The past week saw us tackling a few projects: rug cleaning and continued work on the 2,000 piece puzzle. Becky has been the prime worker on the 2,000 piece puzzle I mentioned in my last post. Pam has put in a few hours and I have contributed a minimal amount of time. Right now the puzzle is about 60 percent done. Here is a photo, taken by Becky, of Pam and I working the puzzle in its initial stage:
It will be another week (or more) before the job is completed. I’ll include a photo of the finished work (or work-in-progress) in my next blog post.
Another activity that took up several hours was the rental of a rug cleaner and cleaning a couple rooms — the parlor and the media room. Both room cleanings required the removal or re-arranging of furniture and “decoration stuff.” The first photo is of what came out of the parlor bedroom and found a temporary resting place in the library.
Becky piloted the cleaning machine around the parlor and I did the upstairs media room.
The cleaning machine came from the Ace Hardware store in New Hampton. We had been in town to drop JoJo at the groomers and rented the machine after dropping JoJo off. We returned the machine on the trip, later in the day, to pick up JoJo.
Seeing as we would be in New Hampton already, we took the travel opportunity to order take-out from the Chinese restaurant in town. The restaurant is named “The Lucky Bamboo” and the food turned out to be very tasty. It has been a long time since we’ve enjoyed Chinese. The restaurant is take-out only, so we waited outside until the order was filled. It was hard to drive all the way home with the smell of hot food in the car! (The dogs thought so too.) We will be ordering from The Lucky Bamboo again.
That was one busy day for retired people!
The following day, it was time to drive Bru and Blondie to the vet for their checkups. The examinations went pretty well for dogs of 12 and 13 years of age. Turns out only Blondie has a current issue – a mild infection/irritation in one ear requiring drops for treatment.
The rest of the week, I worked on making a DVD on a flash drive, and my trial effort seems to work OK. (I used some existing clips to make the DVD.) The next step is to buy the VHS to digital movie software and hardware and start converting our old family VHS tapes.
I continue to scan slides from my collection. I had made a mistake, though, in not marking the early slides once I had scanned them. Now I put a small “s” in a corner of the slides I have processed to indicate they have been scanned. To date I have scanned about 320 slides. The other thing I need to do is sort through the slides in a big way as I have images of the same topic taken at different times. One sample of this is the Lead King Basin and town of Marble. I visited this area several times and images from the trips are scattered through different 3-ring binders where I keep them. That, however, would be a major project and require a lot of room to spread out sheets of slide holders. Not sure when I will take that on. At least once I have them scanned I can put related photos in their own folder.
The upcoming week holds a few tasks to be completed. We will be going through both our tax forms to finalize them. Federal will be filed first, as it appears we are due a small refund. Iowa taxes won’t be filed until near the deadline, as we will own them a few hundred dollars. It’s always excellent to get that task finished and out the door.
For me, the big event will be another trip to the Mayo Clinic for my 6-month check up and my second-to-last hormone injection. I hope there are no surprises and the treatment is progressing normally. Critical will be my PSA level, which was undetectable at my last visit, a condition that I hope continues.
“Significant snow” is in the forecast for the upcoming week. So far the weather forecasters have not put a number on how many inches NE Iowa could get, but it appears several inches is possible over a couple of days. It looks to be a slow moving cold air mass interacting with moisture coming up from the Gulf of Mexico, so there is potential for a good-sized snowfall. We’ll follow the usual “wait and see” forecast cycle.
Photo Archive
Family photos from the early 2000s:
That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!
Pam’s Penny
I’m trying to work up the enthusiasm to continue painting in the downstairs bathroom. It’s more entertaining to watch the Olympics, although my attention span for ski events is pretty short.
We’re surviving February. I’m pretty well “over” winter myself.
Happy Trails.
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