Your AQI is good. There are fires to the east of you a ways, but the wind is blowing pretty much south to north.
Oof, that’s a toughy. Try this:
I looked in the Yellow Pages for electroplumbers and came up empty handed. So I hit it with a broom handle to break it & drain the water then called an electrician. Boy is he gonna be shocked.
Congrats on doing such a stylish job of surviving your blackout.
@Taters: I’ve forgotten where the family lives. Are they outside KC, or is that a different MMP Mom? In any case, sounds like much fun. Doubly so if dear hubby is a bit of a stick in the mud.
@Chefguy: it’s amazing the stories some geezers can tell. Like you. Like her. You might be surprised how many adventurers live in your place.
As to me.
Thanks one and all for the good wishes.
Good day here. Dentist says all is well & she ground down a teeny sharp spot on my newish lower crowns that had been bugging me. She just loves hearing about the compliments I get on them. Her tail is wagging like mad.
The SFO trip w GF will have 2 nights / 3 days in the Wine Country. I’ve booked a spa experience, horseback riding in the hills & vineyards by a big lake, and a private multi-winery tour. Have 1 more daytime timeslot available. Perhaps hot air ballooning? And of course shopping in the quaint town, fancy CA-style oh-so-trendy healthy dining, and fancier 
.
Meantime cousins are all eager to see me before GF gets there. And again later after we’re back from wine country, but first things first. Oughta be lotta fun.
Back to right now …
The little Spanish tapas place near me has been trying to move a couple blocks to a nicer, larger location for a couple months now. Delays in the buildout kept delaying the cutover. Anyhow they reopened in the new place this weekend and I’m sitting on their patio now enjoying Crianza y Montaditos as the light fades in the west. The staff is real happy: the old location was cramped and kinda ratty. This is neither. Hope like hell they can swing the larger rent.
Cheers to all!
I would certainly be surprised if that were the case. Most of the people who live here have never lived anywhere but MN, nor have they traveled very far from home or done anything adventurous. I know of one couple that was doing missionary work in Haiti until it got too dangerous, but that’s about it.
That’s my main stitching problem. I find something I like and looks impressive and then that’s all I want to do.
I’m glad you are enjoying your cutters, I’m learning about a different thread, Mandarin Floss which is a plied bamboo. It is very nice and I support using sustainable materials. Sadly, it is made in China so I have to not fall in love with it cause of the trump taxes.
Does Spot know that that sort of thing is really food? GG and Jolene do not know that cats eat bugs. The Best Cat in the World would watch the old crabby cat play with a grasshopper he found in the catio for a couple of minutes, then roll his eyes and go over and just eat it.
What a lucky lil girl. She really needed someone like you to help her live her best life.
I used to be one of those rescue folks at PetCo and am here to tell you that those sliding doors were scary for a whole lot of dogs. It was also kinda entertaining to watch the smart dogs walk their leash holders into the glass at times. The dog knew where the door was, the idiot on the end of the leash just wasn’t paying attention.
Remember to come back and tell us all!
I love being a homebody. I have worked all my life to be able to not go out and be with people unless I wanted to.
I loved how your King played our orange troll today. Very skillful, I hope our OT remembers what was said in the morning.
The wood needs to be treated or it will rot from the center. IMHO, do remember that I’m not from these parts, I’m from the middle of the desert. Things might be different where there is lots of water, but I think that would make the problem worse.
Today was housekeeper day for us as well. She actually talked to Hubs. She’s afraid to raise her voice for him so comes to find me and tell me what she wants him to know. I keep telling him to not scare the “help” away, I’m glad he is finally listening to me. (You know how it is, she walks in his room, he doesn’t notice because he’s focused on his game and then uses a soft voice to say “I’m ready to clean here now”. Then she gets scared to bother him again and comes and bothers me when I’m stitching.)
And I just saw how late it was getting. I have read all and do think of all of you often. I’m heading off to cry myself to sleep again.
I had nothing planned for dinner, so I just made grilled hamminswiss sammiches. The Spousal Unit said, ‘Thank you, Sweetie,’ after she finished.
