Well, it was a diverse weekend, that's for sure.

Thursday we decided to go to Patak's Meats. We were, we declared, not going to buy a lot, just some mortadella and more Italian sausage and maybe some stew beef. Well, James wanted pastrami, too, and the chicken wings looked good, and he bought some bulk breakfast sausage, too. Luckily this is dirt cheap (at least compared to the grocery stores) at Patak's. We also ran into someone we know: Christy, who used to be the daycare person who cared for our friends' sons Neil and Colin for so many years. I thought she looked familiar when she said hi, and then she said hi to James, who blinked and said hi back; she smiled and said, "Don't you know me?" It was too funny: we are so used to seeing her at Ron and Lin's house it took a minute to click! And we spent the time waiting gabbing about the new Cystic Fibrosis drug that could be such a blessing for Colin, and about how much we love Patak's. It's like a meat candy store. (Christy likes Lidl as well!)

Oh, Pataks had all their Christmas goodies out already: stollen and liebkuchen [sp?] and big boxes of petit fours, candies, special sauces, condiments, jellies, jams... Almost wanted to start singing Christmas carols!

We hit Publix for BOGOs on the way home, and then I had to busy myself: I'd found boneless pork ribs on sale at Kroger on Tuesday and they needed to be cooked up, so spent the afternoon monitoring a nice pot of gravy, which simmered sweetly and gave the house a lovely tomato scent, and we had one portion with macaroni for supper and put two other meals away, one in the refrigerator and one in the freezer.

Thankfully all that was already put away when I had an intestinal annoyance and didn't think I would sleep much, but it let me get seven hours of sleep before cutting back in again about 7:30 a.m. So I was not feeling too "swuft" when morning came, and we blew off going to lunch. I wouldn't have gone out at all, but it was spoiling for rain and if it did rain James couldn't take the power chair to Kaiser, needing my assistance.

And indeed it was raining when we emerged from the house about quarter to one. We just popped the handicapped parking sticker into the car and I drove out to Kaiser Glenlake, where he had an appointment with the wound clinic. Luckily we found a parking space outside the front door instead of in the garage; I could run into the vestibule and find a wheelchair so I could push him through the building.

Alas, the blisters are healing, but not to the nurse practitioner's satisfaction. She put colloidial silver pads on the remnants of the two wounds, wrapped James' leg in compression bandages, told him not to get it wet, and he'll have to come back next Friday (and for two successive Fridays if it doesn't heal). Gah.

We salvaged the day by coming home by Trader Joe's and stocking him up on pumpkin fruit bars until next year (they have them only in the fall), and also stopped by Walgreens to get him a plastic cast cover. (I also found a nifty long metal shoehorn—James has never been satisfied with other thin metal or plastic ones we've bought—that he figures would make a deadly weapon if you could sharpen it, the metal is that sturdy!)

Today was rather fun. We had spent all of Friday afternoon and evening making chicken cacciatore thighs slow cooked in the Instant Pot for today's Hair Day, otherwise the Lin and Ron Butler Tonsorial Occasion/Lunch Club/Computer Tutorial Day. 😁 The latter is not a usual event. We arrived at the house to find Lin had invited a former co-worker to Hair Day, a sweet lady named Ruth who is 88 and who still works typing out "tickets" at David Gibson's law office. Ruth is very non-computer savvy, but someone had given her a laptop and she wanted to learn how to play movies on it; she had bought a portable DVD player to attach to it for that purpose. So while we were waiting for the chicken to get hot again, I popped open the laptop and had trouble getting the DVD player to work (it was plugged into a USB port it would not work with; it successfully worked on another USB port, so we labeled everything for her). Well, I thought initially the DVD player might not be working because it needed software, and opening File Manager found out the poor machine only had 63MB left on a [very small] 28GB hard drive. This meant I wouldn't even be able to install VLC on it for her to watch movies.

So anyway, the chicken got warm enough, James made me a dish of chicken and elbow macaroni, and I managed to delete enough stuff off it, and then Alex took over, and we managed to get it up to 5GB free and that was it, which means she can't even do Windows updates! We were ruthless: removed all extra browsers, anything she wasn't going to use (besides seeing movies she wanted to search for recipes online and read the news, all doable in Microslop Edge) and Windows was still taking up 80 percent of the 28GB. Sigh. I did load VLC, and we did show her how to use the DVD drive and she took dutiful notes, so I hope we were helpful!

In the meantime Juanita passed around little books for us to write notes in to send to Aaron Lawson in Wyoming and Colin up in Salem, MA (I bet he has fun this week!) to tell them we miss them.

We left about two o'clock, brought the leftover chicken home (everyone liked it, but I think it would have been better done in the oven; it would have been more difficult to cook, but I think the flavor would have been richer), and then took the chance and went to the Fall Jonquil Festival. It was heavily overcast all day and rained occasionally, and we thought we'd had it for a few minutes as we rolled past the booths and it sprinkled madly on us, but the actual rain managed to hold off. Smack Yo Mama barbecue sauce was there, so we got three bottles; the arthritis in James' hands is so bad he threw in the towel and decided to try a small jar of ointment with CBD oil in it; he bought a jar of very delicious cherry jam; and I got a little jar of espresso honey (and, oh goodness, is it coffee flavored!). We skipped sampling the dips this time, and have so much blackberry honey in the cupboard that I didn't buy a fresh one this time.

Of course the booths were mostly crafts: saw some very pretty gemstone jewelry, paintings, creations by The Button Girl, etc., and I was so tempted by a stained glass booth. They have all sorts of designs, but I was the most taken by a little window-shape of glass rectangles about 4x3 inches in a sort of Mondrian pattern—inexplicably it reminded me of Ste. Anne's Church in Fall River, MA. At the rear of the church they had tacked on rest rooms sometime mid-century (since when the church was originally built I'm sure there were still privies in the rear), and so there was still an outside stained glass window near the rest rooms, left there when they had bumped out that portion of the structure, at a level where you could touch the thick stained glass pieces leaded into patterns in the window. I used to love to run my fingers over the cold, smooth pieces of primary colored glass, bright ruby and emerald and gold, and these smaller squares of iridescence in the stained glass rectangle just brought that all back.

Then, very tired, we came home, had a light supper, and wandered about on the television dial from Good Eats to Keeping Up Appearances.

Labels: computers, food, friends, gatherings, health, shopping, sickness, television, weather

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