Back yard, late afternoon, the day after a foot of snow

What do you have to say for yourself?

Getting done what has to be done, whether it's getting PG to her medical appointments, keeping the household chores up to date, or fulfilling my duty as a citizen by reporting to the court house and making myself available for a jury.  Well, the last one wasn't necessary, as word came down this afternoon that those scheduled to report tomorrow morning were no longer required to show up.  Can't say I'm sorry for that, since PG has two appointments on Wednesday and another one Thursday morning, and I need to drive her to them.  

Trying to appreciate each day as it happens.  I saw it put in a different way:   if you count on a bad situation resolving quickly, or if you lose hope and feel that a bad situation will never get better, it can break you.  One day at a time, or The New Normal, is the least likely to send someone into the abyss.

Satisfied with the new mini-trampoline so far.  I was on it for 25 minutes today; five minutes here, 8 a little later, then 12 late in the day.  Anything to keep me from rotting, immobile, through the weeks of winter.  One thing I have to unlearn is that when I'm relaxed, I tend to close my eyes, which is bad for balance on the rebounder.

Besides that, by end of day, I had done some charting of one old videotape; I practiced my instrument or watched/listened to instrument-related videos for about an hour; and did the chores that needed to be done. 

Tomorrow, nothing on the schedule since jury duty is out.  Let's see how disciplined I am then.  

Winter weather and its effects

Lousy weather making it too hard to go for a walk, and I was not looking forward to two or three months of that.  Then I got a Facebook Messenger message from a family member that showed someone demonstrating a mini-trampoline, or as they call it, a "rebounder."  Stationary bikes and treadmills are too heavy and take up too much space, and besides they're out of my budget range.  But I did some research and decided on a $409 model that had a 15% discount for the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  That ought to get me through the winter without becoming dangerously sedentary.

Getting better at getting things accomplished:  "What's the next action?" comes to mind, or as they like to say where I get my music lessons, you eat an elephant one bite at a time.  Now, some Christmas decorations are up in the family room, there's a timer on the wreath lights above the fireplace, and electric candles with LED lights are in place in the downstairs street-facing windows.  Maybe Friday I'll work on one room upstairs.  Then, another one.  And so on.

Time to do something

PG has been less than 100%.  Last Friday, the PCP sent her to the ER, although a CT scan found nothing serious and sent her home four hours later.

Music lessons were going steady until PG became ill.  Now there are more important things.

Even though PG is improving, her health plus an outbreak of ringworm at TP has me reluctant to go.  Did manage to write this month's Kitten Fund letter.  Next month, though?

I do some reading; a little French and a little English, so there's still that.  But the past few days -- after turning the clocks back -- the 5:00 p.m. sunset and an early taste of wintry temperatures, compounded by 15-20 mph winds, make the customary afternoon walk undesirable.  

Leaves quite a lot of time to do something... I've been doomscrolling, playing solitaire, playing Strat, wasting time.  Time to do something, but what?

Late night visitor

On the wall of my bathroom, a drain fly, also commonly known as a moth fly.  Not a good sign.

Something's leaking somewhere in the plumbing and giving these something to live on. Oh boy.

 

Fatal accident

Yesterday morning, at about 11:15 I began driving to Tabby's Place.  Four miles later, I saw a line of cars and their red tail lights on the part of Route 309 that connects to I-78.  Fortunately, the long line hadn't reached the Cedar Crest exit, and neither had I.  

Shortly before, a 20-year-old guy on a motorcycle had been boxed in the middle lane behind a semi slowly climbing a hill.  The motorcyclist tried zipping into the fast lane to get around it, but clipped the semi and rebounded into an Escalade that was already there.  All this at high speed.  

One news report said the accident had been reported at about 9:45, and a different source said the young man was pronounced dead at the scene at 11:15.  

When I took the Cedar Crest exit, I stopped in the parking lot of a medical building and checked local news sources plus a map/traffic app.  After collecting those facts, I understood that the road would be closed for some time (in the end, it was two hours), and turned around and went back home.  

Thoughts While Scrolling

Barclays US?  Or Barclay Sus?  

What do you think?  Is it AI or not?  Looks like he has a normal amount of fingers, but rescuing children in uniform and the "Dodgers quarterback" description make me wonder...

A long day

Swirly's been under the weather, up one day, down the next, and after the past weekend Pat and I wanted to take her right away this morning to our usual vet. Trouble was, they said they were completely booked for the day.

We went to one of the 24-hour vets they recommended, and within minutes of getting there, Swirly was checked over and triaged, and we all sat down to wait our turn. Then a person arrived whose dog was having seizures. Then a couple walked in with an old dog with difficulty breathing.

It took longer than anyone would have wanted, but staff members kept us informed throughout, so we never felt like saying "Remember us?" Eventually we and Swirly were taken back to an exam room, and after they took a closer look, they found one bladder stone stuck to her fur, and more still inside. Vital signs good, no damage to kidneys, but a UTI in progress.

