked apart for their parts — the added pockets, in the case of the tights — which will be a good no-thought chore.
I remember cataract surgery as not taking very long, but I was zonked most of the time. I was still legally-zonked when released; Dave was required to witness my signatures. Which is, I presume, why they want me to stand by in the parking lot.
His doctor has decided that as long as he's in there, he might as well correct his glaucoma, so he'll probably be in the operating room longer than I was.
It took only an hour, and we were home before we usually get up. On the way home, Dave noticed that the new right-turn lane at the entrance to the village is going to be a very sharp turn.
I'm going to try to hold out until noon before taking a nap. Finally got Dave down for his "rest your eye by napping" at half past ten.
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When Dave woke up, his eye was pressed into his pillow, and when he opened it he couldn't see anything, but when he called the doctor's office, the nurse told him that this was perfectly normal, and the "blob of Vaseline on my eye" effect wore off pretty soon. His description sounded exactly like what I had after mine, except that mine lasted all day — maybe. It bugged me so much that I kept that eye shut, and was surprised in the evening when I could see out of it.
I did hold out until noon, and woke when Dave did, about an hour later.
"What'cha doing New Years, New Years Eve?" Dave is at Grossnickle's for his follow-up exam. I put my foot down and said "a one-eyed man is *not* going to drive!", but he said "I can see better than I've seen in months", and went alone.
That foot is going to be a little more resistant to prying next Thursday, after he's had the other eye done and has to do without glasses for a month.
He got home before I closed this file — the doctor says everything is good.
And he only has to do without new glasses for two weeks. Pity the guy we bought our current glasses from retired, but Optical One gives good service, and there's something called "The Spectacle Shop" next door to The Pill Box.
Cool! The rain predicted for next Wednesday has been postponed until Thursday.