Lost in translation

Chicken and rice translated to French is poulet et riz.  Agneau is lamb.  Oh la la...

 

Sunday dinner at our house

 

Well, foo...

 Northwestern at Nebraska, scheduled for tonight and tomorrow, instead postponed because the Chicago school had a positive test for Covid-19 this morning.  

Long week this past week, extra hours on the job.  Glad it's now the weekend.

Nope, not a cat

BB & I stopped at the Wild Birds Unlimited on Tilghman this afternoon, and it was a pleasant surprise to see Holly the Newfoundland greeting visitors.  I began to pet her back, and she turned over and I turned it into a tummy rub.  Happy, well-loved dog.  

 

Blursday

 Heard that today sometime, possibly while in the doctor's office with BB, but honestly, it's a blur, sir.

Just like all the other days, one big blur of work and more work and eat a little and work some more.  Sleepsleepsleepawakeawakeawakecan'tsleeptimetogetup. Not even any squirrel sex outside the office window to break up the monotony.

Block party, twice

 Right now, Purdue-Wisconsin is wrapping up on the big screen to my left, and behind this window is a split-screen view of Rutgers-Northwestern and Penn State-Ohio State.  Already saw Nebraska take 3 straight from Indiana.  (Nobody said anything or tweeted anything, but I'll bet Jazz Sweet's sitting the bench the entire match was disciplinary for her off-season DUI.)

Last night's block party was on Twitter, blocking anyone I could find with a connection to the prior administration, either in fact or in spirit.  Cruz, Hawley, Greene, to name a few.  The former president himself had been blocked quite some time back.

Pondering the deep

Sparks music this morning.  I wonder whether whether either of the Mael brothers who are the core of the band ever stood up in an English Lit class and told the teacher, "Call me Ish."

EDIT 2/4:  I'm a member of a Facebook group devoted to Sparks, and one member posted... wait a minute, let's do it this way:

Thousands of geese...

...and soon they'll be on their way again.

Good for a smile

Silent film from 1906.

Good times, good times...

 When I bought the Highlander in 2018, I only borrowed a quarter of the cost from the credit union.  The gap between that plus the trade-in was filled with a loan from my 401(k).  The company match pretty much paid the interest while I refilled the principal.  But then a year and a half later, my company was sold with the loan still years away from being paid off.  That balance, I learn, is going to be treated as a withdrawal and subject to standard taxation.  Still, it also means the Highlander is now 100% mine, paid in full in a little more than 2 years.  No more payments mean a few more bucks in the paycheck for now, with later ones to be routed back into the 401(k) in the form of pre-tax dollars. 

Coming soon

 Later this week, the bamboo pajamas I ordered should arrive.  A real impulse buy.  Scrolling through Twitter, I read a post from a woman whose bamboo pajamas had recently arrived, and she was mighty happy about it.  The whole thing sounded good to me, so I searched, found, and ordered in the span of a few minutes.  

Something (or another)

 As with a lot of useful information, this one has been attributed to a number of persons.  I'll just go with old reliable "Anonymous."

The pandemic hasn't had any effect on the first two points.  My job is still necessary and can be done from home.  And after 36 years with BB, I have someone to love and someone to be loved by.

That leaves the third point.  With so much deferred due to Covid-19, the short-term things to look forward to is a pretty short list.  But I'm going to look harder and think more about it.

So, what've I got for tonight?  I looked forward to some Quality Time with my good girl, Good Queen Schwirly.  Sure enough, around 8:00 I went into the kitchen, and soon she was there with me, looking up and mewing.  That's the constant step 1.  

Then, she goes to her dry food dish and eats a few bits while I pet her.  Eventually, she lifts her head and we both make our way to the living room.  I try to sit down first and place a fleece blanket on my lap, and she jumps up and makes herself comfortable on it.  She stays as long as she likes; tonight I didn't have a clock handy, but it was at least 15 minutes.  She was content.  I was happy.

Blank stare

 Too cold and windy to go outside for more time than it takes to refill the bird feeders.  Another day in quarantine.

I know this too shall pass and things will return to normal (mostly).  At least I'll be able to visit Tabby's Place again.  So let me just state the conditions that prevail.  

If this is a preview of retirement, I don't like it.

MLK Day, a paid holiday from work, and this morning I worked for a couple of hours, just to have something interesting to occupy my mind.  

