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

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:02:00 PM

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The first thing I did this morning was sleep late. It's a waste of a good day off, but I haven't had more than seven hours sleep in weeks and I was just plain tired. Ironically, except for waking up every time I turned over in the bed at Unicoi (because the beds are so small), I slept better there than I had in years. Typical of life, as February Callendar always said.

My plan today was to go to Bed, Bath and Beyond for more sheet garters, then stop on the way back to get some Zupreem fruit pellets for Schuyler. Then I remembered I needed to have the car vacuumed and washed. It either hadn't been done since vacation (October) or my birthday (December); I can't remember which. So I went downstairs and pulled everything out of the car, including out of the hatchback, except for the Bracketron unit I use for my phone. It clips very stiffly on the vent cover, and I've left it there before when I've had the car "vetted."

So I get the car to "Mr. Clean" Car Care and get out, because back in 2005 I had a panic attack while riding the car through the car wash. I haven't wanted to risk that again. I chose the $20 cleaning package (wash car, vacuum, Febreeze spray, cleaning the dash-panels-etc.). Last time I chose the $20 package, I said to the gentleman taking the order, "If I get this one, you'll vacuum out the hatchback?" He assured me that the $20 package included vacuuming out the hatchback.

So I watch the car go through the car wash. I remember doing this as a little girl; you had to get your car washed during the winter to get the salt off to stave off accelerated body rot. Dad used to take it to the car wash at the corner of Gansett Avenue and Park Avenue, and I would always go along to watch the car get washed by the automatic arms. Then, since it was only about 75 degrees and mostly cloudy, I went to sit outside. I pulled out something for a tip and then started to check Facebook.

A peppy looking young lady was suddenly at my side, asking how I was. I still had a rotten sinus headache, but I said fine, and she sat down next to me and then started chatting me up about my car. "Is that your PT Cruiser?" Yes, I said. And then she went in this long speal about how I had some rock damage on my windshield and how my insurance probably covered it—unless I had State Farm!—and I could just call my insurance company and they would be happy to fix the rock damage before it got any worse. I was very polite to her, but I really, really hate this type of pressure sale. I took note of the company name on her shirt—sorry I missed that before saying hello to her!—and if I do have damage I will go anywhere but there.

So the person who does the detail work held up the "Ready" sign and I went out to the car, and it looked pretty good. I handed over the tip, got into the car, and noticed the Bracketron was crooked. They had probably pushed the prop leg out of alignment. So I went to straighten it and discovered one of the two mounts was snapped right off at the root. (I found the rest of it later, in the space in the console where you're supposed to put your eyeglasses, although the spring for the lock was completely gone.) (I also had a spider crawling on me, so I popped right out of the car to take care of that!) Well, I came out of the car with the Bracketron in my hand, got the attendant's attention, and said "You broke it." Okay, that was accusative and I shouldn't have stated it that way. The attendant completely went on the defensive: "Oh, I didn't do it. I wasn't even working in that area."

Without going into detail, they flat denied they had anything to do with it. First they told me it must have been broken when I got there. I said, "It was fine when I got out of the car before it went into the car wash." Then one of the attendants offered, "Oh, I found it on the floor when I got into the car, and I put it back up there for you." Odd. Why do that? Why not just hand it to me and said, "I found this on the floor." Maybe...it was because they were hoping I'd drive off without noticing it?" They finally told me they'd "have someone look at the tape" they film of everyone's car (I guess to keep them from being accused of damage) and "get back to me."

Would it surprise you to know that no one called me back? (Yeah, figures.)

Feeling just a tad grumpy, I stopped with my 20 percent off coupon at Office Max and bought another network cable. I'll need it for work soon.

By then it was way after one o'clock; however, I didn't want to put a clean car in a dusty garage, so I parked outside and swept out the garage. Once I had the car back in the garage, I started putting everything back into it. I opened the hatchback to put the shopping bags and the cold bags back inside, and...guess what! They didn't vacuum back there! And when I went to put my rear window sunshades back up, I could still see the marks from the suction cups still on the windows, which means they didn't wash them very well.

