 Nostalgia, DVDs, old movies, television, OTR, fandom, good news and bad, picks, pans, cute budgie stories, cute terrier stories, and anything else I can think of. Contact me at theyoungfamily (at) earthlink (dot) net . . . . . . . . . .
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» Sunday, December 08, 2024
Christmas and Treatments Trickle In
 Well, it was a bad week for medical solutions for James.Dr. Connally was very firm that she wanted James to undergo some kind of aquatherapy, so on Tuesday we went to the place where he would have the therapy. This turned out to be a swanky retirement home that included a fancy dining hall with white tablecloths, flowers on the table, and Muzak; a little coffee shop type place, meeting rooms, a big gym, and a huge pool with a lift. The therapist was very nice and said because James had trouble walking he would probably be better off going to their other location (on Dallas Highway) because their pool has only stairs and the Dallas Highway pool has a ramp. She said she was very confident that, especially once James had the "cement" in his vertebrae, the aquatherapy would help him regain some mobility. Except he can't have the aquatherapy now because he has the permacath and it might get wet, even though he's only going into the pool waist-high. Which we kinda figured. Then we saw Dr. Connally on Thursday. She was pissed off that James hadn't had the "cement" yet, as she had ordered that something be done immediately. James thought she was being unrealistic. I've managed to rouse minimal interest in decorating for Christmas inside this week. On Wednesday I cleaned out the foyer of Thanksgiving decorations, ditto with the dining room and other bits of upstairs, and then later in the week did the foyer, and then the gingerbread-and-candy cane kitchen decorations and the dining room old-fashioned feather tree and the "1910 tree." I put up what was left over in the dining room boxes on the media bookcase in the living room. In useful things, I got and used bolts to fix the hand truck (the last time I tried to use it, a whole bolt and nut were missing—how?—and another bolt was missing its nut), and also dropped off two full shopping bags of toys for Toys for Tots. I cleaned my desktop keyboard. I got my car inspected so I could renew my registration. I've tested out the Christmas tree; there are still lights out on it. I don't feel like putting it up at all. Labels: chores, Christmas, Christmas decorations, donations, exercise, health, illness  » Sunday, November 10, 2024
The Turn of Events
We saw our first Christmas lights Monday night, November 4! I love Christmas decorations, guys! But, too early!Tried to avoid election coverage on Tuesday by watching a movie, but after the film curiosity got the better of us and we stayed up until midnight watching the returns. I will admit I am not happy, although I disliked both candidates. When your new "leader" nominates an anti-vaxxer to run a health organization there is something wrong. Our parents worshiped the ground Drs. Salk and Sabin walked on, because their children were not crippled, were not confined to an iron lung, did not die from polio, all because of vaccines. Smallpox was a dreadful thing. Just not right. Chores for the rest of the week, and a visit to Dr. Salazar on Friday ended the week. We had not yet seen the orders for the tests, but he assured us they were in the system. So Saturday was a very busy day: we were up early to get in line for free electronics recycling day. Yay, that stupid microwave James keeps barking his leg on is gone. Also my venerable vacuum cleaner, which gave me much joy. The new one works wonderfully, but it's still too heavy. Then we had Hair Day and got to see Mel and Phyllis! We nipped home afterward for a meal (James made pork chops and we ate at three), and then went to Kaiser Townpark. James had two CT scans starting at 5:40, and then we had to wait the hour until his 8 p.m. MRI. It was a relief to get home. It was chilly and cloudy on Sunday, such wonderful weather! Tucker and I had a long walk, me clad in my favorite fabric, flannel! Later I put up the upstairs and foyer Thanksgiving decorations Labels: Christmas, election, events, exercise, friends, health, sickness, Thanksgiving, weather » Sunday, September 01, 2024
Breathing Rarefied Air
As the kids today say, I "did a thing." I was deathly in fear of doing this "thing" because it involved leaving James alone for the day. Make no mistake, he is much stronger and fitter than he was when he got out of the hospital at the end of June. But he still doesn't feel stable enough on his feet, mostly due to his back and knee pain, to go back to a cane or even back to where he was months ago just walking slowly and making sure he has touchpoints. He still relies on the rolling walker we got from Kaiser, but he's been using it to get around the kitchen much better—if still painfully—to the point where he can even wash a pan or two to start prepping. When I told him what I wanted to do, he said, "Go ahead, do it. I want you to do it. You need the break and you deserve it." He even went on Amazon and ordered a tray/storage compartment that fit on the top of the walker so I didn't have to help him transport the parts of his breakfast anymore (the egg plate or the burritos, the tea, the oatmeal, and the smoothie drink). He kept repeating "I will be fine." I was still paranoid, especially about what if he had a fall or had chest pains that didn't go away with nitroglycerin. To assuage that, I made sure the chair lift seat wasn't blocking the door and left a house key hidden on the porch, then told him to keep his phone on him at all times. If he had to call 911, hopefully he could tell them where the key was and they could get in without damaging the door. So I did it. From the moment that I saw Vincent D'Onofrio was going to be at DragonCon, I wanted to be there. We haven't gone since 2019, and, although I miss it, I don't miss the crowds, the constant noise, the crowds, the heat between the hotels, the crowds, the long wait for elevators since James is in the power chair, the crowds...well, you get it. I'm homesick for it, because DragonCon has been an alternate "home" for years, with a bunch of people I adore who I only see mainly there (the BritTrack people, the Trek Track folks, the sci-fi lit panel regulars, etc.). I miss them. So I bought a Sunday membership and bought a photo op (it's a very early birthday gift to myself). Alice did offer me to loan me her badge on Saturday (which would have been naughty, but...) while she watched the Georgia football game, but I decided against it (but thanked her copiously). She reminded me to get parking in advance, which I did (and it turned out I didn't need to, as there was plenty of space on Sunday at less than I paid for pre-paid, but...better safe than sorry, as everyone's mom has said at least once). We made it down to the wire with James neither having a fall or chest pains by Saturday night. Thursday night I was feeling guilty and said to him, "Maybe I should have gotten you a Sunday membership," thinking he could have wandered about while I was doing my fangirl thing. But just going for an echocardiogram, eating out at Pacific Buffet, and stopping at Barnes & Noble had wiped him out that day, and he demurred. Sunday morning, after not a lot of sleep due to anxiety, I was up at 7:30. My backpack was already kitted up with some snacks, my camera, a folder to put my reserved photo from the photo op in, my tablet, etc. I dressed, fed and walked Tucker, used the bathroom, and off Butch and I went. The bad day driving to DragonCon is always Friday, because of rush-hour traffic; on Sunday the freeway is practically empty. We freewheeled following the GPS down I-75, exited at Courtland Street, turned left on Andrew Young, and drove up to opposite the Westin. With SpotHero all I did was drive into the garage, find a parking space, and walk off (coming out was just as easy; I didn't have to scan a QR code or anything). After five years of non-attendance, you would have thought I'd fumble around trying to remember things. Nope—it's all muscle memory now, like riding a bicycle. It was cool and shady enough that I just walked down the big long hill from the Westin to the Courtland Grand (formerly the Sheraton), stopped once by a young blond woman who saw my Law & Order: Criminal Intent t-shirt (bought especially for the occasion!) and gushed "I love your shirt! I love that show," crossed Courtland Street again, and headed for registration. This was easy-peasy, just follow others through a little Disney World serpentine, show my QR code, and get my badge. Took five minutes. Then I went to Disability Services, because, while I am willing to wait in line, I cannot be outside in the sun or else Mr. Headache, Mr. Palpitations, and then Mr. Diarrhea will visit me in short order. DS decided that was justifiable and I got a seat in line and end of row designation. Now, breakfast! Again by long habit: hike the block to the Courtland Garage, use their elevator to what James and I have always called "the Luke Skywalk" and into Peachtree Center and the myriad of eating locations, some shuttered until lunch, others open for breakfast. Of course I went to Cafe Momo, which is a big buffet-by-the-pound, as I planned to have a hearty meal and then just snack later. In my styrofoam container I put oatmeal in one small compartment, roast potatoes in the other, a slice of French toast and some peeled and sliced oranges and kiwi fruit in the big compartment. Finishing off with a reduced-fat milk and a bagel and cream cheese, I went out to the tables to eat. (They have lots of other stuff—eggs—yuck!