10:04 AM 10/5/2022
Sad news: I'm wearing my hair in a pony tail today.
It has always been too thick and heavy to stay up in a pony tail, so I tie it at the back of my neck.
10:23 PM 10/5/2022
According to the Ink Free News, Winona Lake will stop being a roach motel in a few weeks. Instead of "you can go in, but you can't come out" it's going to be "you can come out, but you can't go in".
10:34 PM 10/5/2022
Grumbly gripe. There's a dinner at the church this Sunday, main dish provided by the missions committee, side dishes brought by the guests. On my latest trip to a grocery I bought a bag of the biggest russet potatoes I could find so I could make potato salad. (I like to peel as few potatoes as possible when making salad.)
Today Ashley wrote that the main dish is baked potatoes. Perhaps I'll buy some slaw at Aldi on Saturday.
I may have Mom's recipe for slaw in the Cookbook.
If both lanes of King's Highway are open, it must be accessible from Winona Ave. or Argonne Road. Then it would be only a little out of the way, rather than two miles out and two miles back, to get into Winona Lake.
Dave is annoyed when he passes by on a bright sunny weekday and nobody is at work on the roundabout. "Come on, we're hurting here!" We think that they are waiting for the asphalt to cool and harden.
1:25 AM 10/12/2022
Mom's slaw was not on the Web Cookbook, not in my hand-written book, nothing similar in Betty Crocker or the Joy of Cooking — but Janet had included it in the Loveless Family Cookbook.
Came out pretty good, and I intend to shred some cabbage to put into the excess dressing. Half a recipe is too much for a bag of store-bought slaw, but half the quantity of salt wasn't too much.
I did a major shopping at Aldi on Friday, and that's when I bought the slaw. I also bought an XL black bra, and lo and behold, it fit! Ten bucks is pretty cheap when it takes me three months to make one.
So after the farmers' markets on Saturday, I rode my bike to Aldi — planning to make it a twenty-mile ride by coming back by way of Meijer, but for some reason that I've now forgotten, I came straight home. I bought the remaining two black bras, and also an XXL bra that I intended to try on in the ladies room, and buy them out if it fit. It has a racer back instead of spaghetti straps, and is much more comfortable, but comes only in a rather yucky print. But after checking out, I couldn't face taking off a six-pocket jersey in a room with no place to set anything down, and went home.
The bra did fit, so on Monday, I went back and bought the other one. I also took a closer look at the "lace bralets", and realized that the design was quite sensible, but I couldn't find any XXL. There was one box that I couldn't get at, since it was at the back of a top shelf.
That makes rather a lot of Aldi receipts in the envelope in only four days — I got two receipts on Friday, because I put the water and beverages into the car before shopping for groceries.
We'll be a roach motel for a while longer — the next step in the construction of the roundabout requires concrete, and all the concrete went to Florida.
4:48 PM 10/12/2022
I meant to begin the tale of the four receipts in four days by dramatically proclaiming that a *Bailey* is wearing a *padded* bra. The pads serve to stiffen it and provide support, but feel really weird. They *are* removable, but I haven't tried that yet.
Meant to spend the morning sewing, but by the time I got the ribs ready to put into the oven at 3:45p, It was time for lunch and a nap.
I've been feeding Al wing meat, then gnawing the bone. It isn't safe for a carnivore to gnaw cooked bird bones, and I adore the crunchy and gristly bits.
I wish I knew what they do with all those delicious and crunchy wing tips.
9:53 PM 10/14/2022
I tried to use Google Maps to plan tomorrow's ride, but they have finally figured out that Winona Lake is a roach motel. The Heritage Trail is marked on the map, but they won't let me use it. Perhaps I should have tried the pedestrian view.
At any rate, a map is just too confusing on a tour that's all loops and backtracks, so I used the map to decide what order to visit my waypoints in, and put an itinerary on my shopping list.
I may not visit any of them. My cough is better today than yesterday, but that's a very low bar. And it would be rude to go into Kroger, even wearing a mask.
Al ate perhaps as much as half of his nine-O'clock snack. It's the first bite he's had all day.
I tried pulling the pads out of my bra, and it's much more comfortable.
I don't think my scrap collection includes a box for unwanted padding.
6:07 PM 10/15/2022
Al's appetite is back to normal. It probably helped that he ate his painkiller this morning.
My appetite, on the other hand — well, I'm my mother's child, and she once said something along the lines of "If I can't eat, go out to the graveyard and start digging."
I decided that it would be very rude to go to the markets in my current condition, and thought I might go out to Hough Trailhead, where I can view the party from a distance, but such a short trip is hardly worth suiting up, so I went back to bed.