I can't binge watch or binge read anymore.  What am I supposed to do, chores?  And these are an introvert's words -- imagine how much worse it would feel be to be *extroverted* these days.

At last, something different

 Squirrel sex outside my office window.  He chased her, caught her and mounted her three times in about a minute before I turned my attention back to work.  Right now, they're sitting about a foot apart in the same cherry tree and grooming themselves.  

No, I haven't

 I haven't felt much like reading or listening to French, either.  Or reading anything much longer than 280 characters.  There's just so much going on, and I'm feeling tired.

An improving book

 Just finished listening to YouTube's copy of the seven-hour audiobook for "The Code of the Woosters."  If I can learn anything from it, it's how to treat clients like Jeeves treats everyone.  I won't go so far as to say "Very good, sir" to everybody on conference calls, but it helps remind me to keep a civil tongue in my head.

I've learned

If I think of something funny, sparkling or even brilliant, I've learned to google it and find out how many others dreamed it up and used it before me.  Today, it was the phrase "There's a nap for that."  The listing in the Urban Dictionary is dated 2009, so I'm only eleven years late with that.

Saturday evening post

 BB and I went for a ride in the late afternoon.  Lots of sun, and we wanted to get out of the house, so I took the Northeast Extension south to the Quakertown exit, turned around, and returned home.  Streamed some background instrumental music from YouTube.  At the Allentown exit, we saw a redtail atop the Exit 56 sign, and seconds later, spotted two deer just off the ramp.  

Put in a couple of hours in my office, trying to catch up with the work that came in while I was offline last week.  Long way to go.  But it's the last time I'll be going through it, I tell myself.  

Oh yes, and midway between Quakertown and Allentown, I passed a large semi-trailer that bore the Chiquita logo on its rear door.  Just as well that I get as far as possible in front of him before he starts down the hill that leads into Scranton, Pennsylvania.

If you know how much I like looking at Great Tits...

 ...then you may well be able to imagine my reaction to learning about the book Hookers and Blow Save Christmas. ("Munty C. Pepin" -- I need to input that into some anagram website and see what comes out.)  I bet the story has a Happy Ending, too.

But when I tried to tell BB about this reaction on Amazon... 

...I got only so far before breaking down in giggles like Lowell Thomas in the clip below:

Is it safe to come out now?

 No, just because the calendar reads 2021 doesn't mean anything has changed with the pandemic.  

For the record, at midnight I was listening to Walter Winchell's Jergens Journal for December 7, 1941.

Effective 4 o'clock New Years Eve, I became an employee of a different company.  While there are going to be some adjustments come Monday, ("New York Life Group Benefit Solutions" is a mouthful) there was a rare occurrence on New Year's Eve, consisting of my last full paycheck with the old company, a partial payment for the final week of 2020, and a one-time payment that will take the place of a salary increase.  (Done that way for tax purposes, no doubt.)  Then add the stock award cashed in while the price was more than $210 a share.  Add to that the monthly pension from the previous employer.  And before much longer, a $600 deposit courtesy of the current administration and Congress.  To celebrate, splurged for a second pair of nice Adidas shorts from eBay, and a foam/gel seat pad from Costco to go on the Secretlab Titan chair in the office.  

Also noticed that annual subscriptions kicked in for the food websites from Cooks Illustrated/America's Test Kitchen/Cooks Country, for another year of The New Yorker, and for another year of cloud storage from Dropbox.

Napped this morning around 11 and napped this evening around 8, and now it's quarter till midnight, and I am Wide Awake.  LCI is in my headphones.  (A 2020 accomplishment:  improvement over the past year in understanding spoken French and reading the printed language.)

Spent some time arranging and organizing the reading material (most of it unread) printed to PDF and saved to disk over the past decade or more.  Resolve to read these more and Twitter less.

Homemade pizza and Pepsi for a 3:00 meal.  Cereal and grapefruit juice for breakfast, and again at 6:30.  A few Lindt ganache spheres in between.

And that's all for now.  The quarantine abides.

"Happy 2021!"

 I took a walk around the development this morning in gray, 35-degree conditions.  Halfway around, I passed a man who appeared to be taking down his Christmas lights, and he said hello to me.  I replied, "Happy 2021" and he said, "Thank God!"