—both scrambled and fried and spicy; grits, pre-made tortilla shell meals with meat and lettuce; different fruits; coffee and tea; cereals; etc.) Oh, if you were looking for Waldo, I found him having breakfast at Peachtree Center, too! When I got done it was much too early to go to the Walk of Fame where Vincent D'Onofrio would be signing things, so I marched over the skybridges through the Marriott and into the Hilton to descend to the oh-so-wonderful coolness of the Galleria level where Trek Track and BritTrack are and walked into the Lower Decks panel. Alan Siler was on the panel and I can't remember when I'd seen him in person last. I got two hugs and we talked and he told me how he was splitting the book he was writing in three parts, and that his Kozmic Press outfit is going to be doing an anthology of essays of women talking about how they were influenced by the Beatles. You so rarely see books written about how women have been influenced by rock bands! And the panel was fun, too, talking about favorite moments in Lower Decks—has any scene been funnier than the punchline with T'Ana and the box she asks Beckett and Tendi to fetch?—and if this is really the end for the series. Now I moseyed on back to the Marriott and the Walk of Fame; there was no line at this point and I just strolled right in. The actors sit in little booths talking to the fans and selling autographs (James and I have been going long enough to remember when you bought the photos from a dealer or from the actor and the actors signed them for free!). Jodie Whittaker (Doctor #13) was signing autographs practically in front of me. Vincent D'Onofrio wasn't at his booth, so I walked around checking everyone out. Anson Mount, when I finally spied him, was wearing a baseball hat, so no glimpse of the infamous Pike hair wave, and looked tired. There was a lively crowd around "the hobbits" (Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, and Elijah Wood). And I absolutely had to stop and say hi to Barry Gordon when he was free. He does animation voices now, but I remember Barry Gordon from when he was a child actor, especially in the film A Thousand Clowns with Jason Robards. It was on television in the late 60s and I cried at the end when Robards realized that, to support his abandoned nephew (Gordon) properly, he would have to give up his bohemian lifestyle and take a 9-to-5 job. When he walks off dressed in the suit carrying a briefcase just like all the other white-collar automatons in NYC I burst into tears. He seemed happy that I remembered it. Finally I went back to the line to find out that Vincent D'Onofrio was expected shortly, so I got into line. I had his two books with me, Mutha and Pigs Can't Look Up. Unfortunately, I found out in line that it was cash only. I'd been talking with various of his fans in line, including other CI fans, and the guy dressed as the Fourth Doctor said, "There's an ATM over there; I'll hold your place!" and I ran over and got the cash. Turned out I could only have one book signed with the money I had and I really couldn't afford both, so I got Mutha signed and told him I remembered going to the Monkey Jungle place in Florida that he wrote about when I was about two or three (I agree; it was a terrible place, all noise and agitated simians and smelled horrible, and why parents dragged kids there I'll never know). The line was long and I didn't want to take too much of his time, so I never asked him James' question, which was if we would ever see a DVD or at least a streaming release of Night of the Cooters, and then I was sorry a few minutes later when another woman engaged him in conversation for at least two or three minutes. (While I'd been waiting earlier he told the woman before me the story of the unusual voice he uses for the Jack Horne character in the remake of The Magnificent Seven. He was in London doing a movie (I wonder if it was the Sherlock Holmes film) and he was waiting at a restaurant when this enormous man walked in; he actually blocked the light coming in the restaurant door he was so big, and "his hands were the size of baseball mitts." So he says something to him and this huge man replies in this high-pitched voice, so he wanted to use that voice in the future.) I stood there a long time watching him interact with everyone. Honestly, he looks gorgeous. You can tell he works out and takes care of himself; the only sign that he's older is the grey hair and beard. His hands are still absolutely beautiful, long slim fingers like a pianist's might be. (Yeah, I'm gushing here...) I also ran into Rob Bowen and got a hug. I was really restricting myself on locations, so perhaps it followed, but I didn't run into nearly as many people as I do—I usually see someone from ARTC, or Mark Heffernan, or the Rays, or Roger Nichols, or even Laura Hayden...but...no. Finally I decided I needed to hit a bathroom and hie myself over to the Hyatt to get in line for the 2:30 panel. I'd been in terrible fear that I would need to pee before the panel and lose my place in line or, even worse, have to pee during the panel, so I was sucking on watermelon candies and hadn't drunk anything since the milk at breakfast (which was terrible—it was labeled "ultra-filtered milk" and tasted like milk-flavored water). So when a friendly looking woman sat next to me in the waiting area I started talking to her and we were "bathroom buddies" for the duration; she watched my backpack while I used the rest room and then I watched hers. We bonded over knee surgery, which she'd had (both knees) and I was telling her James wished he could. (BTW, I periodically texted James all day, mostly to receive the response "I'm fine; have fun!")
The panel loaded quickly, and I got a nice aisle seat where I could take a lot of photos. Vincent was on this panel with Mike Colter, who played Luke Cage in the short-lived series. They were very easy with each other and it turned out they knew each other from sometime back when Colter was in an episode of CI ("Albatross"). (They had this very funny back-and-forth about the meaning of the word "albatross"—yes, it's a really neat bird, but it also has a metaphorical meaning and so on...) Since this was a panel about Marvel, the questions were mostly about Kingpin and Luke Cage, a lot of it going over my head since I've avoided Daredevil due to the violence. He did talk about how he loved the role, but that gaining the extra weight every time they filmed was getting harder because it's hard to lose weight as you get older. For the newest series, they have a new "fat suit" which he said is still very warm, but is very light, "like a sneaker," he described it. So with that and the use of prosthetics and makeup he doesn't have to gain the weight any longer (which is fine with me because he looks so fine!). Vincent also told the story about how he got the part of Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket; Matthew Modine, a friend of his, encouraged him to audition via a short film (he was working as a bodyguard at that time) and he rented a camera and performed some dialog from a play. Stanley Kubrick was impressed enough by the film to call him, and the first time he hung up on Kubrick because he thought it was a joke. Kubrick called right back and said immediately, "Don't hang up!" Once the panel was over, I had a short appointment in the ladies' room—"unavoidable delay" as Frank Gilbreth would put it—since it wasn't crowded, which I used it as an opportunity to decompress and cool down. It was not yet 4:30 when I headed downstairs for my 5 p.m.photo op. The area outside was crowded and hot, and I noticed from my appointment printout that I was still early, so I wandered in the rest room for a little longer and splashed cold water on myself and cleaned my face off and put a tiny bit of blush on. I'd never done one of these before so I wandered back following the signs not knowing what to expect. The basement level of the Marriott was partitioned off with a lot of dark curtains hanging from portable curtain stands. It was hard to be in this area without nostalgia because it had served DragonCon as the Dealer's Room and the Walk of Fame for so many years; it was here I got June Lockhart's autograph and talked to Dee Wallace-Stone about her being back to back with June Lockhart—two of Lassie's TV moms together! (Now the Dealer's Room takes up four levels of the Merchandise Mart!) The one thing I hate about the new Walk of Fame is they forbid you to take unauthorized photos; I used to love going in there and get candid shots of the performers interacting with the fans. I have photos of Mark Goddard and numerous other people just sitting behind a table and hanging with congoers. At first you stay in a general area where you wait for your photo op "partner" to be called. While a bunch of us waited, including a woman in a "DUN DUN" Law & Order shirt, I saw someone dressed as Vincent's Daredevil character Kingpin come in, portly, with the white dinner jacket, the cane and all. Then there were two of them, then three, and finally there were four of them altogether. They posed for pictures with the people waiting. It was funny. Then we D'Onofrio fans got called back and shuttled into lines. There were some DS seats available, but I was trying to stand and let the seats go for the people with back and leg problems. Now at this point I hadn't actually had a drink since ten a.m., and sucking on Jolly Ranchers wasn't helping any longer. I finally pointed to a chair and asked "May I sit down?" because I glanced at my Fitbit and discovered my pulse was rocking around at about 90. Sitting helped a lot. I was next to a married couple who were teasing each other, and she was in a wonderful T-shirt with Vincent's pic on top and the cityscape at the bottom and the legend "Robert Goren, Detective" at the bottom. Pretty swell! The photo op itself goes by fast because the Epic people are processing the pictures as fast as they can go. You drop your personal stuff on a table, line up, and one by one the person (or persons, because there are group shoots) gets into the picture with you, the photographer yells "Chin down!" and the picture is done and the next person is summoned. I broke protocol at this point, just quickly, because the one thing I had wanted so badly to say at the autograph table never came out. I said very quickly "Thank you for Twitter. It's helped me through some bad places in the last few years" and he bent over me a little to hear what I said and then they took the picture and I think he said "thank you" or something because I was brain fried and totally overheated at this point. Picked up my stuff and asked one of the Kingpins, "What now?" and he said come back here and get your picture, and he pointed it out when we got there, already printed out. And you got checked out to see if you got your photo—and the correct photo—and then it was over.  