Month: September 2012

I’ll never forget the morning
When Grandpa ate the awning
To impress a pretty lady
Who went for men who were shady.
Anatole of Paris, lyrics by Sylvia Fine

One of the shades in the second bedroom collapsed this week. It was too small for the window that I had replaced a couple of years ago and I’d been putting off getting a new one since then.

I picked up a shade and it turned out to be a fraction too wide. No fault of the store, we hadn’t measured it accurately enough.

Ron brought the shade to the local hardware store to trim.

Meanwhile, I realized that we had the wrong kind of brackets. The old shade had been mounted over the window, not good. So, I went to a third hardware store and got brackets that allow the shade to hang inside the window frame.

Turns out that after the shade was trimmed, it was too narrow. When I tried snapping it closed, the shade “jumped” off the brackets.

This foolish shade already cost us about $16, ridiculous, so I didn’t want to get another one. So, I cut and painted a piece of wood shim and nailed it behind one of the brackets and added a shade pull. I think the shade will work okay now.

We did the transfer station run. I fed the plants in the front gardens.

We finally used our Beach House deal, and had an excellent dinner with equally excellent service.

After waddling home, we started hearing fireworks from across Old Barnstable Road. It was a very impressive display, and almost made up for the ones we missed on July 4. In some ways, it was far superior: no traffic and no parking hassles.

Ron admitted this topped the sound of gunshots that he heard sometimes from his apartment in Berkeley.

This morning, I visited C.L. Fornari’s gardens in Sandwich, a fundraiser for the Barnstable UU church. They’ve only been in that property for five years, and it’s amazing what she’s accomplished in such a short time. Really inspiring.

The St. Johnswort is flowering again. I don’t remember that from last year.

Morning glories started blooming.

I mowed and weeded yesterday at Edgewater. Pulled the extra post in the back yard out of the ground. Someone went to a lot of trouble to put it there, but why is a mystery, like the boat mooring that the septic installers got rid of for us last year.

Bought an inexpensive little bluetooth speaker so that we can listen to music from Ron’s Mac or his iPhone. Sound quality isn’t great, similar to a radio, but it’s nice to have music outside and in the living room.

Saw Peter yesterday. He looks MUCH better, more like himself. James was elected to Student Council! Not bad for his first week of middle school. He had to get 20 signatures to qualify.

After I had the oil changed in Fairhaven on Friday, I didn’t notice until leaving work that the hood hadn’t latched properly. It bounced all the way from New Bedford to Sandwich to Mashpee. On Saturday, I figured out how to fix it. I don’t know why no one explained it before, it’s not that complicated.

The part that “catches” the latch had seized up and just had to be freed with a screwdriver. It seems the spring and the cable are okay (knock wood). We cleaned and oiled it, and it seems to be okay now.

Finally got the O-F and PANA domains to point correctly. The PANA site is now reachable through a test domain, lonesomeroadsoftware.net

I am furious with myself for not transplanting the grasses from Edgewater. We’ve had some really good, soaking rain today.

I’ve been in a funk, some of which might be fixed with an adjustment in meds. I was so tired and hungry when I got home yesterday that I could have strangled Ron for an unfortunate and unintended screw-up over supper.

We did make it to this year’s final Distinctive Voices lecture at the Jonsson Center, though, grabbing some good coffee and the last two chairs. The subject was NCLB, pro and con. The person speaking is obviously a public school advocate, and he was a tad biased, I think.

I ran some projections today, and it looks like we aren’t far off on our federal tax withholding for 2012. Big relief, so we celebrated with a couple of fried clam plates from Cooke’s. I washed the truck. Ron turned the compost and watered the whole back border garden. Did a little cleanup at Edgewater to prep the area for planned transplants.

Around 1, we drove to exits 4 and 5 to see if any year-rounders were waving at the tourists. No one was there so we didn’t stick around. Turns out, we were in the wrong place: the crowd was at the Oak Street overpass. Next year we’ll know.

I plan to go to one of the mid-Cape overpasses today to laugh at the traffic.

For the most part, we’ve missed the worst of it this year. There was only one set of ugly incidents, in fact, on Mother’s Day. I wish those rude drivers and especially their nasty passengers nothing but ill.

Our loud neighbors were out in force last night.

The weather has been quite nice, though. We’ve kept the windows open most of the time.