I may not always cook ‘real’ dinners, but at least I can usually come up with something.
Up from naptime. Having a martini and teriyaki chicken stirfry.
Yay!
“Uncooked? Unseasoned? Great Gods, woman, your feline masters must train you better” - Spot
The Aldi 2 miles west of me has a lot more fancy stuff, but the aldi 2 miles east of me is usually 2-3 cents cheaper.
That sounds better than grilled hamminswiss sammiches.
You should have said something, I would have made more.
Alas, The Missus’s stomach has become more sensitive in recent years. She has trouble with green (or red) bell peppers and onions. 
Evening all. Soccer has been coached, gym has been gymed, and garbage and recyclables are at the curb for pickup tomorrow. Getting close to 10pm as I type this so off to bed in a little bit.
Pilot, most of my monthly fixed expenses are direct deposits from my checking, the stuff i use my Credit Cards for are the annual/semi-annual and occasional things, so far I’ve been able to keep up with them. But I agree, prefer typing my CC info on the computer rather than the phone.
Oopsie, glad the power outage was only three hours, last bad one we had lasted 8-9 hours (guy had hit a pole with a major transformer on it) so just managed to get away without having to discard food. Hope the yard is looking nice; probably will get mine done when it comes time for me to move to apartment living again.
rocky, hope you get new elevators sooner rather than later. I think the last elevator i rode with an attendant was…to be truthful, I don’t remember that far back…
Cookie, two hours of smoke detector beeping? Thou has much more patience than I, would have been contemplating homicide within 45 minutes tops. And I’m equally impressed by the lady’s biking journey, that had to be a tough ride, not much flat plains in Alaska from what I could see.
FCM, good news that surgery isn’t needed.
Taters, hope you have a wonderful trip.
swampy, sounds like a good meal and good use of the leftovers.
Pilot, sounds like a great trip to look forward too. If you’ve never been hot-air ballooning I recommend it, only done it once but it was highly memorable (it helped that it was a dawn over the Maisi Maru in Kenya with the great herds of Africa below us).
Great minds think alike, was my post-soccer coaching dinner.
And that’s all for this day. Off to bed shortly and will catch up with y’all tomorrow.
My dinner was leftover rice with chopped up sweet cherry peppers and a slice of seeded bread with orange-ginger marmalade.
My sweetie is pretty fried after spending all day with our neighbor at her house (I gave her an hour off to go home and shower at mid-day), so I came over, too. Neighbor had surgery yesterday and is loopy and in pain, so we can’t wean down the opioids to de-loop her. She’s talkative and hallucinating a little. It would be better if we had been nurses, but at least we were very competent shrinks, and not particularly fazed by caring for someone who’s pretty out of it.
I’m now in her guest room. My lovely wife will sleep in the living room, where our neighbor is on the couch, then wake me up after midnight and I’ll take a turn downstairs.
Then we’ll do this for another day, but we hope tomorrow she can make do with a little less of the good stuff. A friend of hers is coming on Friday, and we have a house guest from Friday evening to Sunday morning. We hope she was able to line up someone to stay with her Saturday. We weren’t expecting to provide 24/7 coverage, nor was she until she was told it was required at her pre-op. Fortunately, as RDOSs, we can accommodate a certain amount of this.
I discovered years ago that if I eat a ‘rice meal’, I literally gained two pounds overnight. Rice is pretty much off the menu. I’ll make it with aspara nikumaki a couple of time a year, and sometimes some nigiri will sneak in; but mostly, no rice.
So interesting. My body has a different response to rice.
Up, caffeinated, and shevled. Off to heave. It’s 61 degrees Ferret Height(16.1 Centipedes).
I can always delete and ad more 'shrooms and green beans.
Bit late in the process to announce that. Glad you could help out, though.
Mornin’ all. It’s windy but relatively sunny today.
I’m waiting with interest to find out what the commute in will be. Last year they opened up a handy new main entrance to irk. This runs from a little slip road off the nearby main road, which also features a back way into the local village and a small layby. This entrance replaced the old one on the other side of the site which required a labyrinthine route through the village from a previous turning.
