Woo hoo! The August banner validated on the very first try!
I'm incapable of creating a file that doesn't at least have a misplaced </p> Wha hoppin?
This afternoon, when I saw that there were just enough winter-onion bulbs in the fridge to make the taco meat I served over chopped lettuce this evening, I wondered whether there were more, went out to the garden, and brought in five, which I cleaned later.
Since the first batch had kept perfectly in the fridge, I went out after supper to get the rest, and cleaned fifteen. Which makes a total of nineteen in the fridge, because I chopped one on my taco salad. Two or three have visible sprouts, but winter onions don't draw on the bulb until after they've consumed the wrappings outside the stem, so only one of them will have to lose a layer.
This time I pried up with a trowel and succeeded in not taking all of any clump. I covered the disturbed earth with dirt from the compost heap because I plan to raise the garden another few inches, little by little. The southwest corner is already level with the railroad ties, because of filling in potato-digging holes.
We had the last ear of corn with the taco salad.
There's a squirrel on the back walk, demolishing a hickory nut. Once I found the crumbs of the shell of a hickory not on the edge of the raised herb bed — with about half of the meat still in it. I guess humans aren't the only ones who have trouble getting hickory nuts out of the shell.
We did Thursday's roomba-ing on Tuesday this week.
Also on Tuesday, I rode to the teller machine and came back by way of Sweet Corn Charlie and Flavor Freeze. This was a very short trip.
I found the visit to Flavor Freeze unsatisfactory because the windows might as well be silver-backed mirrors. It was an overcast day, the windows are on the north side, and when I sat on the bench I could see, very faintly, that the overhead lights inside were on, so I don't know what was wrong. Normally, one can see through the reflection of something black, but not here.
When visiting a stand of this sort, you are supposed to be able to see that the attendant is busy with a drive-through customer and intends to answer the bell next, and you are supposed to be able to watch him preparing your sandwich, rather than watching your reflection and wondering whether you have been forgotten.
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Our lawyer just e-mailed us a bunch of papers to read, regarding the trust and our wills. So far, I've read the shortest, my living will. Says about what I said on the twenty-seventh of August, but in detail.
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Reading the food column again: A wonderful weight-loss soup contains three quarter-cups of olive oil and three-fourths of a stick of butter. But they do dilute it with four cans of soup. Serves eight. That's a tablespoon and a half of oil and a tablespoon and a half of butter per person, plus the fat in the soups. Yummy, and good for you, but weight loss?
Three deliveries: Linda brought us stuff from Owen's and Aldi, Dave picked up a very large order from Martin, and the litter and dry food we ordered from Chewy was on the bench by the door when he left.
I was amused to note that our cat supplies were packed in crinkly brown paper. I threw it on the floor and Al promptly settled in.
I waxed wroth while putting away the Martin's order. I ordered six-inch plates and they delivered nine-inch plates. "6" looks like "9" but there *is* a difference.
Once again, no Spam, and no sandwich thins.
It's high time to pickle the cucumber crop, but pickling requires that vegetables be sliced in the evening and pickled in the morning, and I have Farmer's Market (with chicken from the Legion on the way back) tomorrow and church the next day.
I got confused and thought that tomorrow was Sunday, and peeled the garlic I plan to put in. All the other veggies can be sliced quickly, since I have a mandoline — a poor one, but it *is* quicker and more even than a knife — and I arrive at church after everyone else is in the sanctuary these days, so I can put them under salt in the morning and pickle in the evening.
I had been careful not to bruise the garlic, so it will keep for a couple of days.
Then I bethought me of the other ingredients. I have all the spices, a quart of vinegar, and just enough sugar for one batch. So I've put vinegar and sugar on my list for next week's Martin order.
Even though I don't plan to put sugar in the pickled giant garlic, and there probably won't be any more cucumbers. It's lucky that I put up a two-year supply last summer.
More luck: Dave has been putting each hamburger he patties into a square snack bag, and yesterday I became concerned because I can't go to Walmart to buy more.
So I checked the supply before logging in to see whether Martin's sells them now — and discovered that I'd bought a box of two hundred, and it was still half full.
I don't recall why I bought such a big box, but I'm glad that I did.
I stopped at the Legion hall on my way back from the farmer's market, and bought a fried-chicken dinner. We had lunch and supper off it, and there's a lump of breast meat in the lunch-meat basket in the fridge.
