Hey, when frozen, zapped several days later, sliced, and toasted, a real bagel still tastes like a real bagel! I shall buy bagels to go again.
Washday, and there was at least as much laundry in the bag we brought back from Michigan as was in the hamper. I expected a few socks and little more; the laundry bag we took was almost too small and I had to fold some of the things instead of just stuffing them in.
I was pretty much wasted on Sunday. I'm glad Dave wanted to come straight home. I'll try to remember what we did on Friday and Saturday some other time.
On Friday we had lunch at Bell's Eccentric Cafe and supper at the Texas Roadhouse. Dave said it was a very good birthday. He has a cake coming, but I haven't even bought the chocolate yet.
Tried to take some notes for the Banner while we were gone, but I *really* hate Dave's keyboard. While typing on it, I can't think about anything but the act of pushing keys. I'm better off jotting things longhand to be transcribed later — and that trick (to quote Rocket J. Squirrel) never works.
It is now past time for my nap. Could you tell, or do I always write nonsense.
Before we left, I shut down my computers. When I started them up again, JOYXP notified me that a program I'd never heard of was enabled. When Dave looked it up, I was aghast to learn that it was a program to make it convenient for perfect strangers to operate my computer from remote locations.
Later on Dave explained that it was a second-hand computer that had been part of a business network where the system administrator needed to be able to do maintenance from a central office.
It was a royal pain for Dave to disable it —I presume that it was designed to be hard for "lusers" to meddle with— so I hope it doesn't re-enable itself the next time I shut down the computer.
Pale Moon seems to load a little faster than it did before this incident; Intel whatever must have been using some of my resources.
On the other hand, he discovered, while figuring out what to do, that JOYXP is a sixty-four bit computer. But now that I'm running Pale Moon, I have no particular urge to run Firefox64 and I don't know of any other 64-bit programs that do things I want done.
This is far from the first time I've shut JOYXP down; I wonder why it waited until now to manifest?
Among the messages that came while we were seeing Trent and Amanda get married was a blank e-mail with the subject line "Warsaw Community Public Library May 2014 Calendar of Events". I guess nothing is happening at the library this month.
Dave has rented Dock #80 for the summer; yesterday he drove a couple of posts to moor to beside it. I went along for the ride and cut down some dead flower stalks. When it became apparent that hedge clippers weren't the best tool for snipping dead stalks out without doing *too* much damage to the new growth, I reached into my pocket for my knife and discovered that I'd left it in my other pants. Dave lent me his and I finished the job — being very careful that I gave it back, because things I touch have a habit of vanishing.
As did the knife; when I got back, it was *not* in the pocket of my other pants. It wasn't a good knife at all —the blade was an inch shorter than it should have been because of an incorporated crown-cap lifter, and it refused to take an edge— but it was my last un-vanished small knife.
Maybe I should ride my flatfoot over to the pawn shop this afternoon and look over their fishbowl of cheap knives.
I've had a query as to what a flatfoot is; the following is copied from an essay I'm probably not going to post:
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They haven't settled on a name for it yet; it's variously called "step-through bike", "crank-forward bike", "semi-recumbent", "flat-footer", and "comfort bike". When I DuckDuckGoed "Trek Pure", I found that Trek calls it a "lowstep",
What it is, is a bicycle with two down tubes instead of a down tube and a top tube ("step through"), with the cranks on the forward down tube ("crank-forward"). The rear down tube meets the seat tube, like the down tube on a diamond-frame bike. This semi-recumbent construction allows the seat to be so low that one can put both feet on the ground while firmly seated (flat-footer). The handlebars are so high that one sits bolt upright, which requires the saddle to be replaced with a tractor-like seat, which may account for calling it a "comfort bike" even though one *needs* a cushy seat to compensate for the inability to transfer some of one's weight to the pedals when one sees a bump coming.
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I still can't see why "Pure" is a model name for a bicycle!
Dave, cleaning the Roomba: "cat fur"
Me: "kitten britches"
Dave: would you make a pair, or would you make a quad?
⁂
Instead of riding, I planted onions and potatoes. I don't expect them to do much when planted so late.
The multipliers are small, but look healthy.
Hot out today. When Dave started the Roomba in the living room this morning, I carried the house plants out onto the patio and plan to leave them there until cold is predicted. Well, I plan to plant the lemon grass in another week or two. I set it on the place where I plan to dig the hole. It says in Wikipedia that it will get to be four feet across by fall — that might be the undoing of the chives.
