hudebnik

Technically, today is a work day, although it's Monday so I'm WFH by default, and not many other people are in the office this week anyway.

Yesterday afternoon we agreed on menus for part of the next week -- at least Christmas Eve dinner, Christmas Day brunch, Christmas Day/Hanukkah dinner, New Year's Eve dinner, New Year's Day brunch, and New Year's Day dinner -- and I compared them with current supplies to generate a lengthy shopping list. Perhaps shalmestere will go on a shopping expedition today while I'm working-for-pay.

There's still snow on the ground, still mostly white. The weather forecast says it won't get above freezing today, and we'll get another maybe-an-inch tomorrow morning. Any of it that hasn't melted by Sunday (the 29th) will melt in the rain that day, as temperatures rise into the 50's. Still, a white Christmas of sorts.

Walked the dogs in the park yesterday mid-day, and every time we got to a decision point, Miss B. insisted on the direction away from the house, so it was somewhat over a mile before we got home. Beautiful weather, snow on the ground and the trees, but when we got to a moderately-busy street the sidewalks were salted, and the dogs didn't like that.

Yesterday we made two more batches of Christmas cookies, four so far (magic cookie bars, dried-cherry-and-white-chocolate-chip drop cookies, peanut-butter-chocolate-kiss cookies, and Mexican-hot-chocolate-marshmallow cookies). One or two more to go; we're skipping some of the fiddlier kinds because we have fewer places to give them away this year.

Last Friday night we had tickets to go to a Ceremony of Lessons and Carols at a church in the Village, with music performed by a local medieval group we've heard before. We didn't actually leave the house Friday night -- shalmestere was too tired -- but we heard and watched the ceremony on-line last night. It was a real church service, with real clergy, with the priest giving all the lessons (the Temptation in the Garden of Eden, the Slaughter of the Innocents, the Annunciation, the shepherds guarding their flocks by night, and one or two other episodes) in Middle English. shalmestere had some complaints about his pronunciation, but she's studied Middle English in school and he probably hadn't. Anyway, I could make out most of what he was saying, and I imagine many in the live audience could too. There were the usual audience-response components, some in Latin and the "Our Father" in Middle English (the live audience had a printed script). The music was good, mostly medieval, with one somewhat under-rehearsed piece written by our acquaintance David Yardley in "medieval style". I might have opted for fewer verses of some of the songs, but if they're trying to convey the idea of a less-hurried, less-clock-driven world, doing six to ten verses of a familiar Christmas song is a reasonable approach.

It being only 9 PM by that point, we then watched another of our library of Christmas-special DVD's: "The Year Without a Santa Claus", from 1974, which I'm not sure either of us had watched more than excerpts of before. It's no "Rudolph": animation technology had advanced somewhat in the ten years in between, but it feels as though the studio had suffered budget cuts and was just phoning in the music and writing.

... I had the day off work ("March global reset day"), so I've been doing miscellaneous household things.

• Took dog to vet for shots and annual exam. Made appointment for dental cleaning next week. Picked up flea/tick pills for both dogs. We still have two months' supply of heartworm pills.


• Watered plants on enclosed porch. They don't need much water in the wintertime, but they were starting to look a bit withered, and an hour after watering, they look much happier.


• Scrubbed and applied Rustoleum to rusty spots on the handrails of the front steps.


• Took down candle-lit houses from front window. Some people take down this stuff on Dec. 26, some on Jan. 1, some on Candlemas, some on Ash Wednesday, but we've missed all of those, and now it's March. Also put away the Xmas-themed front-yard lights (which shalmestere brought indoors two weeks ago).


• Mostly filled out form for historic-district home-renovation tax credit. Not sure how much of the cost to attribute to which part of the project; e-mailed contractor to get a cost breakdown because only certain parts are eligible for tax credit.


• Paid some medical bills.


• Put away some clothes that were hanging up to dry in the basement.


• Made lunch, using up the last sniglets of frozen salmon that weren't big enough for a dinner for two.


• Picked up prescription refill, and a couple of OTC drugs, from pharmacy. Bought some groceries.


• Tacked down the felt weather-stripping in the front door: it was crumpling every time the door closed, and this offends my sense of rightness. Also whacked a loose door hinge pin back into place, ditto.


• Took a nap.


• Checked work e-mail. Started triaging a bunch of probably-low-priority bugs that were assigned to me over the last few days, but found that most of them had been closed already.


• Went to dinner & Trader Joe's w/shalmestere.

Friday was Veterans' Day, and shalmestere had the day off. Her niece and the niece's husband came to NYC for the weekend to see some Broadway shows and do tourist stuff, so I took a vacation day Friday, we met them in Manhattan for lunch and talked for a couple of hours. Which was fun, but somewhat exhausting when you're out of practice extroverting, even with family.