The Legionnaire said "That will be fifty dollars" to the man in the car ahead of me. At nine dollars a dinner, his family must be very large or very hungry.
The chicken was excellent and the baked beans were good, but the potato salad was vile. The potatoes had been chilled thoroughly before dressing was put on them, and there was so much sugar in the dressing that I couldn't taste anything else. Dave seemed to like it; he emptied the cup.
I gave Al two beans, a crumb of breading and a tiny shred of chicken. He left the beans, but I'm not sure he didn't lick the some of the sauce off. His appetite has been so poor that we were delighted that he ate the speck of chicken and the crumb of grease.
He never used to like human food, except for liverwurst, and he felt guilty about eating that, like a human eating a dog biscuit.
I don't think I tried him on chicken liver soaked in butter during the human-food-is-disgusting era. I tried putting a thin slice of liver on his diet food, but instead of spicing up the cat food, it spoiled the liver.
I might up and order another pound of frozen chicken liver. You have to thaw the entire package, but it keeps pretty well once fried and buried in butter.
And I do like rice fried in chicken-liver butter.
I was done with the vegetable slicing half an hour before the service started, and needed only to change my shirt and put on a mask and hat.
And take the pills I forgot to have for breakfast.
So I fooled around a bit, and everyone should be in the sanctuary when I arrive. Except the fellow who listens from the café.
Labor day! I celebrated by washing the clothes; Dave Roomba-ed the living room, parlor, and kitchen.
Fresh hamburgers for supper tonight, with sliced tomato.
And again today, but the patties were puny.
We got some rain in the night.
I spent the whole day clearing out the sewing room so Roomba could get in, then putting everything back again. It's a bit neater now.
It says in the paper that the Light Rail has been closed for months, and I hadn't noticed even though I pass by it every time I leave town or come back.
We went there for breakfast once, only to discover that although they opened at breakfast time, they didn't serve food before noon.
I also hadn't noticed that Marco's Pizza closed last year. They made very good pizza, but I got tired of going to fetch it long before it became unsafe to do so. It's not surprising that the video store next door didn't outlast them by much; Marco was quite, quite certain that I wanted a video with my pizza, and sometimes got annoying about it.
Al seems to have gotten his appetite back. He's been eating almost an entire quarter can of Fancy Feast whenever I give him his Cosequin for at least five days, and this morning we gave him half a serving of Sheba for breakfast and he ate all of it, and in the afternoon I gave him half of what was left, and he ate all of it and demanded the other half.
But he didn't eat it. I don't think I'll try to re-instate his six o'clock feeding just yet.
I came back from the farmers' market around the south end of the lake this morning. It was rather dull, but I did stop where Country Club crossed Eagle Creek and look at the dam and the water for a while. I saw some large fish.
I topped off my bottle in Rotary Park. The fountain goes a bit too far — the water has been softened. I suppose they save more on cleaning rust and lime off the fountain than they spend on the "filter".
Like most outdoor water fountains, the drinking stream has been aimed to miss the drain and splash onto the walkway. I wonder why they are designed that way? The bottle-filling tap is a hard, thin jet, so one has to pulse the switch to fill the bottle all the way up. Seems to me that a jet would cost more than just letting the water flow out as from a tap. But I noticed that the hole the jet comes through is very small; perhaps it is done to make trashing the fountain less easy. And it would be handy for people who want to rinse out their bottles before filling them.
I didn't try the dog fountain.
Roomba is finishing Thursday's work in the bedroom.
Cleaning out the sewing room was easier yesterday than it was last week. Partly because I left more stuff in place.
Pressed all the parts of the wallet I picked apart to remake with a better shopping-list pocket.
Perhaps someday I'll need a shopping-list pocket. Stars and Stripes reported that a promising vaccine was being tested, and they are one of the few papers that can still afford to hire journalists.
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I haven't worn Jesse Bailey's gold watch since our fiftieth anniversary. It's high time I gave someone else responsibility for winding it every month.
If it doesn't run once in a while, the gears will seize up, and the last guy who could repair mechanical watches died years ago.
I finished refurbishing my wallet yesterday, and carried it today. I pottered hither and yon around town, but don't think I racked up any miles. I did climb the west-side steps of the courthouse.