I pulled a chive up by mistake the other day, and ate it. The flavor is much stronger than the flavor of the garlic chives.
I should take Nicoll's Cosh to one of the furrin words for "garlic chives"; the name is confusing. But then I never remember to say "muguet" for "lily of the valley".
Judging by the state of my feet this morning, the cottonwood trees haven't been unusually ungunky — it's just been too cold to go out and step in it.
While getting my shoes down off the shelf, I knocked another box down, which knocked the right lens out of my spectacles. (That lens has fallen out before.) Upon inspection, the fallen shoes proved to be a brand new, never-worn pair of black oxfords. I guess it was a case of "if the shoe fits, buy it!". I must remember that I have those when I tour the shoe stores, and look only at sandals.
On the one hand, there won't be many sandals now, on the other, if they do have a pair it will probably be marked down.
I was taking my shoes out of storage because I'm planning my first real ride on my real bike. Just to Lakeview Plaza and back by way of Owens.
If the heat continues until Sunday, I'll need the black linen drawers I haven't even cut out yet. I've been weeks working on the gray knickers.
The pawn shop is closed on Thursdays. I peeked through the window, but couldn't establish that they still have a fishbowl of cheap knives.
I bought chocolate at Owens, but forgot butter and nuts. And once the cake is made, we will be short on eggs.
I got away with the ride knee-wise, and my legs are in reasonable condition (thanks to the flatfoot and Ninth Street), but I hadn't used a saddle in months. That improved while I was still riding, so I can hope that it won't take long to come back.
I went out on the Trek in the afternoon to wait beside Dock 80 for Eliot to deliver the pontoon. I nearly finished Norton's _Eye of the Monster_.
I'm a little short on destinations that are ten percent farther than I've already been. Ah, Google Maps says that it's two miles to the health-food store. That will do nicely — and we do need long-grain brown rice.
Weird — when I clicked on the bicycle icon, the route jumped from Center Street to Winona Avenue — and Winona is *terrible* for cycling, because it appears to have a shoulder and doesn't. But it does knock three-tenths of a mile off the trip.
Now I notice that Jefferson, with broken pavement and trucks coming at you from all directions, is marked as particularly suitable for bicycles, and Market Street isn't. If I were ten years younger, I'd look for the feedback button.
It didn't rain much during the night, but it's still misting down. BigDisplay.html says it's up to 0.05 now. The weather service says showers followed by thunderstorms, then mostly sunny tomorrow with the rain starting up again at night and thunderstorms continuing through Tuesday.
There has been a fresh fall of cottonwood pods, smaller, slimmer, brighter in color, and *stickier* than the first fall. I assume the first fall was of leaf-bud covers and the second fall came off flower buds. Which suggests that there will be a fall of cotton Real Soon Now.
I bought rice and nuts and came back by way of the pawn shop; the fishbowl of one-dollar knives was still there, but there were very few knives in it and I looked at them and said "not *that* disposable!". It had been clear full of similar knives, so I suppose that these are what people rejected. There were some passable knives marked four or five dollars in the glass case, but the one that had only one blade looked like stainless steel and I've never had any luck with putting an edge on stainless.
Also stopped at Sherman & Lin's. I didn't see the Village Post Office that had been reported in the paper, but I didn't ask after it.
The clerk was busy with the plant sale. I bought a plain-leaf parsley plant. I considered a dianthus, but I couldn't decide where to plant it.
Bill was coming out as I came in. His wife was with him and they had just bought an armload of plants.
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Eggs devilled and in the devilled-egg box. For a change, there was exactly enough yolk mix to fill the shells, and exactly enough halves to fill the box. No "quality control" eggs, but the filling tasted a bit salty when I was scraping the plate. The whites will draw that out overnight.
I boiled the eggs, drained them, and let them set in the pot while we ate supper — which I made with four of the boiled eggs, a big handful of fresh-picked asparagus, a cup of milk, a tablespoon of cornstarch, a cube of butter, a hint of sharp cheddar, and a slice of "ham" lunchmeat. Served over four zapped fingerling potatoes. It went over very well.
I think the eggs were easier to peel lukewarm. Leastways, they were more convenient to hold than when they are boiling hot!
Concern for America's food supply: I bought those eggs yesterday, Mother's Day having sneaked up on me, and they peeled better than week-old eggs.
I forgot to buy butter when I went to Owen's for the eggs. I didn't want to bake today anyway. Did want to sew a seam on my new knickers. Well, there is a little daylight left, if I don't get glued to the computer chair.
