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The plebotomist got Dave's blood with one needle. But it took her a while to find a spot that wasn't bruised by previous draws.
He spent the rest of the day wrestling with the new printer. The printer won.
I mostly goofed off, but after my nap I went to Kroger for milk and lunch meat. Spent ninety-three dollars and six cents without even stocking up on frozen dinners -- it was past time to go home before I got to the frozen food. I did buy one Hormel Compleat of every flavor.
Some time after we got back and left the car parked outside, I took advantage of the empty garage to pull down the disappearing staircase and look for the big fan. As the door opened, I realized with glee that we had never looked in the attic, and beside the hole, next to the box of bagasse desert dishes, was a logical spot for a box of packages of disposable washrags.
This isn't that good a story -- there was an empty box in that spot, but the bath wipes were nowhere to be found.
But a while after closing the staircase, I happend to look at the north wall of the garage, and there on the floor, between the shelves and the pegs, was a carton of extra-large alcohol-free adult wipes.
It's a perfect spot: out of the way, but easy to get at.
The printer is working with Dave's computer, but mine doesn't recognize its existance. At least I can get a copy by sneakernetting to Dave's computer.
That was a really-greasy frozen pizza we had for supper; I had to scour the griddle I use for a pizza stone. It was roasted mushrooms with truffle oil, lots of cheese, no sauce. Good change of pace, but we don't want it again soon. We also had steamed corn (lots of butter) and a slice of the last-of-the-season tomato I bought at the ice-rink market.
My bike is still at the Trailhouse; I hope it's done Monday, before I go to Zale's for levothyroxin. I rode the flatfoot to the ice rink, but skipped all the rest. I'd done a major shopping at Kroger on Friday, so none of the places I would have gone were worth driving the car.
I got a few surprises when moving all the stuff that had accumulated in front of the flatfoot, and I had to pump up its tires. Took a while to find the pressure, which was molded black-on-black in small letters. At first I thought it was 00 (???), but when I made out "2 bar" I realized that it was 30 pounds. I'd thought it was forty pounds, so it's good that I kept hunting until I found it.
While meditating on "everyone likes pizza, but some people are picky about which kind", I had an idea for that recipe for cottage-cheese bread. I could divide the dough into six drop biscuits, flatten them into pizza crusts, and put on six different toppings. Cinnamon sugar on apple slices would be one.
The Remento-inspired entry in the September issue ended in a double ampersand to indicate that the anecdote isn't finished. I was annoyed when I learned that ampersand is a reserved character, and must be "escaped" or replaced by &. No other mark would work as well. But after a while, I realized that it's a feature: when I try to validate a file, every unfinished item will be marked as a mistake.
Some of my sewing pages have *lots* of double ampersands.
And now I've used up the energy I meant to use to complete the anecdote.
While I was in church, Dave got my computer talking to the printer. But Libre Office won't send proper boundary lines of tables to the printer. At least it shows a preview, so that I can see that it's wrong without wasting paper and toner.
The only place I have a table is my calendar, and I don't print out a new calendar page often enough to make it a bother to export to a PDF, print, and delete the PDF.
I passed Steve and Martha's house on my way home from church. For the Loveless side of the mailing list: Steve and Martha live in the house where Dave grew up.
Daisy was outside, and though she showed only mild interest in me, I spoke to her as I passed, saying that we'd been introduced and she had nothing to worry about. Steve heard me and came out, so I went in and visited a bit. Then Martha put lunch preparations on hold and led me down the steps to her garden, where she picked some leaves that I've already forgotten the name of. Green ones to wrap around food, like lettuce, and purple ones for making tea. I tried a green one with a slice of pinwheel for lunch, but haven't made tea yet.
On the steps, she said that having a bad hip made her understand why Claude and Evelyn were eager to build the house where Dave and I live. She gets on surprisingly well.
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Meanwhile, back at the anecdote: I don't remember who gave us any of the neat things that we still have. Which would make me suggest to younger brides: "don't throw out the tags after you write the thank-you notes", were it not that wedding presents have gone out of style now that couples marry so late that they are merging two households instead of setting up a new one. (And if you are wondering what we did before gift registries, everybody told the bride's mother what they were bringing.)
So I don't know who gave us the aluminum-handled knives and forks: a paring knife that is always at my place at the table, a three-tined fork that is my favorite for scrambling eggs, a carving fork, and a butcher knife. The larger implements have been less useful, but the butcher knife played a role in the ceremony.
Both these stories are hearsay; I wasn't there at the time. When the basement was being set up for the reception, they realized that they'd forgotten a knife to cut the cake. Aunt Doris found the butcher knife among the presents and stuck a bow from another present on it.