I really would have liked to stay...but I was tired and hungry and ohIhadtomakesure James was okay. I walked out the back of the Marriott instead of going across the bridge to Peachtree Center and taking the back door, which would have gotten me to within a block of the Westin, but I just did homing pigeon. Walked up the hill past the Hyatt and then crossed Peachtree Center and then left across Harris. By that time I was blowing like a racehorse and stopped to catch my breath at the water features in front of a building on Peachtree Street. In about a minute I was able to take in a lungful of air again to trudge on and turn at the Westin to go back to the parking garage. I will say I am glad we were not in the truck in this garage! It was tiny and if the ramps going up were steep, the ones coming down seemed like they were about at a 45 degree angle! The chair lift would have scraped the ground even without the power chair in it! But yeah, the gate just opened for me and out I went, back on the city streets, and back on the freeway, and then back home, exhausted. I was so happy I cried all the way home. James held dinner for me; it was about six, and it was a turkey burger which I smothered in the wonderful Meadowcroft Farms sweet onion relish. We split a Ritter peppermint-filled dark chocolate bar for dessert. Bliss. My day was complete when I posted my photo op on Twitter and once again thanked Vincent D'Onofrio for his posts—they have truly gotten me through many dark things in the past couple of years—and he liked my post. Well, of course I watched Law & Order: Criminal Intent later on...why do you ask? — [Fitbit stats: 13,546 steps, 5.38 miles, 12 floors, 49 active zones, and 62 active minutes. I put on 1000 steps with walking Tucker twice, but at least 12,000 of those steps were between 8:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. We don't call it "the DragonCon Exercise Program" for nothing.] [At least September 1 was better than August 1. I lost Oliver one month ago today. Miss you, baby bird.] Labels: dogs, DragonCon, dreams, emotions, events, exercise, family, food, friends, television » Sunday, November 12, 2023
Doctor, Doctor, Doctor...Ouch, and Therapy (Plus Lots More)
You've heard of 1001 Nights? This week was 1/3 dozen doctors. (And, to be honest, 1/4 dozen doctors, since physiotherapy doesn't really count.)
The tally: Last visit with vascular doctor. Podiatry. Pre-sleep study consultation (in Decatur, no less). Also, physiotherapy. So doing housework on Monday was actually sort of relaxing. 😉 So James' fistula appears to be healed properly. Not sure if it's ripe yet. The doctor keeps asking "When are you going on dialysis?" Well, not yet, I hope. It's not like anyone's told us. James has no symptoms: he's still urinating fine, the urine looks normal, he has no loss of appetite, edema, nausea or vomiting, or shortness of breath. (Dr. Kongara keeps asking.) On the steroids Dr. Salazar gave him, he lost five pounds. Since we were at Glenlake anyway, we went to Merchant's Walk and checked out the new Barnes & Noble in the shopping center where the Borders used to be (the B&N is in the old Bed, Bath & Beyond). The new store is...quite trendy. The bookshelves curve and "float" around the store so you are led in a certain path around it; James didn't like it, said they didn't have enough stock. I thought it was kinda cool (but, yeah, all the bookstores can use more books!) In fact, I found a cool book about Josephine Baker's spy work there, and bought James Travis Baldree's new book. I also had to get Victoria Finlay's new book, Fabric. "But, Linda, you hate to sew." Why yes, I do, and I can't tell one type of cotton fabric from another (except flannel). But I love Victoria Finlay's writing, and this book is no different. It starts out with barkcloth and tapa, both made out of the inner bark of palm trees, and she travels to New Guinea and other South Pacific islands to meet the few Polynesian craftswomen who still practice doing the fabric the old way. She also uses the book as a way of assuaging her grief after the deaths of her parents. We also went to Trader Joe's, where most of the Christmas stuff is out. Where are the Candy-Cane Joe-Joe's? All they had were the chocolate-covered ones. Wednesday was Thursday we took a box to Goodwill, dropped off our good duds at the cleaners after their appearance at Neil and Emilee's wedding, then James got his feet inspected and a good pedicure at Kaiser before we went on to Lidl and two different Publix stores, since the Scufflegrit store on Wednesday had none of my favorite yogurt flavor (chocolate hazelnut). (They had plenty of that nasty coconut almond, though!) Friday was our 33rd wedding anniversary. (Rodney pointed out that in March we would now be an LP!) We celebrated by having to get up at a hellacious seven a.m. to drive out to Decatur, as James has not had his C-PAP vetted in a long time. The only way to get this done is have a new sleep study, and when you're on Medicare you have to have a neurological exam before the sleep study. So this was the exam part, at 10:30. At the Emory sleep center. Off North Decatur Road. (What I call the "old neighborhood" since if you drive a few miles and a couple of turns and you're at Clifton Road and CDC headquarters.) It was cloudy and rained most of the afternoon, which made it a PITA with the power chair, but we managed to have a good time. We found the building in one shot (thanks, Waze) and the exam itself was anticlimactic (James' opinion was "I had to drive all the way out here for that?"). I'd seen there was a Whole Foods across the street, and the last time we ate at the Whole Foods in Kennesaw they had a killer salad bar, so I said, "Let's go there for lunch." Mistake. It is (or at least at that Whole Foods) no longer killer (no more of the delicious cucumber/tomato salad!) and there wasn't a darn thing on the hot bar I could eat without risk of (1) eating something spicy or (2) eating something that didn't give me massive indigestion even with a Protonix. They had clam chowder, but it was watery. I just had a salad while James found meatloaf, tikka masala, lasagna, and something else. He brought half of it home and the darn lunch cost $34! We could have gone to Tin Drum for less and gotten better food. We did get some nice chocolate tarts for an anniversary dessert and two chocolate bars for other desserts. There was a Half-Price Books across the street with a JoAnn next to it, so we took refuge out of the rain there. I got lucky in HPB and found another John Douglas book; also a hardback of Stephen King's On Writing and a "Bottom Line" book for $2 (we already had it, but I wanted to make sure!). James got some cool Lego Christmas sets (polar bears, a snowman, and a train) in JoAnn. I just bought a yard of good flannel...in case we get another bird. I cut off part of Snowy's cage cover for a shroud. Anyway, James has become addicted to his new air fryer. We went from a 2.5 quart to a 5.something quart, so he's been making everything in it: warming up burritos in it if he has frozen burritos, making egg/cheese/ham/etc. egg dishes, cooking drumsticks and thighs, etc. So instead of putting it back on the dog's crate after using it, he's just left it smack in the middle of the kitchen counter, pre-empting prep space. We have very little kitchen counter as it is. So Saturday I did a little cleaning in the kitchen pantry closet and cleared a space wide enough to put the two clear containers we have for English muffins and for Toufeyan wraps. If I then moved the tea machine next to the toaster, there was enough room to put the balsamic vinegars, the air fryer, the Magic Bullet, and the two-level lazy susan against the back wall next to the refrigerator. This means the entire counter got clean, and also the other counter. It was a long afternoon's work, but it worked out. Finally on Sunday we went to Costco, as we were running out of probiotics. We've been taking them for three months and it has really helped my lower GI problems, and I think they've made James more "regular." Bought toilet tissue, almond flour crackers, and a few other things, too, then dumped all the stuff at home and went to IKEA. I remember when you could get a decent lunch at IKEA; now all they have are the meatballs, veg meatballs, or chicken strips. I had a salad that there was no dressing for, and a kids' meatball dish (four with mashed potatoes). I was famished when I got home. Found a cool light to plug into my desktop that will throw light on anything I'm copying from, a clip-on light for my side of the bed, and a cheap squirt bottle to use when I iron creases in anything. Also got some ginger cookies. IKEA's new self-checkout screens are terrible. They're not sensitive to the touch at all and take you forever. I'll tell you, though, that I'm so glad we moved into the current house when we did. IKEA has gone back to their "roots," which means plastic bucket chairs, ugly square sofas, lots of blond and white woods, and other junky 60s-looking crap. I'm glad we got all the Leksvik furniture when we did, as there's very little I would buy there now, except for the Billy bookcases. It didn't help that they are remodeling the entire bed/bedding department. Labels: anniversary, books, cooking, crafts, errands, exercise, food, health, shopping, sickness, weather » Sunday, September 26, 2021