The next junction on the main road is about 5 miles up the road. If you miss the turning, you have to go alll the way up there and back..
On Moanday, the junction was unexpectedly blocked with a line of cones and a sign saying ‘Layby closed’ but it was just possible to fit in between the cones. No signs saying what was happening or if the junction itself was closed, so I sneaked in the gap.There was no sign of anything happening, just a line of cones. Irk had not been notified of any roadirks, nor was there any indication of any on the council website. Confusion abounded.
Tuesday the cones had been moved to completely block the road- still with a sign saying ‘Layby closed’ and no explanation about what was happening to the junction. It’s normal for laybys to be closed with no warning, but not road junctions. This is especially annoying as they are definitely supposed to inform people of closures in advance (unless it’s an emergency like a tree falling over or somethin’ not the case here) also irk actually had to pay for part of that road (long story).
Yesterday the cones had been moved to block the layby bit but leave the road open- I could just see it, having taken the previous turning to go the back way after the previous day.
I wait with interest to find out what those sneaky little cones are up to today!
Morning, mumpers! It’s currently 17c/63f with a predicted high of 21c/70f and cloudy. Weather app says “The fucking weather is boring. Let’s talk about the fucking amazing gerbil circus I’m creating.” A gerbil circus sounds more organised than my workplace just now.
Mine is mainly the same although laundry tends to happen on a bit more of a schedule when ‘im indoors is working away. He comes home on Thursday night with his dirty laundry, I usually run the washing machine on Saturday when I’ve thrown in my Friday work clothes and my Saturday gym stuff. That means things are dry enough for him to pack on Monday morning before he goes off again, and I can do other laundry (sheets and towels) during the week.
Fingers crossed for her, I hope they can sort her out with a minimum of fuss.
That is an impressive feat, and an excellent cause too! What a remarkable story to hear.
Fabulous! How exciting for you! I hope hubs has a good time with the pups while you’re gone.
I had to leave our NextDoor too, not because of trumpiness but because they were the kind of people who blamed everything on immigrants. Can’t be doing with idiots like that.
JtC I must admit I skipped the news today as it was all going to be full of the doings in Windsor. I put it on pause while I went to do other things, then came back and whizzed straight through to the protests in London instead!
Neighbour is lucky to have such kind people to call on when she needed it, I hope you all get some decent sleep and she is soon feeling better.
The cones are having a little holiday and playing games with the locals?
Yesterday was a good day, I had a day off irk so I did a few things that I needed to do, tended to the cats and also went to the pub with my friends. Since I had to go to campus on an unscheduled day, I swapped to work at home today which meant I got a lie-in this morning too.
I was up before the alarm went off, fed the cats and changed the litter trays before having a cuppa and logging in to work stuff. A few little skip fires to deal with but nothing major. The strike ballot finally resolved at no strike action next week, and to look at strikes during the first week of teaching. Not the result I wanted, but it will have to do. I’ve got two days off next week, and two the following week as I’d got time I needed to take before leave year ends on 30th September.
Today will be a catch-up day, then I need to work out what food I’m taking to campus tomorrow, and later I’ll collect ‘im indoors from the station.
In other news, after her brief flirtation with fuss yesterday, Muffin has come out of her corner and has settled on her blankie which is beside my desk here at home. She also ventured outside the room for the first time, only as far as the landing but it’s another small step in the right direction.
Good Mornin’ Y’all! Up and caffeinatin’. YAWN ‘Tis 65 Amurrkin out and sunny with a predicted high of 89 and sunny. The big item on today’s agenda is mowage which will be accomplished this mornin’. The rest of the day will be spent in high RDOS inactivities. Sup will be leftovers from Tuesday’s sup.
Pilot sounds like you have quite the romantic getaway planned.
BooFae yay for more Muffin/Miffin progress. Actually goin’ out of the room is a big step for her.
Nuts I look forward to more tales of the cone shenanigans.
Now I need more caffeine and to feed rumbly tummy. Then, mowage awaits! Woo and Hoo.
Happy Thursday Y’all!