Since I carried a boquet, I might have been there when they opened the florist box and realized that we'd forgotten a corsage for Grandmother. But the florist had sent two extra buttonhole carnations, Aunt Doris, more ribbon, and a lovely corsage.
Aunt Doris -- Mother's brother's wife -- was a resourceful person. Another story told of her was that she was in a car pulling a trailer (Man, I wish I knew the details!) and they inadvertently did something illegal that left them in a mess that they couldn't back out of because of the trailer. It was repeated as a moral lesson that when a policeman came to berate them, the first words out of Aunt Doris's mouth were "You have the authority".
So at her request, he used that authority to stop traffic and get them out of the mess.
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There are acorn caps and broken acorn shells on the concrete in front of the house, but very few acorns. Yesterday, the driveway alarm bing-bonged in the night, and I peeked out to see a deer eating acorns off the parking patio.
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The rains is supposed to quit at two, and the clock struck two just as I sat back down. Writing was interrupted by a phone call: my bike is now in the garage. I got only slightly damp; I don't think we got as much rain as we need. I didn't notice any wind, but there are green oak leaves on the lawn.
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Notes taken yesterday:
11:36 AM 10/6/2025 -- Once again, I took my clothes off before remembering that I need to comb my hair before washing it. [Since I shed like a cat, I comb my hair outside.]
4:01 PM 10/6/2025 -- When I ran my fingers through my hair after washing it, it squeaked.
I didn't notice that the stew recipe called for a green pepper, so I opened a package of three- pepper-and-onion, and picked out most of the green bits.
Another change: I thought I was buying a turnip, but the receipt says "rutabaga". Tastes like a turnip to me, and it has white flesh and a purple top. [The turnip was bitter and not very good. I'm glad that I put in only half.]
8:59 AM 10/7/2025 -- Just now noticed that ten provinces and three territories add up to thirteen states.
1:33 PM 10/9/2025
Dave's weather station is officially off the air. He says that taking that computer out freed up a lot of wires.
While he was doing that, I was stocking up at Aldi. Being down to my last twenty, I stopped at an ATM on the way and got a hundred and fifty dollars. I spent two hundred twenty-three dollars and fifty-three cents, from the same account.
Since Aldi is on the other side of 30, I bought months of everything I don't buy elsewhere. Including five bags of chips.
6:03 PM 10/9/2025
Kerr's wide-mouth half-pint jars make good serving dishes, but it's annoying that I can't see which nuts are in a jar on the table without picking it up, so I ran a search for "transparent canning-jar lids", and discovered that glass lids for clamp-type jars are still being made.
7:01 PM 10/9/2025
Went into Dave's room to Quicken my receipts, and found his chair wrapped in loose wires.
3:59 PM 10/10/2025
Centurylink won't give me access to my webmail -- same old unresponsive buttons, and I finally had to close Edge without logging out. But it did allow me to update my "action required", and I just now downloaded sixty-six messages, ten of them in the inbox and, therefore, potentially important. (I have set filters to sort mailing lists into boxes.)
Now to re-activate roughsewing@centurylink.net, but there's no hurry; nobody comments on my webbed book.
Saturday, 11 October 2025 8:31 PM 10/11/2025
Today I folded the sheet that Brenda washed and left to air dry on Tuesday. Sometimes I think how silly it is for someone as healthy as I am to have a housekeeper, but when would I have changed the sheets and washed the bedding, if it took this long to fold the sheet?
Today was the farmers' markets tour. I got a tomato and six ears of corn at the Yoder's booth in the ice-rink. The corn was marked "last of the season". Since it has been cold, and is predicted to stay cold, I doubt that there will be any more good tomatoes. I got a green pepper at the fairgrounds, so I can try the stew recipe again. Perhaps Monday; I doubt that I will feel up to anything more time-consuming than frozen hamburger patties on Sunday, and we do have a fresh tomato.
The courthouse market vanished without leaving a forwarding address, but since this also happened last year, I found them at the Pete Thorne Center, and bought half a dozen oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies. (The sign on Main Street points the wrong way.)
For a change, I didn't come home by way of Kroger. I did stop at Dollar General, having read a rumor that they sell Spic 'n Span floor cleaner. That store doesn't, but I did find a miniature composition book that has been on my shopping list for weeks.
I also took a lap around the new liquor store in Lakeview Plaza. They sell dill pickles canned in "moonshine"! Also bright-red cherries in alcohol, which actually makes sense. The "moonshine" wasn't red; are there cherries that are naturally Red #40?
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Sliced the tomaato tonight. No better than a shipped-in tomato.