The dishwasher broke down, because of course the dishwasher would break down during the third week of a statewide shelter in place order triggered by a worldwide pandemic.
Category: TMI Tuesday
bifocals
I’m wearing my first-ever pair of bifocals now. Well, not right this minute. I’m nearsighted, so I don’t need corrective lenses to see a computer screen that’s right in front of my face. There are times, though, when I have to look at someone else’s computer screen and it gets weird because to get close enough to read it, I have to invade their personal space. Some people don’t mind so much, but some people do.
There are also times when I’d like to be able to read the various dials and readouts on the dashboard of my car. Some readouts I can look at and know what they’re telling me without actually reading them; the speedometer, for instance. I know when it’s pointing at “60” instead of “50.” But sometimes I want to know the name of the song on the radio, or read the map display, and to do that I would have to tip my head way back and peep under the lenses of my old prescription.
I don’t have to do that now, but it’s a bit of a struggle overcoming the muscle memory. I keep peeping under the lenses when all I have to do is dip my eyes to look through the lower half of my new lenses.
paint the town
I took My Darling B out at dinner time last night and spent almost two hundred dollars!
The venue: Broadway Tire Sales.
The occasion: There was a screw in the left rear tire.
There was a nail in it, too, but I didn’t know that until the mechanic took the tire off the wheel to check it out. The screw was in the tread, but the nail was in the sidewall. They can patch the tread, but they can’t patch the sidewall, so what I thought was going to be a $18.00 patch job turned into an $89.99 tire replacement.
And it turned out I needed my oil changed, too. Well, it didn’t “turn out” that way. I’ve been putting off changing the oil for months, so I knew the oil needed changing. I just didn’t know the mechanic would know exactly how long I’ve been putting it off. Long time, “it turns out.” Well, he had it up on the rack anyway, so I said go for it.
Aaannnd the air filter had to be changed.
“Anything else?”
The mechanic shook his head. “Nope. That’s it.”
After parts and labor it came to something like $189.97.
Oh, and I spent $0.85 on a bag of Gardettos, which I shared with B.
kegle
The other day I peed my pants like a little boy and survived to tell the tale.
It all started with breakfast at the Avenue Club, a venerable Madison supper club on East Washington Avenue. We went there to take advantage of their New Year’s unlimited pancake breakfast. They brought each of us two freshly-baked pancakes as big as a dinner plate, invited us to visit the table where they had set up dishes heaped with toppings such as pecans, almond slivers, chocolate chips and the like, and said if we wanted more, we could help ourselves to the mountain of hot cakes on the steam table they were continually refreshing.
As it turned out, “all you can eat” means the two giant pancakes they brought me in the beginning. This was a classic “eyes bigger than head” situation. I was really very proud of myself just for finishing those two.
I ordered a tall glass of orange juice with my breakfast, and after we stuffed ourselves full of pancakes, we lingered over coffee for a little while. That was my third coffee of the day, after our customary hot cuppa (or two) to wake up as soon as we got out of bed. My kidneys were doing their best to keep up, and I made a couple stops at the club and again as soon as we got home, so I sincerely thought output had caught up with input. I was so very wrong.
I was maybe four blocks from home when I began to replan my route. I’d thought of going as far as the library, which reminded me there were no public buildings open anywhere today. Maybe not such a good idea to get too far from home. By the time I was walking along Winnequah Road down by the shore of Squaw Bay, I was sure than shortening my route was a good idea.
I had the stop sign at Maywood Road in sight, two blocks away, so picked that as my turnaround point, hung a right at Kelly Place and squiggled through its twisty turns until I got to Panther Trail, which I followed up to Bridge Road, a total of maybe three blocks. By the time I got to Bridge Road there were enough alarm bells going off in my hind brain to make me nervous.
It’s a two-block walk up Bridge Road to Frost Woods Road, and one block along Frost Woods to Sylvan Lane. I was speed-walking all the way. By the time I was in the home stretch I was sure there was going to be an accident in plain sight of the whole neighborhood, but I managed to hang on until I unlocked the front door of our house and stepped inside.
I remember playing in the living room with our son Sean when he was maybe three or four years old. We were on the floor setting up a skirmish with a bunch of plastic dinosaurs or something like that when all at once he jumped up and began a fast march across the room as if he’d just received a coded message by radio wave from the mother ship. Halfway across the room he yanked his pants down and tried to manually stop himself from emptying his bladder on the way but failed, squirting a trail that pointed into the hallway and continued into the bathroom.
That was me as I ran across the living room. It’s kind of funny when it’s a four-year-old, not nearly as funny when it’s a fifty-six-year-old.
too much info number one
I’m not sure if I’ve got this “TMI Tuesday” thing right, but here goes:
I love toast. I mean, a LOT. But not just any toast. Most people are oddly casual about how toast should be prepared. Whatever the total opposite of casual is, I’ve gone in that direction.
For a start, there’s no toaster in my experience that has been able to brown a piece of bread to perfection, so after dropping the bread in the slot, I usually stand by with my hand over the trigger and pop it every thirty seconds or so to make sure it’s just right.
Then, toast must be buttered, and the butter must be spread on the toast immediately after it comes out of the toaster so the butter will completely melt into the toast. There must be way too much butter on the toast, so that the toast looks like a sponge soaked in butter. And it’s important to spread the butter out from the center of the toast, with special attention paid to getting it all the way to the crust. There’s nothing worse than dry crusts on your toast.
If the toast is topped with honey, it must be thickly and evenly drizzled across the toast and, same as the butter, allowed to soak in before the toast is eaten.
If instead jam is the spread of choice, there must be more than enough of it. “Enough” as in “enough to make my stomach hurt.”
The only other acceptable topping for toast is sugar with perhaps a little bit of cinnamon dusted over it. Marmalade is never spread on toast.
Breakfast is ruined if these steps aren’t followed to the letter.
How’d I do? Too much information?
This Is Drivel 