She's staying overnight with an operation scheduled for tomorrow, and we should be able to pick her up before the end of the day. Jack and Jennie loaned us one of their dog enclosures on short notice, which will really help with our Good Queen's recovery. 

Forget it

The internet is forever.  Even irrelevant little online journals like this.

Which is why I'm giving no details of a meeting PG and I had this afternoon.  That's the when, but nothing else.  Not the who, the what, the where, the why, and not even the how.  

Maybe 20 years ago I would have put it all down in black and white, and never mind the consequences.  At 68, I'm less adventurous. 

It was a totally mundane, yet stressful scene.  Anyway, it's over.  This, I can forget.

At least, I hope so.

Calls

Calls all day... along with the usual spam callers who wouldn't leave a message, there were calls from PG's dentist office, her sister-in-law, three calls from the pharmacy with status updates on a prescription, along with a call we made to one of her specialists to postpone a scheduled appointment due to a time conflict.  

In between, PG rested, which with prescription meds helped keep her pain level manageable.  We're waiting for test results from last week and when they are posted, we will see what options are available next.

Look out

 

Down it goes, too

Remember that red maple we planted on April 14?  Here's a good close look at it now.  Rabbits?  The missing parts were seemingly too tall for a rabbit to reach them.  But something nibbled them off.

Down it goes

At 8:00 this morning, work began on roof replacement of our next-door neighbor's house.  Good Cat Nora has her eyes on the workers as they strip away the 25-year-old shingles and roofing paper.

Outside looking in

Good Queen Swirly makes the acquaintance of the visiting neighbor cat from a respectful distance.  The little moocher was here to eat breakfast early this morning, again for a mid-morning feeding, and showed up late this afternoon to ask for another meal.
 

A Good Day

I baked a cinnamon streusel coffee cake early this afternoon.  Then, went to Costco for one or two things and came home with four or five.  (The eggs were $5.79, but that was for a dozen and a half; the Diamond Crystal salt was 37 cents a pound; the pint of Kirkland vanilla, as yet unaffected by the Trump tariffs, was $10; and the Kerry Gold butter and the Rao's marinara sauce both had sale prices that put them below those on supermarket shelves (less than $6 a pound for the former and less than $5 a quart jar for the latter).  

As mentioned above, the coffee cake was made with cinnamon, but our open container of Kirkland (again) cinnamon, although it contained enough for the cake, was at a low level that made it difficult to reach with a measuring spoon.  The answer was readily at hand, though.  

Both PG and I save glass jars just for occasions like this.  There's a shelf in the pantry that holds a dozen or more jelly jars, home canning jars, and other glass containers, and from the stack I picked out one that had held Bonne Maman preserves.  

Maybe a visitor would wonder, but maybe not, if they understood that's how both of us were raised.  Our mothers and fathers had to quit school in their early teens and were thereafter blocked from high-paying jobs, which is why they insisted that their children get as much education as possible.  My mother said again and again that when you had an education, nobody could take it away from you.  

I got there in a roundabout way, which I can attribute to being the first in the family to go to college, but the inexperience that led me to take the scenic route on the road to a diploma also resulted in lasting memories of interesting detours.  That was back when a young person and average student could pay for college with federal grants without signing up for student loan debt.  Any advice I might give now based on that era is as out of date as cookbooks from the 19th Century.

Supper was homemade pizza, washed down with Pepsi, which I've otherwise given up to keep my blood sugar score out of triple digits.  It tasted terrific.  I'll be craving it for days to come.  

Rather than buy Pepsi in bulk, which would be a mighty temptation, I got two cold 20-ounce bottles at Wawa.  The price was $2.59 each, or two 20's for $4.00.  (Don't want to forget that I saw a caramel Lindt bar at Wawa and picked one up for PG.)

That's enough detail about the past day.  Time to go upstairs.

Still at it

Just nothing particularly noteworthy these days.  I'll know it when I see it, and then I'll write about it.

Change of view

June 15, 2024

February 28, 2025

 

Don't ask...

A day in a hospital, a day visiting the TP cats, and then three days down with some kind of virus.  Still hacking, but appetite is coming back, as is energy.

Sunday morning, I woke up in a dark bedroom.  It was darker than usual because the power had gone out.  The electric company's website said the reason for the outage was unknown, but that it would be back online by 10:00 a.m., or eight hours later.  It was hard to get back to sleep, so my eyes were closed when it came back on at 2:35.  At that time, PG's iPad lit up, making the room bright enough to get through my closed eyelids.

There is this...

The headline read, "Coke’s $7 Billion Bet on Milk Hits Big, But Wall Street Wants More".  Turns out all that expensive Fairlife brand milk in the dairy section belongs to Coca-Cola, Inc.  

QUOTE:  "Fairlife filters its milk to boost protein, reduce sugar by half and eliminate lactose, while also, according to fans, being creamier."  

And this: "Despite being about three times the price of traditional milk, retail sales topped $1 billion in 2022."  I was at Wegmans today and can confirm that.  $2.42 for a half-gallon of whole milk, or $1.21 a quart, and the Fairlife on the shelf just above it was going for $3.30 a quart.  