But not until normal nap time. I spent the morning playing with the computer.
Dave says that my fever is gone. It was only half a degree, so I never noticed it. I did wake up sweaty this morning; perhaps that was when it broke.
My sinuses hurt when I coughed yesterday, so I wanted to take a Sudafed, but all we have are two boxes of timed-release twelve-hour pills — quite the opposite of what one needs for draining sinuses. One needs to take a dose strong enough to do the job, and then not take any more.
Dribbling it out over twelve hours is a good way to get rebound congestion — not to mention that it was less than twelve hours before bed time.
Still hacking. I'm not going to church until everyone has gone home.
Remember the outdoor faucet that required so many visits from the plumber to get right? On Friday, Dave broke it off while mowing leaves out of the fern bed.
He knocked down a decorative post, too, but he can repair that himself once he buys concrete anchors for the bolts.
The same day, I burned the potstickers black. We cut the burnt bottoms off and ate the rest.
On Saturday, I went to look at the new outdoor classroom at Grace College. Beautiful weather, but there were a lot of people on the Heritage Trail. I saw a lot of mysterious tree cutting, and will need to go back to take notes as to where, so that I can find them on the map.
The brush dump on Freedom Lane is still open to the Heritage Trail. I can't imagine that the connection is used a lot; I suspect that it was put in on the principle that there should always be more than one way out.
1:06 AM 10/28/2022
Bummer. Lying down makes me cough, and it's too close to Levothyroxin time to have another cough drop.
11:16 PM 10/28/2022
Bigger bummer. The earliest Bright Speed can get a tech out to re-connect us to the Net is November 8. And I can't send out a special edition to explain why the Banner is late.
I've also forgotten what-all I meant to say.
Dave saw freshly-poured concrete on his way back into town!
He can't find any recent news sources on his phone. The Boathouse used to have a paper-paper box Pity I didn't think of it on my way home from church.
Losing contact with the Internet somehow brought our intranet down. I can sneakernet backups to Optiplex Four, but I haven't yet gone to the trouble of finding out where the slot is, how to hook up a monitor, and so forth, so I'm relying entirely on a USB stick for backups. And for convenience, I leave it plugged into the computer that it's backing up, so I've got there is only an ultimate-unedit file.
7:28 p.m.
The cotton-picking *printer* won't work without an internet connection! That doesn't matter, but it really takes the cake!
Doesn't matter because all I print are shopping lists and map snippets, I can't get map snippets without the Web, I can easily hand-write a shopping list — and both my next ride and my next trip to the market are in a fairy-tale future.
I do have two copies of the "Al won't eat" list. [nope. I must have recycled the spare. But one will suffice, particularly when one considers that I won't be well enough to use it before we get the printer back.]
I went to church on time and sat in the narthex until the sermon started. I think it was a tad early to go upstairs, and suspect that everyone was glad when I left.
The sermon took about the same length of time as wiping the gaskets and changing the ice-cube trays. But caring for the fridges took longer than usual because I had to wash my hands so many times.
I spent the morning changing both sheets, running the top layer of the mattress pad through the dryer to shake the dust out, and remaking the bed. After lunch, I got into the freshly-made bed and slept until it was time to have supper on the table — and Dave is getting his appetite back. By good luck I'd already planned spaghetti and meat balls, so supper was only half an hour late.
While I was out like a light, Dave was doing something to the local net that involved "wi-fi not on the internet", and now it works again — access to back-up files on Optiplex 4, printer, and all.
That would be a good note to close on, if I could
send this. I'm planning to start November
tomorrow; you can read progress at
http://wlweather.net/LETTERS/2022BANN/2022BANB.HTM
raw files at
http://wlweather.net/Pcw/2022BANB.HTM
really-raw files at
http://wlweather.net/Pcw/blogsew.txt
The church had Trunk or Treat today. Needless to say, I didn't go.
Something weird happened yesterday. I was typing away in the sewing room, and Dave happened to walk by just as the clock struck. Oops, time to clean the cat's ear, put on another dose of methimazole — each ear gets it every other day — and feed him. So I prepared a saucer of food, Dave got out the ear-cleaning goop and the medicine, I grabbed the cat and held him while Dave messed with his right ear, then lifted him off the table, set him beside the feeding place, and set his food before him.
I watched the minute hand on the clock carefully while eating my bedtime snack, to be sure I didn't eat after ten o'clock, when my four-hour fast begins.
And we were both thoroughly startled when the clean-the-ear flutes started playing at nine o'clock.
We went to bed early, and I had my two o'clock medicine at one.
⁂