Saturday morning I walked the dogs, fed the dogs, fed myself, and when shalmestere woke up, told her "It's an absolutely gorgeous day: high of 70F, light breeze, blue skies, puffy white clouds... it would be criminal to not do something outdoorsy today." So we put the dogs in the car and drove up the Hudson to Anthony's Nose for a hike.

Anthony's Nose is reached by a several-mile hike from a trailhead in a small parking lot off a twisty mountain road just north of Peekskill. When we got there, I slowed down just enough to observe that the small parking lot was quite full (and not quite enough to get rear-ended on the twisty mountain road), so we continued another five miles across the river to Bear Mountain, which has an enormous parking lot.

Even the Bear Mountain parking lot was nearly full, as apparently everybody else in the NYC area had reached the same conclusion I had, but we found a spot and walked the dogs around the lake and a little way up the mountain. Bailey happily Sniffed All the Things, and peed on many of them, cowered in fear from the other dogs but introduced herself to many of the people. Archie, as is his wont, excreted promptly and decided "time to go home now; this place is unfamiliar, and there are WAY too many strangers." He eventually introduced himself to a couple of other dogs, while cowering in fear from the people.

Anyway, it was a gorgeous day, in a gorgeous place. Physically somewhat tiring, but not socially (for us bipeds).

Today the weather is supposed to be intermittently rainy, and at least 15F colder than yesterday, so we'll be doing things around the house.

177.0 lbs. (!!!)
breakfast: grapefruit, yogurt, cereal, soy milk, dried cranberries
lunch: bacon, chocolate-chip pancakes
dinner: potato latkes, yogurt, cranberry salsa
dessert: raspberry-chocolate crumble bar, ice cream

In bed about midnight; D. came to bed half an hour later. Not enough sleep.

About 5:30 or 6 PM our old SCA friend Katie came over: she was in the neighborhood visiting family, and stopped by our place to chat and "reset" after dealing with family stuff. It was a pleasant and wide-ranging conversation, but as she was talking to our dogs, Archie started peeing on the floor. He had had a lengthy morning walk in the park, but no afternoon walk yet. Anyway, I hustled him out the door while D. and Katie grabbed paper towels and wiped up the mess. He peed on the sublawn, then was perfectly content to come back inside to sleep on a nest while we talked some more. Around 8 or 8:30 Katie left, D. took the dogs out for another walk, and I went to the grocery for a few staples, then started grating potatoes and onions for latkes. We ate dinner around 9:30, which isn't optimal, but the latkes turned out well.

Last Thursday, for the first time in fifteen months, we were in Manhattan. Only for the twenty minutes it took to get from the Hamilton Bridge to the GW Bridge, and we didn't get out of the car, but we were technically in Manhattan on our way to New Jersey. We came back, crossing Manhattan again, with a new hound -- our eighth, whom we've named Archie (after Andrews, not Bunker or Mountbatten-Windsor).

Yesterday morning, for the first time in sixteen months, I had a professional haircut. (shalmestere had tried cutting my hair twice in the interim: the first time went pretty well, the second not so much, and she hadn't wanted to do a third try.)

Last night, for the first time, we left Archie in the house unsupervised for an hour or so while we attended a party at the next door neighbor's. We came back when the fireworks in the distance became more frequent, so we could both help calm the dogs.

Today, for the first time in fifteen months, we took public transit. Also for the first time in fifteen months, we were in Manhattan on foot. The occasion was taking a damaged vielle for repair at Matt Umanov Guitars; we also took the opportunity to eat barbecue and gelato. The streets and restaurants were all busy. About half of the people not in the process of eating were wearing masks (although I don't see much point in it any more when I'm outdoors and not in a crowd). This also entailed leaving Archie in the house unsupervised for over three hours. No mayhem seems to have ensued.

We store our dog food in a barrel in the kitchen, lined with a trash bag. A week or two ago I found that part of the trash bag had been pulled out through a knothole near the bottom of the barrel, presumably by a mouse, so I set a couple of mousetraps, catching two (2) mice in the past week.

Last night I set a mousetrap under Moongrrl's food-and-water dishes in the kitchen, next to the food barrel, and re-baited another mousetrap in the quasi-triangular space between the circular barrel bottom, the wall, and the dish stand. This morning I went downstairs and found... ONE mousetrap, tripped and upside down, in the quasi-triangular space, and a mouse floating in Moongrrl's water dish. Cause of death was not obvious, and I didn't perform an autopsy -- might have been drowning, might have been a neck broken by a mousetrap, might have been a dog attack. Where did the other mousetrap go? If the mouse was caught in the mousetrap and subsequently moved into the water dish by a dog, how did a dog without opposable thumbs extract it intact from the mousetrap?

