Well, it was an eventful week, and that was in a good way except for one thing.
Tuesday, since we had an early appointment at physiotherapy, we went to Trader Joe's afterward. Since James has been making real oatmeal daily, we are using maple syrup regularly. It's very expensive, especially if you want the robust flavor ($22/quart at Publix), so we have been trying to buy it at one of the clubs (Costco, etc.). Unfortunately the syrup comes in jugs (like old-fashioned moonshine jugs), and the pour tops on them are terrible; they
never screw back on properly after you remove the foil tab from the top of the jug so that the spout faces "front" (pour spout is opposite the jug handle), no matter how you screw them on. They always face back toward the handle. So we have been refilling the Trader Joe's maple syrup container, which has a pour top that faces "front" properly. Unfortunately a couple of days ago one of us tossed the Trader Joe's container, so we'd hoped to get another.
Sigh...except Trader Joe's has changed their containers and now use a jug, too. I just gave up and ordered a mason jar type 1-quart pouring container from Amazon. This way we can see how much is left as well.
We'd planned to go up to Canton for pizza and a book fix on Thursday, with a side trip to BJs before the coupons expire; I decided at the last minute that it really wouldn't be good for James at this point to put a big load of sodium in his system, and there are enough books, so we ended up going only to BJs. While I was there I saw a little (11 inch) Chromebook for just a little over $100. I've been looking for something that I can write on for certain situations while we're out (James is at physiotherapy or getting an iron infusion), so I grabbed the last one, only to find out it was out of stock. So I ordered one from BJs.com when I got home.
Glad we watched all the Law & Order iterations that evening, since what happens next week may affect a story I'm working on. (Am I in too deep with this stuff or what?)
Friday I tackled some small clean-up things that had been neglected. I finally finished up scrubbing all the things that had been in the birdcage as well as the cage frame itself. It went very slowly and was emotionally draining. The other thing was dusting/cleaning off the space heater in the master bathroom for the season and covering it in plastic. This came as a figurative shock: the plug for the space heater was fused to the plug for the heavy-duty timer with some brownish-black stuff. Both are now in the electronics recycling bin. It's been fine on that timer for several years, so I can only assume the space heater was to blame. We have to have something in there, because it gets terribly cold in there in the winter.
The last thing I did on Friday was to sign up for Philo. This will replace Dish, and, although we will lose TCM, we will actually gain a lot of channels we lost by going down to the Flex Pack, like Animal Planet, BBC America, Science Channel, Destination America, and Sundance all the time rather than on monthly previews. Best of all it's $25 versus $84.
Saturday the first thing I did was pack up the two blue bags that the mail carrier had left earlier. They do a food drive every year. I pulled a lot of higher-sodium items out of the closet and bookcase downstairs, double-bagged it inside leftover Kroger bags, and hung it on the mailbox post. Seriously, they do the food drive in May and expect you to leave the bags on the ground. Sure, expect the nice people who get the food from the food bank to get stuff with ants in them.
James spent the afternoon in his "Man Cave"; I put on a podcast and posted a short piece on A03/FF.net, then girded my loins and called Dish to cancel. I was very surprised, because I'd heard these horror stories on "The Tech Guy" about people calling Spectrum and Frontier and the cable companies and getting these hard-sell please-stay-with-us people badgering them. The guy offered me three things, including one thing where you "park" your account for five dollars a month! But he was very polite, and never at any time gave me a problem. So, after 27 years we are done with Dish.
In the late afternoon I fished the shutters out of the garage and put them on the sidelights on the front door. It isn't pretty, but I thought it did a good job last year of keeping the electric bill down.
Mother's Day was very lazy. James always buy me a gift on Mother's Day because he says I'm a dog mom (and was a budgie mom), so my gift has been sitting on the back of the sofa for about two weeks. I always get him a Father's Day gift for the same reason. He expressed an interest in a book and movie called First Light, about a flyer during the Battle of Britain, so I found a good used copy of the book online (a new copy was $57!) and it turned out to be delivered today. So we exchanged gifts. (I got Catherine Friend's book Sheepish, a sequel to her Hit by a Farm, about a city girl who trades pavement in for soil.)
Spent a good deal of time rearranging the channels on the Roku box. Since we will now get our "cable channels" through Philo, I have that first on the menu. I also deleted the Dish-only Roku services because I can't sign into them anymore. Plus I looked through the channels to see what interesting things are on which channel. For instance, they did a film of Madeleine L'Engle's book Camilla Dickinson. It's on both TubiTV and on Filmrise. There are also short (about sixty minutes each) films based on about a dozen of the "Dear America" books; those are on Filmrise. Stir of Echoes, a paranormal film with Kathryn Erbe, is available on Tubi. (We keep Tubi around because they carry Jonny Harris' stand up series, Still Standing.) I found the Ion channel (which occasionally shows the early Law & Order: SVU episodes) on several services. And a 1948 film based on the BBC's radio series Paul Temple is on one of the "Cozy Mystery" channels.
I also bought Peacock for the year (cheaper per month), which should cover me through almost all of Law & Order next year.
The sobering thing was finding out a friend was in the hospital again, this time with tachycardia. She won't have any news until Monday.
Labels: electronics, errands, events, television
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