⁂
Dave spotted the first ducklings of the season, and both of us followed them to the creek and watched for a while. The peppermint along the creek is up enough that I could pick some.
How much food was there? I brought home devilled eggs! Darryl brought enough fish for everyone to pig out — and fried them after we'd filled up on hamburgers and hot dogs. I don't think Alice ate any meat at all, aside from what was in the salads.
Ripley got an egg — he gave me such sad puppy eyes when I bent to pick it up after I dropped it! I asked Sara Lee before telling him he could have it.
Roomba just dropped in, then swept out again. Dave is doing the hallway today.
Looks like two loads of wash. Pretty big black wash, because I'm washing two pairs of sweat pants to put them away for the winter, and I spilled mayonnaise on my jeans at the party. I don't think these jeans have been washed before.
I had a devilled egg and some potato salad for breakfast. I am cooking a cup of long-grain rice in the left-over chicken broth. Added some celery and water, forgot salt. [goes to kitchen]
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Dried the stuff outside — on the racks, under the eave. No rain, but some of the things blew off.
My new bike knickers are all in one piece now, but I was too chicken to trim off a seam allowance by artificial light, so I won't finish it tonight.
I'd better buy eggs tomorrow; there was almost enough asparagus left over from supper to make another batch of asparagus shortcake, and I left a couple of not-quite-ready sprouts in the patch. I fried all the pretty tips in butter, and left the stems and the ugly pieces to put into gravy.
Knickers all done except for inserting the elastic, and a bit of mending that requires me to move the thread to the zigzag machine. It's predicted to be drippy until the weekend, so I won't be trying them out any time soon.
Three eggs are on the counter getting warm so I can boil them for asparagus gravy tonight. We're out of salad and low on potatoes, so I'd better shop soon.
I think the weather is settled enough that I can plant the lemon grass.
Almost three O'clock. I think that the "nighttime" cough drop I took before bed is working backward; my snot glands are working overtime, and I finally had to get up in hope that my nose would un-swell once I elevated it. Instead, I'm volley sneezing. Perhaps that is part of un-swelling, though I'm not breathing any easier yet. Whatever, I'm glad I bought a half dozen boxes of paper handkerchiefs the last time I went to Aldi.
Taking the cough drop re-instated a minor mystery.— Smith Brothers caffeine drops taste like artificial sweetener to me; I thought it was the caffeine, but upon reading the ingredients on the order of cough drops that came in today's mail (three bags caffeine, three bags melotonin), I noticed that they *do* contain artificial sweetener. I thought that sucralose was one that doesn't taste nasty, but it *is* artificial sweetener.
But the night drops have the same inactive ingredients as the caffeine drops, and they taste quite nice: subtle lemon-candy flavor, with something vaguely familiar in the burnt-sugar class underneath it. But I took several caffeine drops on Mother's Day and didn't mind the taste much; perhaps I've gotten used to it.
And hey, I typed that entire paragraph without reaching for a handkerchief. Still hard to force air through my nose.
I drove to Owen's shortly after typing yesterday's entry. Bought salad and eggs and cabbage, but forgot that we were down to our last carrot. So after I start the corned beef in the morning, we'll be out of carrots. I could use a 1.6-mile bike ride, but I doubt that the rain will stop.
Pity I didn't plant the lemon grass before the rain started.
Dave says that his carrots are up. I haven't been to the garden, but the multiplier in the raised bed has sprouted. The garden will need cultivating pretty bad by the time it's dry enough to work in.
I took the Tour d'Warsaw today, and appear to have gotten away with it. I stopped at the library and checked out four books. The card-file computer showed no new Katherine Kurtz, which leaves me wondering why I wrote her name on my shopping list after looking her up on the online catalog. I had better luck with _The Norton Book of SF_, which got on the list more recently. I've forgotten who I was looking up when I wrote the title on my list, but there are a couple of other stories in the book that I want to read.
I also checked out three Andre Nortons that caught my eye while looking for "Norton Book" — one because I want to read it and the other two because they are in the old-fashioned binding that modern librarians love to throw away, and I wanted to make them more likely to be available to the current generation.
Nothing but rhubarb and asparagus at the farmer's markets, and the market at the fairground was downright vestigial. I bought a spicy globe basil at Ace and set the pot on the spot where I plan to plant it. I was too tired to trowel when I came back, and I barely beat out a fairly-heavy rain. Last half of the ride was sunny and bright and dark spots kept appearing on my orange shirt. Since it's linen, the spots vanished the instant I came inside.