I bought two poblanos, three pears, and two kinds of small tomatoes. I made a dent in the yellow ones each time I stopped for lunch.
Simms Smoked Snack Sticks are a good way to salt tomatoes. I saw a product in a big-box store once, said "Ah, that is what Simms is imitating", and bought a box. It wasn't as good as Simms.
Lunch was two fruit-and-grain bars, one at Center Lake Park and one at Rotary Park. As I was leaving the house, I happened to see the dish of toasted almonds and put some into a snack bag — nuts *really* improve a fruit-and-grain bar.
I think I'll go out and re-fill the bag with raw almonds, so I'll remember that next time.
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Life hacks: before you bite down on a tomato, check it for weak spots that might rupture.
Yesterday, JOYXP stopped responding to the keyboard except for ctl-alt-delete and a few sporadic oddities — if I tried to type a "d" in any field, for example, the focus would jump to one of the icons on the top row. The mouse seemed to work at first, but if I tried to use it to open a shortcut, I got a dialog box about the properties of the program instead.
Dave cleaned it this morning, and it seemed to work on the test bed, but after it was moved back into the sewing room, it was back to its old tricks.
I may not be able to send the Banner this month!
All my back-ups are fresh, by good luck, but I don't have a list of the programs that I use on that machine, and may have overlooked one.
There's Agent, for Usenet; Firefox, my Web browser; Thunderbird, for e-mail; Pale Moon, for reading the comic strip Alex, which doesn't work on Firefox; GIMP, for editing photographs; Open Office, for printing out stuff.
But more than half the screen is covered with icons. So far in my recollection, only Agent and Thunderbird store data that needs to be backed up. Firefox has bookmarks, but I exported those to HTML only a few days ago (and used the back-up to read my funnies on one of Dave's computers last night).
There are a zillion files, of course, but I *think* that most of them are backups of what's on JOY98.
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Dave says that if it happens again, I should turn the computer off, unplug the keyboard, turn the computer on, wait until it's running, and plug the keyboard back in. That will force it to re-install the keyboard driver.
I suspect that the mouse should be included, since it was acting up too.
I checked that all my programs were working, then he ran disk-cleaning programs —Crap Cleaner found gigabytes of crap— and moved it back into my room.
Meanwhile, I untangled the cables and cable-tied some of them into loops in the hope of keeping them from knotting around one another again. JOY98's monitor cords are just tucked behind the monitor, though; I'm going to have to do something a little more aggressive about them.
Hah! There's a big loop like a handle on the back of the monitor, so I just tucked them back the other way.
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Little bitty patty-pan squash, sliced a quarter inch thick, is good on a pizza.
Of course a crumbled patty of sausage, two ounces of hamburger, and a generous sprinkling of bacon bits didn't hurt anything. After all the additions were on, I dusted it with shredded asiago cheese.
I cautiously put only three slices of hot pepper on the pizza, but I could have covered it — all the heat baked out and we were unable to detect the pepper.
That was the last pizza in the freezer, and Dave isn't as intolerant of carbs as he was a few months ago, so I may order more. A cracker-crust pizza isn't all that carby.
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Reading my evening funnies: "Alex" worked on Firefox. I thought it was just the "on vacation" notices that worked on Firefox.
"Safe Havens" had to be downloaded twice. Perhaps I should try Pale Moon on Comics Kingdom comics. But the situation has been improving; at first it was all comics that wouldn't show the first time, then some worked, and now more than half work.
There have been complaints in the comments columns, so the problem isn't on this end.
Whoosh! Our Martin's order was over two hundred dollars, and we forgot to order fresh hamburger. There is plenty of frozen hamburger.
Woke up this morning to hear heavy machinery. I peeked out the door and saw something going on by the bridge. By the time we got dressed, they were in front of the house & Dave said they were definitely paving. I haven't noticed any problems with the pavement, and I come and go on a bicycle!
Later on, I walked out and saw that they were unpaving: chipping off the top layer of asphalt and hauling it off in trucks. All machinery was gone by the time I looked out after putting the clothes in the washer and eating breakfast.
Someone on the radio this morning said something about McAdam, then identified him as the guy who invented asphalt. Nope, McAdam invented the McAdam road, and tar was added later. But in the paragraph above, I misused "asphalt" to mean "asphaltic concrete".