Hurrah! It's Fall! and Other Delights
The autumn equinox arrived this week to great cheering by the folks here at Autumn Hollow. Now only if it would feel like autumn—although we did have to wear flannel shirts Thursday morning to drive with the windows down on the way to Costco. But by the time we got to Costco (ten minutes) it was too warm for them. (We were also windows down a couple of other times, one early morning, one nighttime return trip. But it's not enough!) Went out to walk the dog Wednesday night and discovered abruptly that sometime today they changed out all the streetlights. I think they are those new lights that only aim at the street and don't glow upward, and so don't interfere with migrating birds. It's a weird effect; they make what they're shining on brighter, but the light doesn't extend as much, so our front yard is now darker. There's also a rather large dark area near the upper cul-de-sac because all the lights appear to have two light fixtures except the one on the cul-de-sac itself. We hit Costco Thursday morning because Procter & Gamble was doing their "buy $100 worth of stuff, get a $25 gift card" thing again. Since we can easily spend that much buying Swiffer pads, Oral B toothbrushes, Metamucil, and Downy, we went for it, plus we needed "plastic cheese" (Kraft cheese slices) as James calls it, and both BreatheRights and generic Flonase were on sale...needed almonds for my oatmeal and mandarin orange cups as well. It is so nice when it's not broiling outside and we don't have to rush into one store, dump perishable items in a insulated bag with an icepack, rush to the next store, etc. We were able to drive to Publix in a leisurely fashion and finish most of the rest of the shopping (although I still had to go to Kroger on Saturday morning for milk, yogurt, and no-salt-added mushrooms). Friday we did a little of everything: paid our property tax, picked up a gift, had lunch at Okinawa with all the Spiveys and John Bouler, drove down to Kaiser so James could have blood drawn for what the doctor says is a minor problem, and then went to Barnes & Noble. James bought a book and I didn't, which seems ironic, but I'd already gotten three in the mail this week: a used copy of Madeleine L'Engle short stories (The Moment of Tenderness), a used copy of Hal Borland's Book of Twelve Moons (nature essays), and the new Vanderbeekers novel. We also bought a new gadget that is three plugs that are operated by one remote. Since I was depressingly unsuccessful in trying to set up a "smart home" system to turn on the lights through Amazon wifi plugs and Amazon Echo devices—two of the wifi plugs worked flawlessly for a month and then quit working; I contacted Amazon and they walked me through all sorts of remedies that didn't work for one and they finally told me to send the plug back for repair, but when I tried to set up a third plug I had bought, brand new out of the box, it wouldn't work either. They supposedly work on the 2.4GHz portion of the router, and I tried resetting the 2.4GHz, which reset perfectly and everything else that worked on them, like the Roku box and James' Kindle, worked perfectly. Then we ended up resetting the router anyway, and the plug still didn't work. We have to press a remote button instead of doing a voice command, but it works! So Saturday I did the Kroger thing and James had to cook meat and breakfasts for the rest of the week, and we broke up the time with original Law & Order episodes on WE. I've become so besotted with Law & Order: Criminal Intent that I am reading fanfiction, most of it of the "shipping" sort, but I appreciate that the stories that I really have enjoyed have chosen to actually have a mystery plot among the romance. One story has Mike Logan down so pat I can hear Chris Noth doing the dialog. Unfortunately I think that was the one that got to part eighteen and then never was finished—and, darn, I wanted to know the solution to the mystery! This week I also worked out a way to get all the videos I've saved on YouTube to show up in the YouTube app on Roku. I have so much saved that the idea of re-bookmarking them gave me the horrors. It's a great big dog's breakfast worth of stuff: old British black and white films, 1930s black and white films, the Old Indiana Jones segments they cut out of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles DVD sets, an uncut version of the 1960s animated The Night Before Christmas with Olan Soulé as the voice of Professor Clement Moore, Lucy Worsley specials, Lassie episodes, and more. Today I got all my weekly chores done and there was still time to go to Alice and Ken's house after James finished work to celebrate Aubrey's 28th birthday. September 22 was the Autumnal Equinox! All hail Queen Autumn and her colorful court! (Now for cryin' out loud, do something about that big bully the Sun!)  Labels: birds, events, exercise, food, friends, plants, reading, seasons, shopping, television » Saturday, March 21, 2020
I'm Game (Atomicon, Part 3)
We woke (having slept a bit better with some minor noise in the room provided by the Relax and Sleep app) to another lovely day. Again, most folks went out to breakfast, but we had ours in the conference room again joined by Jerry and later by Charles.We had done our usual things yesterday (the bookstore and walking downtown and popping in and out of the shops, even if the latter was severely curtailed), and, because of the virus, did not feel like venturing other places we had gone previously (the art store in Clarkesville or even Hiawassee), so we figured we would stay close to the hotel this afternoon, but have a nice grand walk this morning, and we did. It was going to be a bit cooler today, but still in the 70s, so, like yesterday, we headed out after breakfast. We walked the same route as yesterday, through the back road, emerging at the main road at Wendy's, walking by small, closed restaurants, and then along the truss bridge that spans the Chattahoochee River. Down in Atlanta the "Hootch" is muddy and brown and mostly torpid unless it's storming, but here it is clear and rushing among rocks. Anglers in hip boots dotted the stream. We passed the "castle" building with The Olive Tree, the glassblowers' shop, the T-shirt shops, the L-shaped shopping center where the old (better) Christmas shop used to be until it caught fire, and then kept going, down to the little waterfall overlooked by a gazebo, "Helen Falls."  We walked all the way down the hill, past Hofer's restaurant and bakery, past the big windmill, past the wooden toy store and Charlemagne's Kingdom (a big model train layout), all the way to Betty's Supermarket. We crossed the street to reach Betty's, then headed back up the hill past rental homes and old houses repurposed as restaurants and shops, and then past the row of shops we explored yesterday (Hansel & Gretel, etc.). There we stopped for a few minutes so I could take photographs of the beautiful flowers in the raised beds dotting the shopping area: tulips, daffodils, ornamental cabbage. Behind the restrooms that are set across the street from these shops, there is a path that slopes downward so that you are mere feet from the river. I wanted some photos, so I went down the rather steep slope to take a couple of shots, and James in the power chair managed to navigate it, so I set the camera to "movie" and took a nice little video of the river and our walk under the bridge, the anglers in their hip boots, and just the pretty day. The path came out at the parking lots in back of the Helen shops, so we wound our way over the gravel surfaces and came out at the very back, to the back road that would lead us back to our hotel. There is a just a small bridge here over the river, and since there was little traffic, we crossed the road to check out all the fisherman. There was a man just at the edge of the river right under the bridge and we were talking with him; he had just tossed his line in and caught a fine trout! He was sorry they had to cancel their trout tournament next weekend. As we walked back, bicycle riders sped past, calling a good morning to us. We spent the rest of the afternoon at the hotel, talking with whomever was there (a lot of people took walks today and came back bouncy and happy as well), messing around on the computer, watching Riley the puppy, and just having a grand time. At lunch time I still had the Zaxby's chicken wings from last night. James nipped over to Wendy's for a hamburger and brought me a milk. At suppertime we decided to go to Bigg Daddy's, which was in walking distance. As we were going back into our room to change, Aubrey was in the hallway asking if we by any chance had a blood pressure monitor. Well, yes, we did. Ken had been taking a nap and then felt a bit odd when he got up, and he did have a hospital stay for low blood pressure a couple of weeks ago, but that had been straightened out by his doctors. His BP was normal, so we went off to dinner. Well, Bigg Daddy's wasn't seating anyone inside (understandable) but the way it is set up you have to go inside and then outside to the patio again, and there is a very small step up to get inside. Juanita almost tripped over the step, and then when Ken came in he missed it completely, tripped, and took a header right in front of me! Several men in the store helped him get up; thank goodness he did not look, at least, like he was hurt at all! (The only time I ever fell like that I landed on my face and broke my nose!) So we were able to have a nice supper, even if they followed instructions and broke us up into two groups and left empty tables in between. Bigg Daddy's food is very good. I had a bowl of chicken and dumplings and five delicious chicken wings. (Yes, wings again. I could eat wings until they came out of my ears.) James had soft tacos.
