howeird | Entries tagged with #8

When you have more than one.

Busy morning. Did 2 loads of laundry & put them away. Lots of Hawaiian shirts still need ironing.

Junk guy called at 9 that he would be here toward the end of the 9:30-11 window.

Filled the hummingbird feeders. Emptied the stuff out of the big ugly TV stand. Watched college football.

10:30 junk guys arrived. They saved the futon for last. If I had known it would not fit out the guest room door I would have removed the side pieces, but before I could stop them they just broke them off. It was being junked, but it could have been sold/recycled if they hadn't busted it.

Their rates have gone way up since the last time I used them.

As soon as they were done, I set up the now former guest room (it's really my library) with a litterbox, food tower and water fountain, and carried Spot from the bedroom where he had been deposited to keep out from under the junk guys' feet, to what is now his room. Shut the door.

Added a scratching post, toys and his favorite under the window platform from the livingroom. The library window looks out on #8's carport garden. Neighbors are out there a lot, so he'll have something to look at.

The webcam which was in there died, I had a spare but it's the wrong model. I'll have to order another of the right one. The new model can't be seen from my web page, and it isn't supported correctly by my phone app. It's also 16:9 and the others are 4:3.

Spook was totally spooked by the junk guys. She curled up inside the house section of the kitchen cat tree and shut the world out till about 7:30, when she came down and meowed for treats. She is back up on the top tier of the tree now, more normal.

I changed the cartridge in the laundry room litterbox, I hope she uses it.

12:50 pm I headed to Sunnyvale Nissan, I had emailed the salesperson I was coming around 1. It took 20 minutes - slow traffic and lots of stop lights. But he was not in today. His email said he would be. A grey haired Indian guy named Suresh showed me a car. 2018 model - he said the 2019s won't be in till March. But as he went to get the key, I checked and they had 6 2019 cars on the lot. I pointed that out to him and he said that they won't have the 2019s with the extended range till March. These only get 150 miles. I did not point out that's better than the 100 they got in 2017.

He was not very enthusiastic, and frankly the features he showed me were ones I wasn't too interested in except the all-around camera system. I didn't want to take it for a test drive, which surprised him. If I get a Leaf it won't be from that dealership.

Home, put a few more goodies in Spot's room. He has moved into the closet. Opened it himself.

Found a more cobbler-like recipe and baked a peach cobbler. Would have been better if I had used fresh peaches instead of week-old, but baking goes a long way to equalize that.

Had some brie on wheat thins as an appetizer, but the brie was bland. Fried a couple of roti to go with chopped liver & fried onions for dinner, but the chopped liver had turned so all I had was the roti and some of the onions. Had to disposal half a container of chopped liver. Boo hiss.

Watched some more football. Started up my stream on Twitch and have a bunch of people chatting after being on for an hour.

Plans for tomorrow:
Watch football
Meet Janice for coffee
Safeway for salads and microwave lunches

Up at 8:30, but Spot decided to keep me company with his purring as I read from the tablet, so didn't get out of bed till 10. 11 on the dot the nice man came to install the new gas meter and take away the old one. While he did that I plugged in the laptop, partly to charge it up and partly to update it.

Watched some CFL football on Tivo, am impressed by two things: 1. They all tackle like they mean it (basics which the NFL rarely gets right) and 2. They pass almost every down - because the field is too long & wide and they only get 3 downs. 2-and-out.

Went to Lowe's as planned and bought one of those flex hoses. Attached it to the car wash brush and it leaked at the connector. Attached the garden spray attachment and it leaked. Used, I doubt it can be returned. May try another brand, either from OSH, Home Despot or online.

Stopped off at Grocery Outlet and bought a couple of steaks, onions, mushrooms, multi-colored sweet bell peppers and forgot the mochi. Also got tempura shrimp, peeled garlic and strawberries - and two cocoa butter based skin lotions. Trying to smooth out a couple of rough sunburn spots on my face.

Home, lunch was tempura shrimp fried in vegetable shortening from the onion fry. Not very tasty. Nuked the onions for 2 minutes, which made smoke come out of the microwave.