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Success at last! For weeks, we've been noticing a foul odor in the southwest corner of the kitchen. We cleaned the garbage disposal, we poured boiling water down the drain in the other sink, we pulled out the fridge and swept behind and under it, Dave removed and scrubbed all the shelves and bins in the fridge. Finally he gave up and bought a perfume dispenser, which isn't terribly obtrusive but also isn't particularly effective.
This evening, he pulled the fridge out and we dragged the air compressor in and blew dust out of the fridge's guts. I was surprised that the compressor was so easy to move; it's on wheels, and I can lift it with one hand. Then he peered around in the guts with a flashlight yet again, and found a tray filled with a foul liquid. So I lay on the floor and detached an ornamental grill and reached in with assorted rags Dave brought to me because I didn't want to get up again, then he poured water in and sucked it out with an attachment duct-taped to the wet vac a few times, then I suggested that we knock off for the day and take it up again tomorrow; he puffed agreement, then poured soapy water into the tray.
When I walked into the kitchen a few minutes ago, it stank of dish-detergent perfume. This is a vast improvement.
⁂
Later he decided to go one more round, at which point we discovered that when you suck dishwater into the vacuum, it foams up and gets all over the floor. So now we have a nice clean floor.
When he got down with his face near the working parts, he said that it still stinks. So we left the fridge pulled out. It's easy to push back, but has nothing to take hold of to pull it out.
Boy, is that wet-vac ever clean! I found it in front of the garage when I got back from church. The fridge was still pulled out, with a fan directed at the offending parts. Dave pushed it back while I was getting out of my long dress.
Passed through the Fat and Skinny Festival on my way home, contemplated the pulled-pork booth, decided to come home for a sausage burger on English muffin.
It's lucky that there is only one load this week. I started the washer, set the timer for sixty-five minutes, took the timer to my room, and started reading my mail. About twenty minutes later I got up to mark an event mentioned in the Koscuiosko County ARES News on the calendar and heard an odd noise as I passed the laundry room. The machine was pumping out my water and soap without having done any washing because I'd absent-mindedly left the lid open. And I had to re-start it three times before it gave up pumping out and started re-filling.
Yesterday afternoon Dave set out to get some exercise and see what was going on at the festival. After a while I decided to go out on the flatfoot to look for him. He got back just as I finished changing my clothes, so I took a lap around the neighborhood. When I got back, he mentioned that the Cerulean is closed on Sunday and I replied "Then we'll have to go to the Boathouse for a black-and-blue burger." A very short struggle with temptation later found us walking toward the boathouse. Not as crowded as it might have been, as most of the festival-goers were eager to get home and go to bed. There were four bikes and a pair of skateboards on the back porch. One of them was an upright bike fitted with a racing saddle. Ouch! Two were ordinary uprights, and one was a fat-tire with a number on it.
I ordered a whole slab of ribs and a box, Dave ordered a Boston Burger and gave half to me; half of that half went into the box. And not much more than half of the slab of ribs.
The washer is pumping out again, this time legitimately.
I took only one side, since Dave had ordered french fries and everything but slaw was potato. The slaw was ample for both of us.
Each of us had had enough exercise before beginning the walk, and we got home pretty tired. I slept well last night —didn't get my three-o'clock pill until nearly six— but I don't think I'll take *that* sleeping potion every day!
I cultivated the garden today. It wasn't honestly dry enough yet, but it's supposed to rain again starting at ten tonight.
I set out to burn the remaining limbs yesterday, and after a while noticed that a section of log that was standing on end in the woodpile was burning. It was rotten and dry; I presume that a spark was enough to get it started. I knocked it over, but couldn't roll it, so I levered it away from the woodpile with the spade. Eventually I discovered that even though it was too heavy to roll —the side next to the pile was *not* dry— I could stand it up and knock it over, and got it onto the fire that way.
So I toasted it all day. When I inspected it at bedtime, it was spitting out lots of sparks and they were blowing toward the wood pile, so I scattered the fire and carried several buckets of water from the rain barrel.
This morning I laid two rotten logs on the hearth, filled the space between them with greasy rags, somehow levered the log up on top of the logs, and touched a match to it. Toasted it all day again, clearing a lot of rotten stuff out of the woodpile in the process, and now its shrunk up to about the size of the logs I'm toasting it with. The last rotten log I put in the fire was all mulch except for a lump at one end, and that lump smells very good as it burns. Not pine, not cedar, not spruce, but some sort of resin must have kept that knot from decaying with the rest of the log.