The final night is always a little bittersweet in the background, but the most fun. Some folks had a Dungeons and Dragons game going. There was a coloring group, and Clair was working a minute crocheted chain. James and a few others watched the DVD of Ford vs. Ferrari that the Butlers brought. Juanita, Alice, Aubrey, Kristine and I played Big Bang Theory Uno (there is a "soft kitty" card; if you draw it, you are required to draw cards from the deck until you get a Sheldon or a Penny card—they are both on two different cards, but you'd be surprised how many cards you had to draw sometimes)! After that, we played Qwixx, which is a fun dice strategy game, and by then the film was over and it was time for bed.
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» Sunday, May 19, 2019
Time Moves Forward (And Does Not Tarry With Yesterday)
We all travel in time, the saying goes. We just travel forward and can't go back.
I'd had the time after WHOlanta pegged as quiet time, but it's been anything but—nothing really bad for us personally, thank God, but one unexpected and tragic event has happened and some interesting events have occurred. On May 6, we heard that we lost our friend Claudia Barbour. James and I last saw Claudia at the Apple Annie craft show at the beginning of December. She was with a friend and we learned she was being treated for cancer. She told us things were going well, and we invited her to the Twelfth Night party, but she didn't come and we assumed it was because she was not feeling well due to the treatments. Evidently things did not "go well" after that December day. We remember her friendship and the fun we had launching model rockets in her horse pasture, her smile and the twinkle in her eyes. I am continuing to try to walk more, not just for exercise, but to help my vitamin D, which is in the tank. I'm at an age where I need to worry about bone density. Tramping the same mile and a half route out of the development and back in does become monotonous, but I have been listening to podcasts ("Happier" with Gretchen Rubin and Elizabeth Craft at present, until I catch up) while I do, and trying to observe what nature can be observed on a suburban street, which included having a good look and sniff at Chinese privet and honeysuckle blossoms. (I wish they made perfume that smelled like the privet! I would buy it!) Most of the time I am amused by the birds. One morning Tucker and I were buzzed by a swallow at least four times. Since we just walked up and down the street a couple of times that day since I was keeping an eye out for the A/C guy and we were nowhere near someplace that could be a nesting site, I'm assuming this is a dashing young swallow enjoying his wings and his ability to turn on a dime. A avian Eddie Rickenbacker, as it were. One morning as we approached the daycare center down on the main road, which has a big lawn to the left of the structure, we saw a funny bird territorial dispute. There was a robin hunting worms there and apparently a male cardinal had the temerity to try and hunt a meal there, too. The robin kept chasing him off—they did that fluttering circling around each other and hissing birds do when they fight--and still the cardinal kept coming back! He only flew off a few yards when Tucker and I finally reached the driveway. The following morning a male bluebird was perched on one of the mailboxes and I don't think I was more than two yards away from him. To my surprise instead of flying away, he flew to the sidewalk directly in front of me and pecked at something for a minute, so I could admire his lovely blue wings. I even had a close encounter with a silver spotted skipper (a type of small butterfly) who was perched on a mailbox post one morning. I stopped to admire the dark wings with the orange spots on the top and the broad white stripe under the wings, and, on a whim, held out my forefinger to it as you might to a pet bird. To my surprise it stepped up on my finger and actually let me carry it a few driveways before it fluttered off on its way. What a magical experience. And once in a while something cute happens: one morning as we meandered toward the stop sign on Sandtown Road, walking toward us was a man with a tiny little girl. I think she was only about twice Tucker's height, and you could hear her chattering for quite a distance. As we grew closer, she saw Tucker and started repeating "Doggie! Doggie!" and the dad (I guess) asked if she could pet Tucker because "She has a cat, but wants a dog." I said "Sure, if he can quit sniffing at whatever he's sniffing at!" Would you believe Tucker was so absorbed in whatever he was trailing he had hardly noticed they were there and looked surprised when she tried to pet him? He loses track of everything when he's trailing a scent. 😊 More prosaically, the aforementioned HVAC guy did arrive to do his semiannual check. We didn't need a filter replacement at the time, so the filter I ordered is back in the garage until autumn. I was happy to finally receive George Winston's a new album this month, as he has been undergoing cancer treatment and not done one for quite a while. I've had it on pre-order since I heard it was being released. I have to be honest; his new albums are not as good as his old—not his piano playing itself, that is as lovely as ever, but in what music he is playing. This may be due to his health, or just his own changing tastes. I'm not really into The Doors, and while I love his Vince Guaraldi tributes, I prefer his own compositions. To temper the sad news about Claudia, we also were able to celebrate Lin Butler's retirement at Longhorn on the 10th. Good food, good friends, good chat, and a cake; you can't ask for anything better. In routine news, I've done some spring cleaning of the master bedroom (oh, that ceiling fan! not to mention the one in the living room) and did the saddest spring task, washing and drying and putting away all the jackets, hats, gloves, and scarves. Once again we barely had a spring, but went almost directly from chill at night and nice days to 80s and, starting next week, 90s! Of course it was open window weather when the pine pollen was at its worst, so we lost over two weeks of fresh air for not wanting yellow dust all over the house. The best television news so far: The Orville has been renewed by Fox. This has been the best season! It's still a weird show sometimes, but it gets more and more thought-provoking each week. And, in what could have been sad news, this month we also bid farewell to The Big Bang Theory after twelve seasons. James and I didn't watch this series at first; it sounded dumb. But at one of the conventions we were going back and forth to the con suite, and one time we had an hour or two between panels, and it was playing constantly on the television. After the convention we started watching the reruns on two different channels and the first run episodes on the network, and we eventually started collecting the DVDs. So this will be our final year of the tradition of buying the DVD set at Best Buy on Black Friday! It was a fun, fuzzy ending: Sheldon finally realized what he had, Leonard got to tell him off, we finally saw the Wolowitz kids, Amy got a new look and enjoyed it, and Sheldon and Amy did indeed get a Nobel Prize. They also tied it in with the end of the season finale of Young Sheldon, where ten-year-old Sheldon is listening to a shortwave broadcast of the Nobel Prize awards all alone, not knowing his future friends (shown as kids) are "somewhere out there." Later they did a wrap-up special. All very satisfactory. I will miss Big Bang, but I'm not absolutely heartbroken over its end. It's a good place to leave it. Better it goes now before someone does a Castle to it. The big news in the last week has been James' new work schedule. Several people have left and there was not enough coverage on weekends. Alas, after so many years of being free of it, James is relegated to working one weekend day again. He chose Sunday since this will leave Saturday free for his club meeting and also for Hair Day. He also is working four 10-hour days, so his schedule is now Sunday through Wednesday. We have just begun the second week and hope to provide a little more routine to the new schedule, as last week was rather unsettled. The big event last week was James' second MOHS surgery on Thursday. He had another small basal cell cancer mole removed from near his left ear. The procedure took only two hours and then we were home with him having to ice the site every two hours. We followed all the instructions—although I almost went spare when we couldn't find the polysporin (we aren't allowed to use Neosporin), but finally remembered it was in the suitcase because we had to take it with us when we went to Atomicon—and it looks as if it is healing nicely, at least as far as "Nurse Linda" can see. The only problem with the new schedule is that we are not eating until 7:30-8:00. This is going to play hob with both our weights. It's already bugging my digestion. One afternoon when he teleworked we did eat dinner rather than supper and that "went down" (literally) better, but that's not going to work when he's in the office. My best hope is to either have something cooked right when he gets home at about 7:40 p.m. or if it's something he needs to cook have everything prepped when he walks in the door. I can always walk two miles, but he can't walk at all. Guess I'd better get that exercise bicycle I bought a couple of days ago assembled and see if he can ride it. Then there was the phone saga. Last week while he was teleworking, James dropped his phone as he has dozens of times before. Unfortunately this time it hit one of the legs of the laptop desk rather than the carpet. When he picked it up it was "bruised" with tiny flecks of purple at the bottom of the screen. As the day proceeded, so did the "bruise." By next morning the screen was almost totally purple-black and unusable except for answering phone calls, since James could just swipe up in the usual place to answer it. So that evening we found ourselves at Best Buy. He was particularly interested in the new, less