Oh, yeah, and in the driver's side door pocket I found whole Munchos left over from vacation.

Really, really disappointed. Epic FAIL, Mr. Clean!

(Incidentally, when I came back inside I went to Bracketron's website. I found my unit and followed a link that said "to request free replacement mounts, go here." So that's what I did: filled out their form and hoping they will not take too long to come.)

My sinus headache was still being a wretched bear, so I took four ibuprofin and lay down for a half hour. Spent the rest of the afternoon surfing the web and waiting for the phone to ring.

[Later: James had a long call and didn't get home until after six. I watched Lassie on Angel2, followed by Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. We had supper at Hibachi Grill, which was the quickest food we could think of, then came home via a long drive through neighborhood streets. Now that the sun was low in the sky, the air was cool as sweet juice and heady with the scent of the privet blossoms, huge bushes growing wild in yards and at roadside, in fields and by corners, scattering their heavenly sweet scent everywhere. There are other flowers blossoming everywhere, scarlet roses studded over big puffy bushes, honeysuckle creeping up fences and poles, pale pink flowers, white waxy magnolia blossoms perched on branch ends, but none smell as exquisite as these tiny white blossoms in the cool evening breeze.]

Labels: errands, flowers, shopping, television, weather

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 6:12:00 PM

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Okay, I was going to pin this in Pinterest, but Jane Brocket asks that you not use her photos without permission, so here's the link to the post:

http://yarnstorm.blogs.com/jane_brocket/2012/02/bff-pansies.html

I love pansies almost as much as I love lilacs, because their cute little "faces" remind me of budgies or owls. These two little guys "posing" are so appealing!

I love Brocket's blog; it's always so bright! I bought her Gentle Art of Domesticity book not because I like to knit or crochet, or cook, or garden, but because I couldn't resist the bright illustrations, especially those given patterns and textures: rows of yarns, quilt patches, threads. I've never gotten over my childhood love for rainbow colors, whether on Christmas trees or in fireworks.

(And really, really, really Brocket publisher, you need to put Cherry Cake and Ginger Beer back into print because I can't find it for less than $60 and that is ridiculous. At least put it into PDF format and sell it as an e-book! ::grump!::)

Labels: blogs, books, flowers

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 9:00:00 AM

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I can tell, since my joints ache, my nose runs, and my eyes itch. :-)

The Bradford pear trees are approaching "giant snowball" stage, and all the flowering plums, cherries, and other fruity combinations are abloom in varying shades of pink, violet, and white. Here and there a bright yellow patch of forsythia or daffodils announce the season, and the magnolias are also doing their thing in vivid purple-and-white.

Next it will be the tassels on the pine trees and it will "snow" yellow and the dogwood blossoms will open up to glow pale white in the moonlight.

Today's "almost record high" is supposed to be 81°F. Oh. Joy.

Incidentally, I don't know if the earlier-observed DST is saving energy, but it has sure generated more traffic. Yesterday it took me 75 minutes to get home and it was only Monday. Everyone has exploded outdoors in their cars; I haven't seen traffic like that on Interstate North Parkway since last summer; the turn lane on Windy Ridge was backed up almost to the Weather Channel building and the right lane at Hargrove was backed up past the entrance to Heritage Pointe shopping center. And this is the least crowded of the ways I have to get home. In-credible.

Just realized that since it is now pitch-dark again when I drive to work, I won't be able to watch my favorite patch of trees bloom. This is on the side of I-75 south near the I-285 split, a lovely little grove where the trees are all shades of the spring pink, violet, and white with additions of red from the redbud trees. I really hate driving to work in the dark. To me dark means I should still be asleep and I miss the morning sky telling me it's time to begin the day, and the beautiful colors of the sunrise.

Labels: flowers, seasons, spring, time, trees

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 8:14:00 AM

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