There was nothing in the council minutes about repaving Park Avenue, nor yet anything about the water-main flushing. We were due on Saturday, so I assumed that it would all be done by Monday — after finding a news release that said that another neighborhood was due on Sunday,
It was the third or fourth news release I found. They don't put the year on news releases; my only clue was that the days and dates didn't line up.
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Al is still entranced with the brown paper, which he has ironed flat.
A couple of days ago he threw up on it, near the edge where it was easy to tear the mess off and throw it out.
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Awk scrickle we forgot to order eggs!
But I just opened the last dozen, and we haven't eaten any of them yet. And we did order lots and lots of frozen breakfasts.
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We've been doing both Monday's and Tuesday's sweeping on Monday, and sometimes Wednesday's too.
Today we didn't Roomba anything.
The order was about two hundred and forty dollars, but after the things they didn't have were deducted, it was about a hundred and ninety-nine.
The icons on JOYXP's desktop got scrambled during the crash recovery because I use the monitor vertical and Dave needed it horizontal to see what he was doing. So this morning I sat down to check my mail, couldn't find Thunderbird, started sorting icons, found one that I should copy into the outlinks page of Rough Sewing and delete — there went the morning.
Well, I also stuffed a chicken with pattypan squash and looked up how long to bake it. And I dug up two winter-onion scallions to put on the relish plate.
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Al showed an undue interest in the liverwurst sandwich I was having for lunch, so I broke off a sliver of meat and balanced it on the strip of renal-support food I'd given him for breakfast. He very carefully picked it off without touching the health food and ate it off the varnished box.
When I wasn't allowed to bend over, I put a towel over my box of wool scraps and set it on the floor to feed Al on. We got used to it and I didn't put it back when normal activity was allowed. Then Dave re-arranged his television and no longer needed the box he'd been elevating something-or-the-other on, and we swapped. Having something to feed him on that can be brushed off instead of laundered is a *very* good idea!
I think that box has been around since the sixties, when it supported a power supply above a tuner or something like that. The power supply must have been inside the box; once George was taking a nap on the warm electronic equipment and her fluffy tail drooped down among the hot tubes of the power supply, and caught fire. I noticed when I was returning to the ironing board after refilling my spray bottle, so I picked up her tail and sprayed water on the fire. The heat of the fire had not yet penetrated her furry insulation, so she put this down to one of the random acts of malice humans are prone to.
Which is one of the reasons that George and Jerry rolled down the stairs together at shift-changing time after she went to live with Alice. I suspect the main reason for her misanthropy was the [no sufficiently-dirty word exists] who tried to feed her to Uncle Joe's hogs.
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While I was preparing supper, the pavers came back and began to lay down blacktop. Looks pretty good out there. They were still at it when it was too dark to see.
Pattypan squash isn't particularly-good chicken stuffing. Pity I didn't remember that we have an apple.
I also forgot to salt the chicken. We pigged out anyway. Almost all of the squash is left, but the potatoes and all but one slice of carrot are gone.
Also had half an ear of corn each. I don't think I mind that corn season is almost over.
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"Alex" has gone back to not working on Firefox.
I wish I'd taken a close-up picture of my shoulder before I started rubbing E-oil on my old scars. I'm pretty sure that I used to be able to feel where to put the oil on my clavicle repair, and now I have to turn on a light.
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We did Monday's and Tuesday's cleaning yesterday, and Wednesday and Thursday's today, so we are done for the week.
But I've got to dig more giant garlic; some of what I dug today had roots on it. I washed those bulbs and put them into the fridge. I've been saving the smallest onions to piece them out when I make sour pickles, but I may already have half a gallon.
I surprised myself by getting the rest of the row in one digging. I'm planning to pickle it today.
When preparing supper yesterday, I noticed that we were out of something, but couldn't spare time to open Martin's shopping list just then, and now I can't remember what it was.
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Pickles are in jars and at least two have plinked.
Lunch is packed and the bike is ready to go to the farmers' market tomorrow. It's time to read my funnies.
But CenturyLink is down. It was supposed to come back on line at three in the afternoon, but so far hasn't. I supposed the engineers have gone home for the day now.
I haven't read the paper either. I wanted to scan for ads for things like the Legion pork-chop carry-out.
At least our intranet still works. The connection between JOYXP and JOY98 works even when the intranet doesn't, because they connect to it through the same hub.