expensive Pixel 3a, which has the headphone jack restored to it, and he needs the headphone jack since his home headphones have Bluetooth, but they don't stay on between calls, so he uses the wire instead for reliability. But despite all the publicity about the damn things on the review sites and on television, Best Buy didn't have any in stock and James needed one for Wednesday at work. He ended up with a Motorola G7, which has twice the storage memory, and the ability to load a microSD card. The camera apparently isn't as good as the Pixel, but, you know, if we want good pictures we do have real cameras. I was quite envious, as I've made no secret that I've never been happy with the original Pixel we got back on Black Friday of 2016. It was too small (they were out of the XL size), it didn't do a lot of the things my old Droid Turbo did (I'd wanted the Droid Turbo 2, but the ads made the Pixel sound like the greatest thing since HD-TV), and I missed the Moto Voice feature. (I eventually named the phone "U.P." for "Useless Phone.") Plus right before WHOlanta it started eating battery out of nowhere; one night I barely got to the car to plug it in before it died. I'd take it off the charger, read Facebook (no video watching) for ten minutes, and it would go down fifteen percent. So Saturday while we were out I went and picked up another G7. Alas, the one feature of Moto Voice that I loved most, the fact that you could give it a passphrase rather than using "Okay, Google" to ask it a question, Motorola (actually Lenovo) has gotten rid of. Otherwise, it's quite nice. I did have a bobble loading my old podcast app. It was a free app, but limited in how many feeds you could download and had ads. So for $3 I bought the full version (unlimited feeds and no ads), which was a separate unlock app. Usually when you buy a new Android phone, if you have been backing up religiously to Google, all your apps will re-download onto the new phone if you give it permission to do so. When they all downloaded, the unlock app was not there. When I checked the Google store, it wasn't there either, and as I checked the app itself, I realized it hadn't been updated since 2015. So, orphan app. I looked around for the best substitute and found Podbean. I'd downloaded it, added some feeds, made some playlists, but it was dreadfully awkward; you had to add to a playlist and then download as a separate function; MyPOD did this in one action if you set it up that way. And if you used the shortcut widget, whatever podcast you were in last automatically started to play. Very provoking, and I couldn't find anything in the settings to stop it. So on a whim I loaded up MyPOD on the phone anyway to see what would happen and it mostly still works, with no ads, and I can add all the feeds I had before (I just stuck the backup feed file on the phone and told it to import and everything was there). You can't sort by title properly anymore, and every time you open it it asks that you load the unlock app, but the feeds still download and the podcasts still play. So I'll use it until it doesn't work anymore and then go back and wrestle with Podbean again. (I should be able to go into the file folder on the old phone and actually find the .apk file for the unlock app, but I haven't been able to manage that. I did it previously on an older Android phone. Not sure if they've taken away that ability or they've just hidden the files too well.) [Update, May 20: I decided there must be a solution to this problem, and I found it: an app called APK Extractor (yeah, go figure). I extracted the .apk folder from my old phone and saved it to Google Drive, then went to Google Drive and extracted it to my new phone. Viola, as Snagglepuss used to say. I can see my mother giving me that look, cupping her right hand with the thumb and first three fingers joined and bobbing it at me, and calling me "Calabrese!" Makes me laugh and cry at the same time.] And, as Walter Cronkite used to say, "That's the way it is." Labels: birds, chores, death, dogs, exercise, flowers, food, friends, health, music, pets, podcasts, retirement, smartphones, television, work » Friday, April 21, 2017
Ping-Pong Friday
Nearly 10,000 steps just doing errands today!Up at eight, ate breakfast, walked the dog, stripped the bed, then:
Before James got home I took Tucker out for another walk, put the bedclothes in the dryer, and put the fresh sheets and the comforter back on the bed. We had supper at Uncle Maddio's and then did the shopping at Sprouts (some nice meat deals, Vidalia onions, and even Italian wedding soup for Sunday supper) and Publix (twofers, turkey thighs, yogurt, and assorted goodies). Once the groceries were put up, we took Tucker out one last time, and viola (as Snagglepuss would say), lots of steps. Now I'm ready for bed. » Sunday, October 21, 2012
Going Colonial
Once we decided to ditch the Busch Gardens plan, we had originally switched Jamestown to today. But since we were up way before the alarm at 7:30, and today was going to be the coolest day, we decided to transfer the Colonial Williamsburg trip to today.
But first, breakfast. Ah, now the oatmeal is the consistence of library paste. That, however, is more easily corrected. What with breakfast and cosseting the fids, and the drive down the freeway, we didn't get to the visitor's center and on into the area until a bit after ten o'clock. We could have used the extra hour, although I don't think James' legs would have stood it! (His bone spur is paining him again and making him limp, which hurts his knees.) Now, the last time I was here, the visitor's center was a lot smaller, but this was in 1976! I don't remember a lot about the old visitor's center. The new one is huge, with two big gift shops on either side of the entrance, one with books, cards and videos, the other with dolls, tchochkes, and decorations. These stay open until eight, so you don't have to rush out of the colonial area, plus they have activities at night. Then there are ticketing lines. Once you are ticketed, you go downstairs and catch the bus, which makes a big circuit of the Colonial Williamsburg area, plus some of the shopping areas outside the borders. It drops you off at the Governor's Palace, which is by far the finest of the reconstructed buildings. When I came the first time, the tickets you bought were for so many attractions, depending on how much you spent. My dad could only afford the lowest-priced ticket, for seven buildings, so we didn't see a lot, and the Governor's Palace was an extra charge. Now all is included. Seriously, there are now "McMansions" in Atlanta larger than the Governor's Palace, but for its day it was opulent and expensive, a solid brick edifice with white-trimmed windows and a white cupula. We waited on benches in the courtyard with the smokehouse and kitchens for our tourguide, where great gusts of wind kept shaking acorns loose from the oak trees above. One struck a woman in the head, so we started making jokes about killer acorns. The tourguide did something unusual. Outside the building, she spoke as a tourguide, but once inside, she apologized for showing us into the servants' quarters, and fell into character as one of Lord Dunmore's (royal governor at the time of the rebellion) servants. Lady Dunmore and the children have been sent away due to a threatening mob earlier in the year and the fresh news of Lexington and Concord. We are shown the beautiful entry hall, full of swords and rifles, most of the rifles used by Lord Dunmore during his battles in the French and Indian War. The swords are interwoven and in patterns and look quite artistic. We also see the housekeeper's room and the parlor, then climb upstairs to see the bedroom of the Governor's teenage daughters, Lady Dunmore's dressing room with her newfangled pianoforte (the tourguide prefers the harpsichord), Lord and Lady Dunmore's bedroom, and then downstairs to the hall and finally out to the blue-painted ballroom with its "Dutch heating device" (a huge iron stove) and the bright green supper room. This leads out to a long formal garden that ends in impressive iron gates opening the brick wall surrounding the Palace. A big group of tourists were gathered outside, waiting for someone: it was the Marquis de Lafayette, enthused about the arrival of General George Washington in Yorktown to fight Lord Cornwallis and his troops! The actor portraying Lafayette gave a joyful speech, then introduced the General, who was properly sober. He took questions from the crowd. We left before the questions were finished, and walked back to see the kitchens. An exhibit of typical colonial dishes were shown, including curried rabbit, beef tongue, a shredded meat and vegetable salad, and some dainties. The garden, with huge cabbages, was right outside the door! We walked down a little ways, attracted by a small bakery, which sold chocolate chip and sugar cookies, and ginger cookies. We got two of the latter and some water and sat in the shade for a few minutes, nibbling half a cookie each. They are tremendously gingery and delicious. I was confused when we walked on, as there were cars ahead of us. Cars aren't allowed on the grounds. Ah, but it was Sunday morning, and the historical Bruton Parish Church is still a working Episcopal parish. So during services cars are permitted. But so much for stopping in the church right now. Instead we turned down Duke of Gloucester Street, which is Colonial Williamsburg's "main drag." Most of the open buildings are off this street. We walked down the road slowly, savoring the trees which are slowly turning colors, some dull, and some bright to the point of flaming, including the one near the courthouse, and stopped at the round magazine. Downstairs the powder was stored (our tourguide at the Palace had mentioned the theft of some of this powder) and up a spiral flight of stairs was the armory: rifles, short and long swords, pikes, halberds, powder horns, and other military supplies. A costumed soldier answered questions here. Next we stopped at the blacksmith shop, which they are expanding to include an armorer. Charcoal-burning equipment was