But if the rain does start at ten, the log has only an hour and a half to finish burning.
Yesterday, Dave told a story about a fellow who wanted to take his son on an airplane trip, the airline insisted on picture ID for the boy, Indiana doesn't give picture ID to people under fifteen, so he had to get the child a passport.
Which made me say "Hey, do I still have a passport?" Dave checked —he keeps such things written down somewhere— and mine is good only until August. So he printed out some forms, and this morning I filled them out and Dave went to the bank and got my passport; tomorrow first thing I intend to go to Blossers and get my picture taken, then go to the post office and mail it all.
I wonder whether to use a regular #10 envelope or hunt around for the brown #11s I've got stashed away somewhere. Or use a 9"x6" envelope.
I suppose I could address one of each and ask at the post office.
Left the passport safe at home when I rode to Blosser's.
Riding proved to be a mistake. I thought I'd gotten away with walking to the Boathouse on Sunday, and was looking forward to walking to church again, but my knee was still a little sore on Wednesday. I rode anyway, and the result was that I could barely walk yesterday. Hence no trip to the post office.
Somebody told Dave that a 9"x6" was best for mailing passports. Those envelopes are, of course, on the shelf of the printer stand that I can't get at.
Ta dah! I can't get the box out without moving the Deskjet, but I managed to reach in and tip the box over, which made it possible to remove an envelope. *And* I was able to tip the box back up again! I took out only one; I hope that it prints right the first time.
⁂
*After* I finally got an envelope that was sorta usable, I measured it: nine *and a half* by six *and a half*. Then I remembered that my nine by sixes are gray, and made of a sturdier paper. But I can't find those; they aren't on the printer stand, in the "study center" desk, or in the parlor. I found some loose envelopes in the study center, but none of them were gray.
It looks as though I won't be wheelchairing to the post office until Tuesday, since I don't know what their hours are tomorrow.
The goslings are bigger every time I look out the window. They are always working hard at eating grass.
The check — and my old passport and my application for a new passport — is in the mail.
In one place the instructions for filling out the form say that giving your Social Security Number is purely voluntary, but failure to do so might slow up the process a little. In another, it says that if you submit an application without your SSN on it, you will be fined five hundred dollars by the IRS.
Oh, the post office *is* open until noon. Possibly later, even, but I made it by noon, so I didn't look.
And I did go by pedal-powered wheelchair. Don't seem to have been any consequences, even though I walked most of the way up Ninth Street after mailing my letter, and took all the stairs in the church more than once. (Well, I never set foot on the stairs to the balcony, just took vertical loops through the narthex and the fellowship hall.)
I went to the church to clean the fridges and borrow two big tables to mark bias lines on some red linen I plan to make into bras. It's really nice linen; I wish I knew what it's called and where it came from. It was one of the factory scraps fabric.com used to sell when Stephen was running it.
And it's lucky that my envelope was a little big. After stapling the picture on, one has to fold the application enough off center that it just barely slipped into the six-and-a-half inches.
I hope I don't get arrested for putting in three staples instead of six. Our stapler isn't long enough to reach the far side of the photo, so I used removable correction tape.
The geese are still raising their goslings in our back yard.
I thought I was putting an overwhelming amount of hot sauce in the devilled eggs, but I can't detect it at all. Maybe cream cheese neutralizes it. I know salt puts out fire, and I did salt the eggs heavily.
Lovely weather today, and I dried most of the clothes outside.
This afternoon, I went out to put away the spade I had forgotten yesterday after I dug garlic chives and cooked them for greens — much to Dave's olfactory distress. He didn't ask to share any! They had been a royal pain to clean, but that little clump there wouldn't be much trouble, there aren't any in the house, and I do want to get my kow choi down to where I can resume cutting it off instead of digging it up. Much to my surprise, it came up easily, and had just plain roots, no tangled knot of tubers. Umm . . . since when has Allium tuberosum made bulbs? And those leaves are rather wide. It was garlic! How it got started in the herb bed, I don't know.
And I'm not planning to make anything I can put garlic in before fresh bulbs go bad. I do intend to boil some celery rice tomorrow, but I had already dug garlic in the garden and put it into the pot.
On the way to Donny's house we were surprised by SR 115. On our previous trip, the only good thing to say about the road was that there are only three miles of it — in long stretches, the potholes were contiguous. Yesterday, all the rough stretches were smooth new asphalt! And they'd had only a couple of weeks to do it in.