I’m pretty sure when I started working for my dad, the elevator in their ancient building was “operated” - that would have been ca 1970. But by the time I left in '73, it was DIY.
Yeah. This will be the next couple of months:
Today is grand opening day for the new Aldi in Charlotte Hall. The other one is about 15 miles from me - the new one is 8 or 9 miles away, so it will be my go-to most of the time. They’re giving out goodies to the first 100 folks in line - I don’t plan to be one of those, but I do want to try to be there when they open. If the lot looks too crowded, I’ll do Food Lion first, then go back. And if my timing is right, I can get to the thrift store on my way back and get FCD the next size smaller jeans. He’s shed 40# so far and his newest jeans are close to falling off his butt.
As an aside, his account on myfitnesspal dot com seems to have lost the last 2 months of input. It shows mid-June entries, then nothing till today. Weird! Not that it matters a whole lot - I mainly use it to be sure he doesn’t overeat, plus it has a nifty weight-tracking graph. Well, nifty when the last 2 months isn’t a straight line that plummets 20#. Very bizarre.
After my grocery run, well, dunno. If the sun comes out as promised, I may pull some weeds - after all the rain, they should come out easily, right? We’ll see.
Meanwhile, onward!! Happy Thursday!
Mornin’ all - Gray & intermittently drippy here. But warm: 78/25 now and 85/30 later. But intermittent rain all day.
Today’s activities are a haircut, a yak with a pilot pal, and pack for tomorrow’s pre-dawn departure from home for the airport.
Turns out hot air ballooning won’t work, at least not this time. The closest source is too far a drive from where we’re staying, it starts real early, and so on. So just a bit tooo impractical, given that one of our major goals is simply to get her enough sleep each of the nights. She’s been running real hard for 6 weeks now; the Europe trip was fun, but her friends had packed the itinerary with zero downtime and 5 hours allotted for sleeping each night. I’m careful not to make that mistake. Going forward, it isn’t that hard for us to travel, so we don’t need to pack each day full; we can come back another time for the other 8 hours a day of jam-packed “fun”.
@JaneDoe42: I’ve settled on greeting the housekeepers when they arrive, pointing out anything special they ought to do today, then leaving immediately for breakfast. They’ll be here an hour, and it takes me longer than that to go, eat, and return. Which I was going to do anyhow. Sometimes I leave shortly before they arrive.
That avoids me being underfoot. Even when I tell them I’m happy to move so they can clean where I am at the moment, it’s still a delicate and reticent dance; I suspect many (most?) of their customers aren’t very nice. And/or are tiresome micromanagers.
As to groc lists, I’ve never tried to sort them in store order, even back when I was doing basket-filling trips. Between no two stores being in the same order, etc., I found it easiest then to just “stitch” up and down each aisle from one side of the store to the other. Maybe skipping the soda/snacks aisle or the pet/baby aisle or the frozen food aisle where I knew there was nothing like that on my list.
Nowadays when I do mini-groc runs with 2 items usually, and ~4 items max, it doesn’t much matter what order they’re written in; I can glance at the list and plot my course through the store on the fly. As GF and I transition to a more shared living arrangement I expect we’ll both be going back to cooking more, and hence groccing more. That’ll be an interesting test of compatibility; both the cooking and the shopping.
Would it surprise anyone here in the audience if I told you that HL’s method of grocery shopping was solidly 90 degrees off anything I’d consider rational? And was utterly non-negotiable, even if I was the one doing the shopping & she was just tagging along?
About time for my phone appointment w pal. Cheers all and happy Thorsday!!
That’s my routine. I mostly mosey down all the aisles except the ones where I know I don’t need anything. If I have a list, it’s in no particular order, but I do scratch things off as I pick them up. I think I need to find today’s list, now that I think of it…
I’ll be heading out shortly. I suddenly have the feeling that Aldi will be stoopit crowded - I may have to skip it till another day. We’ll just see when I head that way. I’ll probably gas up the car, too - I’m down to half a tank!!! 
I tend to fill between half and quarter, just because.
OK, off to find the list and inventory the pantry.