outside and inside we are surprised to see that the smith is a young woman. That certainly would not have been common in colonial times as well as when I first came here! Another smith answered questions about what was made there, and what she was making: tools to be used in making other tools! Several of the taverns that usually serve food were not open today, so there was a big long line at the King's Arms Tavern, which was serving lunch. We were told it was a forty-minute wait, so we figured we would wait until the lunch crowd lessened and went on to the Capitol building, where the House of Burgesses used to meet to take the tour. You are taken through both chambers of the building, one for the representatives of the people and the other for the representatives for the King (two big portraits of King George III and Queen Charlotte are in both rooms), and also a conference room. The guide here was very sincere, but rather slow-spoken. We were both getting a bit drowsy and very hungry! So we worked our way back to the King's Arms, and amazingly a line was still outside. We got in it this time, watching people line the street around the Raleigh Tavern across the street. They were waiting for one of the scheduled bits of street theatre that take place intermittently through the day. For this one, two women just meeting on the street are interrupted by a customer of a storekeeper accused of hoarding salt. There is quite an argument in the street and the crowd boos the merchant as a hoarder. Then a townsperson runs into the crowd: the British are heading toward Williamsburg! Later Benedict Arnold and an aide ride through town. We're just about to collapse from hunger when they have space for two in the tavern. After all that, the service is very quick and we have an enjoyable meal. James has some fried chicken and I have slow-cooked beef. It is rather pricey, but it is a dinner portion rather than a small lunch, so we decide to "nosh" later rather than have a big meal. There is even some bread to "zoop" in the delicious sauce. Instead of having dessert, we went across the street to the bakery and bought some cookies to eat later. It's three o'clock by this time, so we start moving back to the Governor's Palace. James is limping pretty badly by now, so we really only stop at two shops. The wigmaker was a fun stop. She is stringing human hair to make a reddish wig, and speaks to us about powdering wigs (where the "powder room" came from) and the different colors used. Grey wigs, for instance, made a man look distinguished, so many judges and prominent men had them made. Human hair was used along with animal hair. We had to skip several shops then because there were lines waiting to go inside. We figured on a Sunday we'd have less of a chance of running into school groups. Not here! There must have been four or five big groups of teenagers in school groups going from building to building. That was the reason the Tavern had been so crowded, because at least two of the groups had been inside. Our other stop was at the bookbinder. This was a fascinating stop! The bookbinder was a gentleman somewhat older than ourselves who had been apprenticed as a bookbinder in 1957 and has worked that field ever since. He was using a trimming machine when we arrived, and another couple were in the shop, the woman asking all sorts of questions about how the books were bound, how they were sewn, etc. Several blank books were on the display table, including an old one with soft, soft paper, and I kept rubbing the pages...old books feel so good! He still binds blank books using 100 percent rag paper, and the paper looks and feels so lovely. One of the things he was showing was how the books were printed on one big sheet of paper with the pages out of order, and half upside down, and how he knew to fold the paper so all the pages were in order. He said he had worked with pages like this up to 36, and then went to Italy where they printed a 96-page magazine on one big sheet of paper and he had to figure out how to fold it! We climbed from the bookbindery up a staircase as steep as a ship's ladder to continue down the street. The low sun cast a golden glow over everything. Colonial-garbed men were playing ring toss on the green with visitors. The little stalls selling women's bonnets and tricorn hats were closing. The magazine was already closed. James found a bench while I checked out the Bruton Parish Church. Sadly, there was scaffolding about the belfry, so I couldn't get a nice photo of the front, and there was a service starting shortly, so I couldn't stay long. But I did have five minutes to look about the pretty interior, especially the beautiful pulpit and sounding board in dark wood, the throne-like seat where the Royal Governor sat during services, and the lectern, which is an angel with upraised arms which faces the congregation, the board for the Bible being supported by the angels arms and wings. Walked out through the churchyard, where squirrels scampered and a beautiful maple tree bid me farewell, and then James and I walked back up to the bus stop to catch the shuttle to the visitor's center, part of the path which goes past a sheepfold and through a bit of woods. He was hurting too much to do more than a short search of the books, but I bought some postcards, an official guidebook, some Christmas photos, and a fridge magnet. I wanted the book Williamsburg, Before and After, but we still had a Barnes and Noble coupon and I hoped I might find a copy there, as it was rather expensive. They also had a lovely Schiffer book, Christmas at Historic Houses, but that one was out of my reach. We came home by Barnes and Noble and I did find the Before and After book, as well as an Arcadia Publishing book about Williamsburg. James got two books, one about Langley Air Force Base and one about aviation in Hampton. Finally we stopped at Kroger to get something for supper, and have spent the rest of the night watching Law & Order: the Creepy One, a.k.a. SVU. Labels: autumn, books, exercise, food, history, shopping, television, vacation » Thursday, October 22, 2009
Walk with Caw-tion
I did something different today. Usually I get up, dress, and walk. It's still dawn and partially dark, and there are several cars and kids at the corner waiting for the schoolbus, which means I have to thread through them.
This morning I logged on to work early, read my e-mail and noted some problems I needed to take care of, then took the walk. By then the sun had risen some. It was a lovely sunrise, partly cloudy with blue sky peeping out, with grey billowy and shreddy clouds to the south and a rank and file of mackerel clouds moving in from the north, forerunners of the rain due tomorrow. The mackerel clouds were outlined in orange and tinted a dark mauve, and what I could see of the eastern sky had a bright orange-almost yellow tint. As I walked a flock of dark birds, sixty or so, burst from the trees and wheeled and maneuvered above. What a camera shot that would have been! I'm not sure if they were starlings or blackbirds. About a half dozen crows added their caws to their cries, and I followed the flock until they disappeared over the trailer park. From across the street one tree was alive with bird voices. As I approached the main street, suddenly this second flock (about the same number, around fifty or sixty birds) launched themselves from a tree fronting the apartment complex. Looked like more blackbirds or starlings. The crows cried along with them. This flock headed down our street, pausing briefly at a tree where about half of them lighted while the rest of the flock went on and the laggards hurried to catch up with them. These disappeared going south, leaving the crows to caw derisively in their wake. It was a swell walk. :-) » Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Aromatherapy
 A chilly, chilly morning. Even the birds kept away from the feeder until the sun was a little higher. We had a new total on brown-headed nuthatches today: six!I worked today to the spicy odor of a café au lait candle. For someone who used to eschew candles, I'm sure losing them a lot. It's the Christmas scents and the coffee. :-) And I still don't trust the things: I light them and leave them on the stove. But I do wish someone made a decent peppermint candle. I sniffed a so-called "peppermint" candle last year. Ugh. Nauseating. At lunch Willow and I took a walk. From the weather report, I thought it was very cold and bundled up in jacket, hat, and scarf. Cold, fiddlesticks. It was nearly 50; I had to unzip the jacket, toss the scarf over my shoulder, and stick my hat in my pocket. After work I finished decorating the house for Thanksgiving—turkeys and Pilgrims in every corner, and pumpkins scattered about liberally. I also designed a nice Christmas wallpaper for my computer with some scans from the Tasha Tudor Christmas book Take Joy!. I used one of the pictures—children around a Christmas tree—and blended it with the wreath on the title page to make it look as if the picture is framed in greens. Still haven't found an image I like for Thanksgiving, though. Labels: birds, Christmas, computers, exercise, Thanksgiving, work » Thursday, June 05, 2008
Oh, Joy!
While we were out biking, the temperature dropped ONE WHOLE DEGREE!
It's now only 85°F. Urgh. I'm gonna order a pair of these. » Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Past Times
I am 84 pages into the first volume of About Time and am enjoying it immensely. We are talking an anal-retentive volume here. :-) I have several episode guides to Doctor Who, including single-volume works and then the paperback "Handbooks" for each Doctor, plus the Discontinuity Guide, which lists all the errors, but nothing like this detail. Along with examinations of each episode, there are sidebars about how the BBC operated in the 1960s, how the show was created, who really created the Daleks (one of the early designers of the Daleks was supposed to be Ridley Scott, but he had left the BBC a few weeks earlier to learn how to direct), theories of how the TARDIS works, can you rewrite past history, etc. Wonderful stuff.