We came back by way of the Kokomo Bypass. On several occasions I've glimpsed what appeared to be a recreationway under construction from one of the overpasses. This time I looked back at the next sign and saw that we'd just passed Exit 167.
Alas, none of the map programs I found map exit numbers. And none of them have gotten new aerial photographs of the area since before the construction. But Google Maps shows that CR 50 E was broken by the bypass, and when I click on the show-bike-routes button, 50 E lights up green. I deduce that someone, somehow, has raised enough money to repair the gap — but the money isn't coming in very fast; in contrast to 115, there is very little progress from one trip to the next.
Just had a couple of garlic scallions for a bedtime snack. Hope I don't have to sleep on the sofa.
"Tilting at windbags" — what a marvelous phrase! I shall forthwith steal it.
Umm . . . I should have posted that as a reply to the post it's in, not here. But it's after midnight. (So read that automatically-inserted "30" as "29".)
Patched my orange linen jersey today. The seven-day forecast says that I got that done just in time: temperatures will be in the eighties.
I shall never again buy "softened" linen, no matter how desperate I am. And it isn't even yellow.
The date means it this time. The maple keys are a literal windfall — a little black squirrel is going through them like peanuts.
The USPS said that it delivered my passport not long after I mailed it — I wonder when the passport office will send it back? I suspect that the expedite fee is a profit center.
The Roomba somehow wound some scraps that had been on the ironing board around its brushes, then stuffed the paper they'd been pinned to into the space between the XP tower and its keyboard stand — which is behind my typing chair and the Roomba can't get at it.
And it did it wide end first, I suddenly realize. Leastways I took hold of the tapered end to unwind it. The wide end was pinned to the paper.
I put both the paper and the scraps back on the ironing board. I hope that isn't rash!
Gaaack! I never found the pin!
Ever since I started reading cookbooks, I've been seeing references to "almond milk", but I've never been intrigued enough to pound almonds in a mortar. The last time I went to Aldi, I saw a half-gallon of almond milk in the dairy case and couldn't resist. Alas, though it *looks* like skimmed milk, the taste is indistinguishable from sugar water. Dave says that he sort of likes it. I like sugar water, but at 175.5 pounds, I don't feel that I need it.
I did the Tour d'Warsaw today, which Google Maps says is about six miles, and I don't appear to have over-exerted. I may yet need those tea ice cubes left over from last summer!
I like a sprig of cinnamon basil in my drinking water — and both basil and lemongrass in my bitter tea. Since I'm not getting around as much as I did last spring, I haven't found any cinnamon basil yet. A while back I bought a pot of spicy globe basil to tide me over, and it turned out to be three plants when I planted it. Today I looked for cinnamon basil at the fairgrounds farmer's market; there wasn't any, but there was some lemon basil — I gotta have me some of that. When I bought it, the vendor threw in a pot of purple basil in exchange for a promise to plant it. And I still intend to buy cinnamon basil if I ever find any.
If you like pesto, you might want to drop in at pruning time.
On my way from the downtown farmers' market to Walgreen's, I noticed that I was passing Ace Hardware and dropped in even though that's where I got the globe basil. I didn't see any herbs at all this time, but they were clearing out leeks and mustard, so I bought a four-pack of each. Had a pannier full of potted plants! By the time I left Owen's, I'd used up what I had thought was an excessive supply of packing material. (Crumpled plastic bags. Also good for keeping small cans from falling through the holes in the panniers, and for shielding potted plants from a dry wind.)
The radio-club event at Walgreen's was a bunch of hams gossiping around a card table near the electronics department. Nobody wanted instruction in operating a weather radio while I was there, and I didn't identify myself.
Now there's a hole in a brand-new T-shirt! I am *really* not happy with my new washer's insistence on many minutes of rough agitation, even when set on "light". I may have to go back to controlling each separate operation by hand, as I did in New York when I had to pump out the laundry sinks before allowing a second spin — only this time I will have to interfere several times per fill-and-spin, instead of just once.
Perhaps I can get by by always setting the water level for "super" and putting in only half a load.
I set out the mustard and basil plants today. I set the leeks out yesterday. The rain is still missing us, but I'll have to bring the laundry in before nap-time because I can't be *sure*.
The leeks had more than one plant in every pot; I should have separated them, but they were so root bound that I thought that it would damage them too much.
There is a lone gosling in the lawn. No sign of adult geese.