Set up the webcams in the office, guest room and piano room to email me when they detect motion. This includes about 10 snapshots which I set to snap every 3 seconds. One of those messages showed Spook peeing on the new futon cover, which is waterproof sort of. None of it bled through, but it spread out on the surface to make a huge stain. Online, ordered a plastic cover like the one on the sofa. Pisses me off, there's a litterbox right there in the room. I think the problem is Spot has radar, and chases Spook away when she tries to use it.

I think the pheromones are working on Spot a little. He isn't running the length of the house as much, and he does a lot more lying in front of me in the livingroom and office. And bedroom, for that matter.

Indoors, took a short nap because I was falling asleep watching football. BP was way low - 75/41 but pulse was 60. I figured maybe I should get outside and do something active.

I got the rake out of the shed and pulled out a huge amount of dead poppy plants, the last of the dead bee's friend plants, and this liberated a very long and robust lilac which had been fighting to break through. Put the rake back and got the shovel to dig out a well established grassy plant which had also been stealing sunlight and nutrients from the lilac and a rose bush. Found three more smaller ones as well.

Pulled the lawn recycles bin out to the curb and shoved it full of what I'd pulled out. Filled to the brim.

USPS email said there should be several items, including a prescription, in my mailbox, but instead were two letters for #8 next door. Opened #6's mailbox, and my stuff was there. Put #8's in their mailbox. Understandable mistake, as #5 currently is an empty lot.

Dinner was a production. Sauteed in butter & white wine garlic cloves, chopped onion, sliced in the Cuisinart mushrooms. Got out the grill pan, covered the surface with olive oil and after it heated up threw on a steak, which was actually two steaks. Ate both smothered in the sautee, on sourdough rye. The first steak was great the second was small and mostly gristle. Ice cream with cherries and sprinkles for dessert.

Plans for tomorrow:
Replacement replacement hose
Take the camera out to Ulistac Natural Area and shoot bees & butterflies & flowers and maybe play Ingress

Did not manage to get out of bed till almost noon. I have no idea how that happened. Good thing I had "staged" most of my recycle trip the night before. Added the four former RAID array drives.

Dropped off the rent check. Most of the parking spaces by the community center were taken, but there was no one inside. I guess people are using those spaces for extra cars. Sad because most carports here are big enough for 2 SUVs. #8 has 4 cars, three fit in the carport and one gets parked on the street outside the mobile home park.

Recycle center was crowded, someone hitched a trailer to his van to load up with compost. There was enough compost in the pile for 4 trailers. It took me a while, but I put most of the stuff into the misc. electronics bin, batteries and CFL bulbs have their own baskets.

Overcast and windy, so I scrapped any plans to hang out in the park.

Home, did some gardening. Pulled a bunch of weeds, and when I got up I couldn't get my legs under me, backpedaled until I hit the side of the stairs. Fell and hit my head. Went inside and applied tylenol, and I had a cold pack in the fridge from yesterday's oven burn.

Eventually drove to Lowe's and bought 5 strawberry plants and a bag of steer poop. Put those in the trunk for later and drove to the place which was putting a new zipper on my Shark's jacket. They had cleaned it, but had not done the zipper. Come back in an hour, they said. It was 2:45.

Home, poured the manure onto an area by the shed where I'd grown tomatoes, and planted the strawberries in there. Inside, cut up some onions & garlic & caramelized the onions. Turned off the heat at about 4, and went to claim my jacket. It was still not done (she had interrupted the project mid-sew to work with two guys who were having suits altered. I went outside to wait, the weather had turned nice and their sofa was impossibly low. Discovered a "secret" trail between their fence and the apartment fence next door.

Finally got the jacket. They did a nice job on the zipper, but the cleaning just scratched the surface. The zipper was the main thing.

Home, finished the onion project, and went outside to collect sage, rosemary, oregano and mint from the garden, and bay leaf & Thai lime leaf from the porch. Used the spice grinder to make a mix of them. Added cloves and peppercorns to the mix.

Took the steaks out of the fridge, they were mostly thawed. Buttered the cast iron skillet and cooked them 2 at a time, using the spice mix as a rub. The thermometer said they were medium, but they are pretty thick, and the one I had for dinner was rare. Tasted fine. The other 5 are in the fridge because I'm out of freezer bags. And I will probably slice some of them up before I freeze them.