We had our bike rides tonight (very difficult tonight, since it was still about 79°F and sticky as hell), the came back to watch Most Outrageous Moments, and now I am watching a marvelous documentary on the Smithsonian Channel in glorious HD, about the different monuments in Washington, DC, which was filmed in the fall, so the color accents the architecture. Labels: bicycles, books, exercise, television » Monday, May 19, 2008
Postprandial Moves
We took the bikes out for about fifteen minutes, just around the neighborhood. It's a bit like training wheels, acclimating yourself again.
On the other hand, it's nice to remember again what it was like to fly... » Sunday, May 18, 2008
Rolling, Rolling, Rolling
After supper we took the bikes around the neighborhood a few times. James still needs to adjust his back brakes and I really must have my handlebars lowered. I don't feel in proper control. I also notice I am having trouble reaching the caliper brakes. I have small hands and this is a pretty wide grip. May have to loosen the mounts and move them up a little.
I didn't expect the years to fall away once I started rolling and miraculously end up back in 1983 and the five-miles-nightly stamina (for one, my knees are definitely cracklier than they were back then!), but yeesh...it started to rain after the third orbit, so we came in. We had a very quick thunderstorm that started the dog barking and got the north and west windowsills quite soaked. What Has Four Wheels and Wobbles?
Two bicycles ridden by people who have been "on hiatus" for several years.
I kept seeing bicycles yesterday. People on them. Bikes on the back of cars, in the beds of trucks, on racks. I woke up this morning thinking "I want to go to WalMart and buy a bike." Astute observers will probably remind me "Linda, you have a bike." Yes, I do. I bought it in 1996, after we purchased the house. (There was no room to keep it in the apartment.) I rode it about half a dozen times, mostly to get air in the tires, and then pretty much quit. There was so much traffic in the neighborhood there was no safe place to ride and there were always mosquitoes out because we were fifty feet from a creek, plus every time I wanted to ride, I had to go into the backyard, which I hated, through a gate that never worked properly, and into the shed, which was full of spiders. The bike itself is still brand-new and is reasonably clean, especially now that it was rinsed off with the hose last year, but it needs a good lube and new tires. So over the winter I asked around at bike shops for this work to be done. The average price I got was $125! I only paid $99 for the bike! I said to James, "I'm going to say something stupid. I want to go to WalMart and buy a bike. But today's the last day it's going to be nice; tomorrow it will be eighty and sunny and it will be horrible again." But we went anyway. Something's got to give here. I picked out the retro 7-speed Schwinn (a lady who was trying to pick out a starter bike for her tiny little boy said, "Oh, that's cute, like a PT Cruiser," and James grinned and said, "She has one of those, too"), and he got just a generic 21-speed guys' bike. We brought them home, did the rest of our shopping, then came home to fix them. Seats are always placed too high for me, and for some reason they angle them up so the front of the seat is like the horn on a Western saddle. James fixed that, and he also adjusted his rear brakes and lowered the "horn" on his seat, but raised the seat itself. However, he is going to have to buy a metric hex set to fix the handlebars on my bike; they angle upward and I feel like a bird flapping. Stupid. I felt really stupid on the first ride-around. I was scared. Me, who used to ride five miles a night after supper the whole summer of 1983, zipping in and out of the streets probably at about 12 mph. Made me mad. By the fourth ride around the street I was a little more comfortable, but the handlebars really have to be lowered. I don't feel balanced with them at that angle. The big thing is going to figure out when to use them. If James got home at a reasonable hour, we could go out biking after dinner. But the earliest he can get home is seven; usually by the time we get done eating it's almost eight o'clock. By that time we're both exhausted. Not to mention that I still can't tolerate the damn sun, which came out while we were out fixing the brakes and things. I came in absolutely sick to my stomach for at least an hour. » Wednesday, October 03, 2007
The Walk, The Mouse, and Other Things
It was overcast all day and I kept toying with the idea of opening the windows, but was reluctant to do so because the temps tonight were supposed to be in the high 60s.
It was only 76°F at lunch time, so I took the opportunity to take Willow and myself for a walk. By the time we got home, I was glad I hadn't opened the windows, since it was indeed in the 70s, but extremely humid. I'd been working fine all morning with my new wireless mouse, and when we got back from our walk, I had ten minutes left for lunch. I figured I'd sit down and play a game of mini-golf in Webkinz, when suddenly my mouse started doing weird things. The mouse pointer would just skate to the top of the screen. I'd shake the mouse and it would react normally for a second, then do it again. This went on for about five minutes. I rebooted. The mouse was okay for about five minutes, then started it again. Well, I paid $5 for the mouse and you do get what you pay for. I called James and asked if he would stop at MicroCenter on the way home and get me a little more expensive mouse. But things were slow at work—we don't have a budget yet so we can't issue any purchase orders—so I figured I would save him the trouble and just run out to Office Max or Staples and see if they had a good one. Then I would just work that much later. As I was getting dressed, a thought occurred to me. I changed the batteries in the mouse and now it works fine. Heh. The box said the batteries should last three to eight months, depending on use. I killed them in five days. Anyway, I spent late afternoon before supper working on my Thanksgiving page, adding vintage postcards that I got in a clipart book and some Thanksgiving poems; also a post I wrote in "Holiday Harbour" last year about "A Boy's Thanksgiving Day" ("Over the River and Through the Woods") and "We Gather Together," the two classic Thanksgiving songs. Wasn't paying much attention to TV, but while I was reading my new Reminisce I started flipping channels. Boy, I wish I knew about this two weeks ago: HDNet is running Torchwood uncut, no commercial interruptions at all. But I've missed the pilot and Gwen's first day at work. I know commercials pay the bills but I am getting increasingly disenchanted with commercial television. It was okay when they broke an hour show four times, just a couple of minutes at the time. Back when I was a kid there were only four or five minutes commercials in an hour. Then it was eight minutes of commercials in an hour (about the time Wild Wild West was broadcast). Then ten minutes in a hour at the time of The Waltons. Now an hour show is about 40 minutes. Plus we have ads streaming across the bottom of the screen, popup previews, and credits squished so you can't make out who played that familiar-looking guy with another ad roaring over the theme music. It's so fripping horrible when a dramatic scene is coming to a climax and some boobish Gilbert Gottfried clone with a screechy voice or big-boobed bimbo pops up to promote some new dingbat comedy or reality show. I don't even watch Doctor Who or Torchwood (or Monk) live anymore, and I'm probably going to start doing it with House, too. I just can't bear the noise. Labels: computers, exercise, television, weather » Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Clever Girl(s)
The exterminator showed up at the appointed time, checked out both the kitchen and the bath, then went outside. The master bath is on an exterior wall, so he immediately went to check that.
The ants had made a tidy little nest under the gutter spout, between the splash guard and the foundation. Straight for water, clever things. (He said they would be female ants, hence the entry title.) He also sprayed inside and baited outside for roaches, which are coming in occasionally, apparently through the deck door. Schuyler got within an inch of my finger today, but declined to take that final step onward. Instead, she fluttered backward, scolding. WBPA's showings of Rick Steves Europe seems have to disintegrated into repeats of the same ten shows, so I put my own DVD on during lunch and saw one I had never seen, using London as a home base to see things like the bunker where Churchill directed British action during World War II (fascinating! want to see!), the Cotswolds, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Cambridge, and, predictably, ended with punting on the river Cam. Then I got on the exercise bike in the dark and cool spare room. Thirteen minutes at a nice steady 13 miles per hour burns off 100 calories, according to the gauge. The weather alert radio has just gone off again. When I got home yesterday, we had finally had some rain, and the steam rising off the streets was so thick it looked like fog. I found some chunks of ice on the lawn about jawbreaker candy size, and the wind whipped on and off in the early evening. At one point James thought he saw hail again, but it was only rapidly dropping leaves. We went outside to watch the grey clouds gallop past overhead like mammoth coach horses and it was quite cool and pleasant. What a shock to watch the news later on and see fires caused by lightning, hail that looked like snow, and storm damage on the other side of town. Not sure why the soundoff now. It was cloudy a few minutes ago, but is now completely sunny. |
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