Sunday evening post

 Late, because I had a Good Cat on my lap.  

How does someone go through a day under pandemic conditions, and a rainy one at that?  

I read news stories, using Google News to accumulate them.  At noon, I went upstairs and checked the mail at work.  Not surprisingly, there was a pile there waiting.  If my backup did much with it, it was hard to tell.  In about an hour, things were organized; nine requests for tool assistance, four remaining (out of the 8 originally there) requests for tool assistance without sending the tool, and one request for a conference call.  That can all wait until tomorrow morning.

BB made a pot of chili, I vacuumed the house, we spent time with each other and with our cats.  

I watched some volleyball, an episode of 30 Rock, and the remaining half-hour or so of Line King.  

Friday off

 A day off from work.  (With pay, I might add.)  How did I pass the time?  

BB and I got in the Toyota, I put on chapter one of Blott, and drove to Bethlehem ShopRite for some seltzer and a few other small things.  A pint of Ben and Jerry's for $2.88, for instance.  Then back home with chapter two.  

Dropped off the ice cream and went back out to Wally's in Emmaus for a sandwich.  Home again to eat some of it.

One more trip, this time to Wegmans for stuff BB didn't find at ShopRite.  

Then, listened to some of chapter 1 of The Great Gatsby, baked some M&M cookies, and cued up The Lady Eve.  (Which I'm going to return to now.)

Stafford, R.I.P.

 He was a good cat.

Thursday night

 Stafford died today.  He was a good cat at Tabby's Place.

Another day in our house, going outside only long enough to check the mailbox (and find it empty). 

Nebraska vs. #1 Wisconsin postponed due to the pandemic.  

Quality Time this morning with Nelson, and this evening with Schwirley girly.  

Another 4 chapters of Blott in the headphones.

A day off (with pay) tomorrow, and I'm hoping to go for a ride somewhere.  Weather forecast: sunny and low 40's.

The house is dark except for the laptop screen.  News from French network LCI in the headphones.  Subject:  Covid-19, what else.  

Tuesday evening

Watching:  Purdue whipping Indiana in straight sets.

Eating:  chicken murphy, followed by a Dove bar.

Listening:  audiobook of Blott on the Landscape arrived today.

Backing up:  almost all the media files are copied to the new external drive.  All that's left is photos from 2008-2021.  

Pretty uncompelling, but at least I'm not shoveling.

OK, that's enough checking in.  Time to listen to Blott.

Saturday Evening Post

Happy Walter Becker's birthday to one and all.

Events of the day:  WalMart to pick up a prescription for BB.  Also cat food, bird food, cleaning supplies, and some nourishment for ourselves.  

AOC has helped raise $3 million for Texas, and today I chipped in a few bucks.  Her activity is a nice contrast to what Senator Cruz has done.  Reasonable persons on all points of the political spectrum agree.

Baked M&M cookies this afternoon.  I may never buy an Oreo again.  

Then got a haircut, the first since October.  Locks of Love will appreciate the gift, if they don't mind the grey.  

After that, to Costco, where parking spaces were in short supply and the checkout line stretched to the back wall.  Walking out empty-handed, I found a shiny quarter in the parking lot.  In the kitty for Tabby's Place it goes.

Looking back a little, BB called a local plumber to replace the faucet in the kitchen, and the replacement is an improvement.  Of the 2-out-of-three choice in such cases, we elected Good and Fast and passed on Cheap.  

But, we tell ourselves, it's covered by one of the stimulus checks from Washington.  We're spending it locally, helping the economy, just like we did with the garage door opener replacements last year.  (Kids, if you have any aptitude for the trades, you can make a good living.  I mean a *good* living.)

Thus ended another day in winter 2020-2021.  Now the TV's on and I'm trying to figure out spikeball.  

A nice surprise

The Big Ten Network's top-rated sport is football, followed by men's basketball.  In third place, though, is women's volleyball.  

