Christmas has been accomplished. Kathy's mom flew in today; luckily her flight was not one of the many that got canceled. She'll be here tomorrow and leave Monday. I'm glad she was able to be here. It will be four years since Mom's death in a few days, and I've been feeling a little melancholy.

The pomegranates are ripe - at least, the ones on ( Read more... )

I don't recall if I mentioned it here, but last January we hired a contractor to build a porch on the south side of the house, the side that faces the street our address is on. Our house is one of those corner houses that is built on a diagonal, and for reasons beyond my ken, it was built so that the front door faces the cross street rather than ( Read more... )

Today at work we got the email expanding the company's vaccine mandate to all employees (the first phase had excluded retail and warehouse workers.) They'd strongly hinted that this would happen when they notified us of of the first phase, so it was not really a surprise. Despite all the screaming and posturing on the company intranet when phase ( Read more... )

I didn't mean to fall off the face of the earth, but, well, you know. Over Thanksgiving weekend we have 1) cooked a big dinner, 2) assembled 3/4ths of a shed (the remaining 1/4th is door assembly, which, judging by the illustrations in the manual, is as complicated as the entire rest of the shed put together.) 3) Moved all the tools and paint ( Read more... )

For the last week we've been in Florida, visiting Kathy's mom. She's 86 now, and starting to slow down a little -- she was a heavy smoker for many years; she quit thirty years ago, but her lungs are starting to give her trouble and she runs out of breath easily. She had surgery on one shoulder recently, and is going into physical therapy this ( Read more... )

I got my second covid shot Monday afternoon. I woke up at 2:00 AM Tuesday morning with fever, chills, aches, and nausea. I couldn't take the day off, because there was a meeting I absolutely had to be at, but after several hours of tossing, turning, and barfing, I called in to say I'd be in late. I dragged in to work at nine, made it through my ( Read more... )

This morning when walking the dog, we saw the detritus from some flares in the road ahead. "Oh, there must have been a traffic accident last night," we said. When we got to the northeast corner of 28th and Indian School, there was a bunch of sand in the road, soaking up oil from what must have been a car crash. And there on the sidewalk was one ( Read more... )

Kathy and I got our first covid vaccinations on Sunday. Monday morning, I went to the dentist to finally deal with my fallen-out filling. (I had originally been scheduled for last week, but the dentist's assistant had a family emergency, and we had to move the appointment.) I hadn't had any adverse reactions to the shot up till then, but after ( Read more... )

I had intended to do many things today, but we had a cold snap, and a lot of wind, so many of them did not get done. Luckily we managed to get 85% of the water sealing in the back yard done (all of the tiki bar, and the boards in the two gates) done Saturday. We still have to do the clothesline, but hopefully next weekend will be a little more ( Read more... )

I'd intended to try posting more this month, as December was sadly fallow, but I've been distracted by the attempted coup. :/

Our wonky water heater has finally been replaced - we'd nursed it along for as long as we could, but it was getting harder and harder to deal with, so we finally bit the bullet. We were going to have our regular plumber do ( Read more... )