With the colder weather and snow heralding winter, the “Big Event” was Elma’s Holiday Lights parade which goes right past our house on Main Street. I have a few photos to share this time around, so take a look.
In preparation for the big parade and holiday season we had put up outside lights, and some in-window lights as well.
You may notice the lack of snow. Although NE Iowa had received some, a day or two of warmer weather melted it.
Here is the parade approaching the house from the west.
The upcoming week promises to be cold with a chance of snow. Regardless, it’s time to cut a live tree at a tree farm we’ve visited the last few years. The tree will go into the Media Room, being one of our last Christmas decorating activities.
Most of our other activities were inside the house. Pam continues to work on the Solstice cards and I “puttered” with my computer. One medical note: I had a routine blood draw and my A1C has fallen from a high of 8.8 to 7.1. The trend is in the right direction and is partly due to the Lupron, from the prostate cancer treatments, working out of my system. I would like to get back to my pre-treatment levels of 6.5 – 6.7. I feel much better with the lower numbers coming in.
We have some sad news, though, as another of our outside cats has walked over the Rainbow Bridge. Ink (one of the outside catio cats) had been failing for some time and we had taken him to the vet a couple weeks ago and scheduled a return visit for this week. The vet concluded Ink had a tumor in his throat. While treatment was possible it would be very invasive and would require frequent visits to the vet. Pam made the difficult decision that Ink’s time was up, not wanting to put him through the pain and trauma of the treatment at his age. Ink was about 12 years old and started as a feral outside cat in DeBeque. Over the years he became more friendly and lived in our DeBeque garage, so we brought him with us when we moved to Iowa. Ink was my favorite outside cat and I will miss him.
I don’t have a really good photo of Ink, but here he is (in center) with a couple of his garage buddies from DeBeque. They are sitting on the warm hood of of our old Honda.
While on the subject of cats, I caught Elmo while he was settling in for a nap.
I don’t have any new news (or photos) re: the kittens, but they are learning new tricks from Elmo, such as opening the drawer under the kitchen prep table. This requires standing on the step stool and pushing the drawer from behind. Pam keeps a few cat toys in this drawer which draws the attention of the cats. While amusing, it’s also slightly irritating as one now has to check the drawer’s position to avoid bumping into it when walking through the kitchen.
Of note, Pam is in the process of changing phones and phone carriers. She will soon have a new number and the old one will be shut down. (I do not want to put the new number in a public post.) Pam will be contacting people with the new information, but for now the best way to contact her is by e-mail.
Her old Android, a Jitterbug 2, mostly died this past week. I was able to remove some files and get the phone partially working, but -in any case – she knew it was time to upgrade to something newer and better. An iPhone 12 will soon be put in service and we hope it takes care of her phone needs for some time to come.
I have a few technical notes to pass on. Those of you who view these posts from a desktop unit will observe two changes. First, the blog title is now in mixed case rather than all uppercase. Second, links from the menu now open in new tabs. The first change was done by changing the page’s underlying code. (I have yet to find the code that controls this in the mobile version, but I am working on it.) The second change was provided by a WordPress guru in response to a question I had posted in a support forum. I am pleased to have these changes in effect.
Another tech note involves our network connection speed. Last November we had received an e-mail indicating our internet speeds would be increasing along with an extra $10.00 per month charge. I ran a speed test on my Mac and found we were not getting the speeds promised and already billed for. In fact, we were getting less than a third (94Mbps vs 300Mbps) of the download speeds promised. (I requested and we were promised a bit of a rebate on the price increase for the past two months due to equipment issues. Let’s see if the carrier delivers.)
I called in a repair order and a few days a later a tech arrived to check our cables and modem. He found the modem was the problem and replaced it with a new one. (We rent the modem.) This cured the download problem, and now web pages and content appear to load much faster. We hope this will eliminate a situation we had been having with our streaming video where the signal would occasionally “lock up” and freeze the TV screen. The work-around was to change channels, usually by hitting the “Back” button, and forcing the streaming box to re-load. So far this has not happened with the new modem installed.
While puttering with my Mac I came across some video clips that had been saved in an unusual place that I had not noticed before. Taken on Grand Mesa, Colorado, this 1:51 clip is titled “A Fall Day Out.”
Except for getting our Christmas tree, the upcoming week promises to be quiet and cold. No visits or visitors are on the agenda. Holiday cards will be completed in the next day or two. I was able to get the snow blower running after replacing a leaking fuel valve, but major snow is not in the 10-day forecast so the blower will sit unused in the garage. I hope.
Photo Archive
This is a mixed bag of photos taken in Colorado after we moved [back] there in 2003.
That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!
Pam’s Penny
Today, let’s consider happiness. I’ve been pondering happiness. Is it possible to achieve a state where happiness can enter, given the level of ongoing stress in daily life? Or does one need to go to a remote location to tune out the negative? I kinda thought retirement would be an entry point to happiness. Not necessarily, as it turns out.
This week’s negatives: cell phone dying (I’m a Luddite, mostly non-tech, I hate dealing with this), heart-wrenching euthanization decision to be made for ailing cat [yet again], the usual [bad] news reports on climate-hate-gun violence, hog manure smell wafting into Heart House carried by 15-20 mph [frigid] wind. Ugh.
A personal oasis in the stress is my current “happy place” – working on the Solstice cards, with my kittens keeping me company. For those of you on the card list, know I intentionally develop a design that utilizes cut-and-paste and hand printing. Sure, I could learn how to set the whole card up on a computer program and print it. Why? I want the card to look – and be – mostly handmade. I think my ideal occupation would be working on miniature dioramas…maybe that’s my long-term happy place.
Happy Trails.