Watched rounds 2-3 of the draft, used FF a lot. Also watched the latest Graham Norton.

Turned the laser toy on, Spook didn't play because Spot was lying in the path of the beam, mostly ignoring it. I had to spray him a few times today when he started bothering Spook. But now that the guest room is closed, she is getting closer to normal.

Plans for tomorrow:
Safeway, I have a list
1 pm, Boardwalk Chevy to look at a Bolt
Maybe Costco. But probably not

Started in on the letters early, using Omnipage, which oddly is now a product of Nuance, which also bought Dragon Naturally Speaking, which I believe was developed by IBM. I am very impressed with how fast it is. It scans a page in about 10-15 seconds, much faster than I could dictate, and while I do have to make corrections on almost every line, especially where there were folds in the paper, most of them are single characters or gratuitous single quotes, and most are easily caught with spell check in Word.

I have the routine down, to eliminate massive formatting issues (Omnipage is too smart - it adds page breaks where it thinks there should be some, and in Word these are difficult to correct if you are out of eye of newt):
1. Scan each page
2. Run auto-OCR on all the pages in the letter (this is a 1-step process)
3. Save as a text file
4. Open the text file with Word
5. Select all, and click the "normal" formatting button
6. Save as a docx file
7. Edit as needed
8. Cut and paste the "Love, Me" line (handwritten and not OCR-able) and the return address from another text file
9. Save
10. Delete the .txt file from step 3.

Around 10 or so, garbage and green bin were collected, so I parked them in their places on the driveway.

At about noon-thirty it was time to drive to MV and the protected block of (aptly-named) Shorebird Drive which used to be a combination of start-ups and SGI spin-offs, but is now all Google. Took my lightweight Tamron 28-300, plugged in my GPS tagger and searched for herons (egrets, if you want to be technical, but egret is French for heron, sort of, and I like the word heron better).

Today was a non-work day for Google, but there still were cars on the parking lot. I plugged mine into a charger, turned around, and there was the street I was looking for.

There were white birds everywhere. And then there was this guy, sitting on a heron nest, but not looking like either a snowy or great white:

Will have a pointer to lots more photos Real Soon Now, but for now, one which needed no cropping:

Got some mediocre shots of babies being fed (steep angles) and then everything went quiet, so I drove down the block to Starbucks, updated my laptop, Facebooked and mochaed, then went back for another round of herons.

Glad I did, because this time a nest with kiddies feeding was right at the edge of the tree canopy. And there is an adorable shot of a fledgling on the ground hiding amongst the catmints.

From there, since it was so close, Shoreline Park, which was way less crowded than I expected. Mostly relaxed, walking around with the camera. Got this shot of a peregrine falcon up on the mast of the boathouse, lined it up 4th of July style:

Home, recycle bin had been collected, someone had already wheeled that back onto the driveway. Probably my neighbors in #8, to make room for their weekly car shuffle.

In the mailbox was the annual tax assessment for the house. Looks like I'll be paying less this year.

More letters. Break for dinner - smoked turkey drumstick & mixed veggies & ice cream. There were 3 scoops left in the box, I only ate 2.

And more letters.

The last two described the 1976 coup, which I actually saw as it happened, on TV sets in Chinatown electronics stores. But I didn't know what I was watching. My letters do not mention the fact that I was en route to the university where the most bloodshed occurred, on my way to their museum to see the letter which the King had sent asking for a teacher for his children, and cough drops, to a British merchant marine captain. When I saw the TV live stream, I reversed direction.

And there was a lot in those letters about trying to land a UN job, or have my PCV role converted to a UN position. And plans to tour Jugoslavia. None of that happened.

Watched an episode of Glow on Netflix. There is some fine acting, and some downright horrible acting. The script is a mess. It is allegedly offered in HDR, but I'm not seeing any evidence it was shot in HDR. Sydelle Noel stands out, she can actually act. Alison Brie, whose character is the person the story is about, is lame. And the character she plays is even lamer. There are one or two actresses who seem to be diamonds in the rough, or more accurately, hiding their talents under a bushel.

Plans for tomorrow:
More letters. I may finish the project.
I used to love fireworks shows. Now I just don't care.
My house is still the only one on the block flying the flag. I mostly fly it to add color, and so I can see where my driveway is.