Which is sitting there blinking at me even though there can't be any data flowing through it.
Perhaps I can finish _A Blink of the Screen_ tonight and take it back to the library tomorrow.
Nope. Pratchett says more than once that writing short stories is harder than writing novels, and I have discovered that they are also harder to read than novels, page for page. Each story doesn't take much time, but each has to be appreciated separately. When reading a novel, one can get into the groove and go with the flow.
The washing machine crashed this morning, just as the first load was supposed to change from "fill" to "agitate". I let it soak half an hour, agitating by hand several times, then reset, which pumped out the soapy water.
Now it's drain-and-spinning the way I told it to, so I can hope that it will finish the job without further backtalk.
It's good that I can't hang clothes out today anyway.
The drought *would* break on a Monday!
A small sacrifice, we *really* needed the rain. Probably too late for a lot of plants, such as the grass at the fairgrounds market.
I put the king-size sheet back for later. The rest of the week looks like good drying days.
It's a pity I didn't plant the garlic and giant garlic yesterday. It will be a big job because I have to haul compost to fill a hole, then level out what I piled up while digging the hole.
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My "smart" washing machine doesn't do anything that mechanical timers didn't do better, but there are no search terms that turn up computer-free washing machines.
Way back when, I composed (but didn't write) stories about computer-controlled washing machines, but never considered it possible that there would be no input from the user.
Evening: one disadvantage of drying indoors is that I just now got around to folding and putting away.
There was a sparkling spiderweb between a garment and a pillowcase. Alas, I didn't think it would photograph. It was a random-looking three-dimensional filter that was probably very efficient, but it hadn't caught anything.
One of the things I washed yesterday was my gray cycling knickers. I hung them at the back of the closet; I think the black ones will hang together until I can start wearing tights.
The gray knickers aren't in much better shape than the black ones. It's a pity one can no longer have shorts made to order. There were only two women who did that, and one died and the other vanished. I can't buy washable fabric to make my own. I made a pair from dry-clean fabric once, and they were still bleeding dye after they wore into holes. And it didn't take all that long to wear them out, because dry-clean fabric is made of spun lint.
Brock called today, and we re-arranged our investments to make room for the payment on the farm. On Thursday, we have an appointment with a lawyer to take care of our trust. We'll have to see a tax man to see what to do with the I bonds.
We did Wednesday and Thursday's Roomba-ing today. It stirred things up to haul stuff from the sewing room to the bedroom, then immediately haul it all back. There are still a few things from the bedroom floor on the bed.
Dave's doctor told him that there is no way there will be a vaccine before New Year, and we still have three cakes left from last year, so I might as well announce now that I'm taking orders for fruitcakes to be left on doorsteps in December.
If I don't bake on speculation, there won't be any undeliverables. I think I can get the stuff to make cherry-cherry and apricot apple, and of course there's the traditional everything-in-sight.
No plain raisin, because muscats are illegal, as near as I can make out (else why would they be readily available north of the border, and not at all here), and other raisins just don't have the right flavor.
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We got a Martin's order today. I ordered miniature bagels and got giant bagels instead. No comment in the substitution list, so it was a picker error. Luckily, I remembered in time that bagels aren't sliced all the way through, so I took them out of the freezer, sliced them, and put them back into the bag round side next to flat side. It should be easy to get a half bagel out and break off half.
I served hamburgers with one of Kathy's tomatoes for supper, then Dave pattied two of the three pounds for the freezer, which left just enough for breakfast. He put balls of ground beef into square snack bags, then we rolled and bacon-pressed them to fit slices of bread.
We had the fresh hamburgers on "Asiago bagels", which I did order. They are somewhat irregular bagel-textured hard rolls — no hole. I presume the streaks on the surface were asiago cheese, but I couldn't taste it. Not bad, but I won't order more.
Flat buns and Spam are still not available. They were also out of yogurt, multi-grain bread, and Hungry Man bowls. But with two kinds of bagels, a surplus of Hillbilly Bread, and two kinds of home-made bread, we won't miss the multi-grain. We did get the jar of yeast, and have plenty of flour.
I'm planning to make walnut-and-raisin bread next time, and I'm thinking of making it a batter bread; I get bored quickly when kneading.
I remembered to order eggs this time! We still have three of the previous dozen.