Between storms

There's another 6 to 9 inches on the way the day after tomorrow.  I need to get the gas can out of the shed before it gets here.  I need to remind myself that in a month or less, it'll be well above freezing and only the Canadian neighbor's front yard next door will have any snow in it.  They pile it up intentionally, and why not?  Their neighbor has a chicken wire fence at the opening of their living room.  I doubt any other homeowners in this development of six-figure houses have such a feature.  

Where's my good girl Schwirley?  I've been here for hours, and she hasn't appeared.  (Let me get up and go into the kitchen, and then we'll know where she is.  Sneaking by her in there is like trying to sneak the sun past a rooster.)

Copying files from the hard drive to an external drive, with the intent of saving them in the safe deposit box.  There's a hard drive, there's a drive in the cloud backing it up, and soon, another backup offsite.  Gigabytes of audio and video, and a whole heap of photographs.  

Sunday delivery

Baked bread with the bread machine.  Usually use it just for making dough for cinnamon buns or for pizza.  

Late morning, an Amazon deliveryman stopped with 3 cases of Evian.  When he got out, friendly and enthusiastic dogs from next door ran to greet him, but as he told me later, he'd been bitten by a dog in the past and wasn't taking any chances.  Personally, I was happy to see both Lenny the dalmatian and Charlie the black-and-white non-purebred, and took the opportunity to pet them both.  

And the other different thing today was that I went through the hundreds of bookmarks in Chrome and cleaned them up.  There used to be a utility that would check bookmarks and remove the dead ones.  

Good quality time this morning with my little buddy Nelson, and this evening with my good girl Swirly.  She couldn't wait for me to go into the kitchen and then the living room, and instead simply hopped onto the arm of the recliner and made her way onto the fleece blanket covering my lap.

Saturday Evening Post

 My day in a nutshell:  spending money all over the place.

Mid-morning, to Wegmans with BB for $90 of groceries.  Then to Ace Hardware for $40 of bird seed.  

We would have bought ice melt, too, since there's freezing rain in the forecast, but they were sold out.  Come back later, though, they said, we're expecting some more around 2:00.

Giant was next, with another $25 going for things they were sold out of at Wegmans.  (Cat food, Evian, sour cream)

I watched the first set of the Nebraska-Rutgers volleyball match on BTN Plus, seeing the #4-ranked Huskers upset 25-22 by the league doormat.  It was 12-12 in the second set before Nebraska took 13 of the final 15 points.  (If not for the pandemic, I might have made the trip to New Brunswick to see them in person.)

Back to Ace for a 40-pound bucket of ice melt, another $28.  Home again for supper and two more sets taken by the Big Red.

After supper, $200 for a 1 TB external SSD to fill with photos, music and 23 years of digital miscellanea to stash in the safe deposit box.  Then $11 to a used bookseller through eBay for an audiobook of David Suchet reading "Blott on the Landscape."  Began listening to it some months ago as a bootleg upload on YouTube, which got taken down after I'd listened to a couple of hours.  Gave up waiting for another upload.

Now, back to what I had been doing:  listening to Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett call the April 12, 1971 game against the Cubs, on YouTube, of course.   Another technically illegal upload of copyrighted material, but everyone's looking the other way for now.  And me, I could use some free stuff today.

Did you miss anything?

It snowed a lot and I did more physical labor than a soft 64-year-old ought to do.

But all I'm doing now is putting in writing (before I forget, again) that just before the big snowfall, BB and I went to the Giant to get her some lemonade.  I walked across the parking lot, went inside, and saw the checkout area was jammed.  Then I realized I'd left my mask in the car.  Nobody said anything, and I don't recall even getting any funny looks.  But I got out as fast as I could and drove home. 

I was listening to Atul Gawande's story from this week's New Yorker when my good girl Schwirley climbed onto the chair arm, and from there, made herself comfortable on my lap.  There she stayed for the next 45 minutes.  She was happy, and I was happy to have a lap cat again.