But here's what got me:  "The US milk industry...has been facing declining demand for decades as kids aged out sooner and cereal’s popularity waned.  US per capita milk consumption has sunk nearly 30% since 2010."  Also during that time: "Since 2000, data analyzed by Beverage Digest, a trade publication, shows that the total amount of soft drinks consumed each year in the US has sunk by 37%."  

Well, my weight and blood sugar levels have forced me to cut way back on soda, so that last part is understandable, but I've been a fan of whole milk ever since grade school, when it came in half-pint cardboard containers and cost 2 cents.  Here it is, 60 years later, and I'm still drinking whole milk, putting it on my cereal and making homemade pudding with it.  For all I know, 2 cents in 1965 dollars is worth 30 cents a half-pint today.  (However, now the president wants to stop minting pennies, and I'm with him on that.)

Would you rather...?

Going into unemployment retirement from my job, I put together a list of activities that I wanted to retire to.  That consisted of (1) Tabby's Place (a) socializing cats, (b) taking pictures of them, and (c) writing about the Kitten Fund; (2) reading Le Monde and other French print, along with some audio; (3) beginning online drumming lessons through Musora/Drumeo.

Of those 3 activities, what would I rather do?  I believe the order is (1a), (1b), (1c), (3), and (2).

When I have a card of fresh photos, I would rather download them and start the process than anything else.  Download them, tag them (name, suite, color(s), Tabby's Place), move them from the Camera Download folder in Dropbox to the applicable year and month folder.  Use SyncBack to make a backup copy.  The uploading program, whether Dropbox, ACDSee, or FastStone, will change the name of the file from the card to the usual YY-MM-DD HH.MM.SS format.  

When they are all tagged and filed, I would rather go through the images and decide which to keep and which to pitch.  It's not as fun as baking chocolate chip cookies, but I would rather do that and then do the basic editing (straighten, crop, white balance, color EQ, touchup) than baking or any other experience I enjoy.  In a way, I'm not satisfied until the whole process is finished, in a way I'm anxious that somehow all those photos will go away forever if they're not backed up at once.

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When all of the above is done and I've completed the upload to Flickr, my next favorite activity is the monthly supporter letter for the Kitten Fund.  Writing is only enjoyable when I feel like I have something to write about; I briefly wrote descriptions of the adoptable cats, but if I didn't know the cat, I didn't know what to say, and getting to know the cat required multiple visits.  By the time I felt ready to write, I learned that the cat might have been adopted .  So, I dropped that role.  

When I'm responsible for a supporter letter, I always have one eye and one ear open for next from TP about the cat(s).  If someone posts in Slack some images of the kitten(s) they're caring for, I make a copy of the picture and any text that could be used as a quote.  I take notes when I visit, which is usually 2-3 times a month.  At the end of the month, I have a large stock of material, and the only difficulty is whittling it down to 500 words and 5 pictures.  

The structure is (1) Greeting (2) Health update (3) Anecdote (4) Pop culture cat reference, if needed (5) KTHXBAI.  When thanking the supporter, I want to tie it to some other element of the letter, whether the health or the anecdote, and I'd like to make it like -- and this will probably be out of left field for you -- the closet gag from Fibber McGee and Molly.  

They didn't always use it in an episode, but when they did, it wasn't always in the same scene each time, there wasn't a long setup, and they masked it until they wanted to spring it.  Just a scene, they're talking about something relevant to the story, they want something, oh it's in the hall closet BOOM CRASH AVALANCHE TINKLE.  I'm guessing that they learned that it worked better if the audience didn't see it coming from a mile away.  Quick setup, so it's as much of a surprise as possible for a running gag.

I'm telling a story about what one of the kittens did, or giving information about a kitten's health, and then the next sentence explains the need for funds to pay for the medical care or the overhead so the kitten is safe and maybe even happy.  Thank you for helping us do that.  Quick and natural, and it doesn't stick out.

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I would rather do something drumming-related than French language-related.  Reading French becomes tiring quickly, although I've learned enough vocabulary and grammar to be able to read a story and only need to look up the occasional unfamiliar word or idiom.  It reminds me of the TiVo, which has a dozen or more films that have been waiting for me to commit 90-120 minutes of my remaining life to give them the attention they deserve.  It reminds me of the unopened books on my bookshelf, books purchased with the best of intentions.  It reminds me of the 50 videos in my YouTube watchlist.  It reminds me of the dozens of bookmarks in the browser.  It reminds me of the innumerable PDFs in a Dropbox folder labeled "You saved this for a reason."  

If I thought of drumming in that way, I'd probably avoid it, too.  But drumming is like short attention span theatre for me, like the short bursts of Twitter/Bluesky/Facebook posts.  It's not that I can't concentrate, but at any given time there are things that I would rather do than others.  I would rather feel like I'm doing a lot of small tasks that add up to an achievement, than to work on one big project.