Saturday late morning: shalmestere and I went into Manhattan for a Viola Da Gamba Dojo concert at St. John's in the Village, a cute little church where we've heard a couple of early-music concerts before. Then went around the corner to a barbecue restaurant for dinner. Came home, tired. I don't know why this relatively mild schedule should have been so tiring -- at least shalmestere was actively playing music, while I spent most of the time just sitting in the pews reading or doing Google-work. But I made a start on this year's income taxes, which I think I can do without paying Turbo Tax or anybody else for the privilege.

Soaked Moongrrl's foot. The corn seems to be emerging a bit.

Sunday: I woke up, earlier than I intended to but later than usual, with Moongrrl panting. I thought she might need to go out, so I took her downstairs, whereupon she lay down on a nest and stopped panting. I offered her some water, because I'd been pretty dehydrated overnight, but she wasn't interested. So I started soaking the Romertopf to bake bread. (I had fed the starter Thursday night, made a sponge Friday night, added eggs, salt, and more flour Saturday morning, and formed a loaf Saturday night.) Fed dogs, walked dogs, set a beef roast to lying in salt (which should ideally have happened the night before), baked bread, and went back to work on the taxes. shalmestere woke up, and I made pancakes for brunch.

We both had showers, and the drain clogged: I got some hair and gunk out of it with the plunger, but it was still clogged, so I went to the basement to get the snake. Which also didn't seem to make much progress, although I eventually got the water level low enough that it wasn't standing in the tub (but left a bunch of gunk in the tub). In the evening, I tried to rinse out the remaining gunk, and it didn't go away, but at least the water drained more quickly. Still need to do some scrubbing and apply some drain-clearing compound.

shalmestere did several loads of laundry. I soaked Moongrrl's foot again.

I didn't make any progress on the (first) bedside table, but retrieved from the basement the thrift-store lamps we were planning to put on the bedside tables once both of them are built: confirmed that (a) the electrical connections work, (b) both lamps will need some gluing before I feel secure putting bulbs into them, and (c) both lamps need shades, but currently have no harps onto which to attach shades.

I made more progress on the taxes. We make too much money to use free-file, but we can use "free file fillable forms", in which there's minimal software support but at least you can fill out the forms on a computer, it does much of the arithmetic for you, and you can e-file. At the state level, we make too much money to e-file without paying a tax-prep company for the privilege, but there are forms one can fill in on a computer, it does much of the arithmetic for you, and you then print out the forms on dead trees and mail them in, because e-filing would hurt the business models of the tax-prep-software companies. And some of the forms have bugs. There's a line on Federal Schedule 1 that says "please attach Form 8889", and it'll automatically fill in the 1040 line from form 8889, except that form 8889 isn't actually available on-line -- I presume because the relevant law was changed in December, and they haven't finished implementing it in software yet. And on State form IT-196, line 42 is supposed to be auto-computed from lines 40 and 41, but in fact it ignores line 40, so line 42 is always zero, and I can't fill it in by myself because it's auto-computed, so the subsequent lines are wrong.

Mid-afternoon: the bread had cooled enough to try some. Much tastier than the previous batch: not only did I remember the salt, but I think I gave it a longer rise time. Yum!

Made and ate dinner -- roast beef and Brussels sprouts, both producing leftovers.

After dinner, we (mostly shalmestere) took most of the ornaments off the Christmas tree, found the appropriate boxes to put them in, and played Tetris to get those boxes into bigger boxes and the bigger boxes onto a shelf in the basement until next December.

Also looked at Moongrrl's foot. With a nail-trimmer, I managed to remove a majority of the corn that's been in her toe for months. Maybe she'll limp less now. Still needs more soaking to get out the remainder.

Yesterday we went to a Greyhound Friends New Jersey adoption event and came home with... Miss Bailey, a beautiful red brindle two-year-old female. The car ride home was uneventful -- no snarling or quarreling between the two hounds in the back -- albeit longer than expected due to traffic. And by and large, Moongrrl has been remarkably patient with this new, young interloper.

When we first started adopting greyhounds, we were advised that they feel most secure in a crate or kennel, and will probably want to retreat there. After six other greyhounds, Bailey is the first one for whom that's been true: as soon as I assembled the Vari-Kennel in the dining room, she walked in and curled up inside. Haven't been able to get her to eat in the kitchen, but if I put the food dish just in front of the crate, she's willing to step outside with her front two feet to eat. At bedtime, I closed the crate door (so she didn't get out in the middle of the night and damage herself or something else), and she was fine until about a bout of crying around 4:30 AM. I came downstairs, opened the crate door, scritched her a bit, and went to sleep on the couch, and she was fine. We'll try to expand her horizons gradually, teach her to climb stairs, and eventually get the Vari-Kennel out of the dining room once she feels secure enough in the house.

Bailey seems jumpy about loud noises. Which could be a problem: we're in a fairly quiet residential neighborhood, but it is New York City, and noises happen. Lo que será, será.

( Cut for pictures )

I hope that was enlightening and entertaining....