I have been writing lately, just not here.  Tabby's Place asked me to pinch-hit for Adam's correspondent, so I knocked off the rust, followed my template, and produced around 500 words.  

Template:

1.  Hi  ("(month) greetings to you, and to all (cat's) friends")

2.  Cat's health (After all, that's why they're Special Needs.  Was it a good month?)

3.  Anecdote (Stafford got up, got a drink from the fountain, watched through the baby gate of JR's office and saw someone playing with another cat.  Then back to his bed.  Put a bow of capital-W Writing on it, but make it real to the reader.  Like the Zen/Motorcycle exercise of describing a dime.) 

I always wonder whether anything will happen, but something almost always does, and there's my hook, there's what I'm going to write about.  A UPS deliveryman sits in the lobby and passes time with humans and cats.  A blind woman comes into the Community Room, but describe the scene without saying that she's blind.  White cane, guided to the table by companion, comments on a cat's soft fur, then later, that she's purring now.  Make it clear, but not obvious.

4.  Kicker or Filler, in case the cat was perfectly fine and didn't do anything noteworthy, so there isn't much else to write about.  A reference to some cat-related story in the news.  (Example:  someone who embezzles to support homeless cats.  No, I don't recommend it to TP's donors.)

5.  KTHXBAI (sum up, wrap up, sign off) "Wishing you all good things,"

That's the structure, but feel free to mix it up.  Maybe a pop culture reference in the first paragraph instead of at the end.  Perhaps a plug for some TP's merch.  I play just what I feel.

Just the facts

 Awake at 7:30.  Quality Time with Nelson at 8:00 or so.  Up and into the home office by 8:30.  Break at 10:30 for Special K, nuts, and grapefruit juice with seltzer.  Another break around 3:00.  Came up with the pangram that put us into Genius level in Spelling Bee (outgrown, I think it was). BB had found 29 words, and I picked up the last 2.  An hour later, outside to throw some snow off the main sidewalk and the smaller sidewalk leading to the front door.  But after two feet of snow, it was like trying to mow a lawn of knee-high grass.  15-20 minutes later, inside with wobbly arms and elevated heartbeat. Wrapped up paying work at 5:30 and went downstairs for supper of skinless chicken breast, sliced potatoes done in the Breville toaster oven, and carrots which may also have been done in the Breville.  Very little fat.  Followed with a Dove bar.  Netflix for a half-hour of a Scottish BBC comedy, and the subtitles were absolutely necessary.  Amazon Prime for a half-hour of Yes, Minister.  Maybe 20 minutes of Quality Time with my good girl Good Queen Schwirley.  Back into the home office to tie up loose ends before logging out.  Some YouTube music, and I see there's an abridged pirate version of Blott on the Landscape that was just uploaded.  Months ago, I listened to another pirate upload, that one unabridged, until it got taken down somewhere around Chapter 15. That featured Suchet himself doing the reading.  And finally, after the "Call him Ish Mael" comment on Facebook, I tried a Librivox recording of Moby Dick.  And so to bed, as the other diarist put it.

How does that work?

(1) I read a New Yorker book review of a Mike Nichols biography.  The accompanying photo was from "Virginia Woolf" and showed Nichols, Elizabeth Taylor, and an actor whose face was familiar, but...

(2) Finished the review and next began to read a review of the Sparks documentary.  Quote:  "... everybody has their own entrance-way into Sparks. Mine personally was the film Rollercoaster which you perform in. [Sparks were cast after KISS dropped out of the film.] I was a kid at that point. Did you get to hang out with the cast? George Segal was a prodigious banjo player. Maybe you could have got him on a record."  

Right... George Segal was the other guy in the photo.  

Dialogue

 BB's eye doctor told her that a humidifier was better for eyes than eye drops, which contain chemicals with side effects.  We have a humidifier in the family room and another in the bedroom, so, I told her, there won't be a dry eye in the house.