I have been trying for the past several days to come up with a word to describe my bride, my best friend, my partner for life.
Saint comes to mind, and it's accurate, if a little threadbare. She probably qualified for sainthood in the first year or two of our marriage, trying to come to grips with the quirks and foibles of someone who was certainly a less than optimum choice.
She stuck with it, and with me. Thank God she did.
I took the money I earned and bought a 1960 Plymouth Valiant station wagon. Still one of the ugliest vehicles ever manufactured, but it had a slant six engine that was darn near bullet proof.
Prior to 1965, Chrysler used left-hand (reverse thread) lug nuts on the driver's side of their cars. This was left over from the days when wagon wheels only had a single nut holding them on the axle. Using reverse thread nuts on the left side of the wagon kept them from unscrewing as the wagon went down the road. Once car manufacturers went to multiple lug nuts, reverse threads were no longer necessary, and really didn't make much sense.
A few months after I got it, the old Valiant lost a spindle on the way home, the right front wheel took off across a pasture, and I spent the weekend scouring junkyards for a replacement. I didn't think about it at the time, but the one that broke was on the right and the replacement I found came from the left side of a car. It worked fine for years after I replaced it, but I probably had the only car around with left handed lug nuts on three of the four wheels.
How many reindeer does Santa have?
How many?
Ten.
Ten???
Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen, Rudolf, and Olive.
Olive?
You know. Like the song - "Olive, the other reindeer..."
For the past several years, I have posted pics of ugly Christmas sweaters and at least one out-of-the-mainstream Christmas song. Pickings were pretty slim this year, so I've combined the two...
And this sweater that defines 2020...
The communications company and the broadcaster failed to reach a new agreement resulting in more than 60 stations lost on DirecTV, AT&T U-verse and the AT&T TV streaming service.
AT&T places the blame on Tegna, which has more than 60 TV stations in 51 markets and reaches 39% of all U.S. TV households.
"In the midst of an ongoing pandemic, TEGNA is demanding the largest rate increase we have ever seen, and intentionally blacking out its most loyal viewers," the company said in a statement to USA TODAY. "We challenge TEGNA to return its local stations immediately while we finalize a new agreement and pledge to pay TEGNA retroactively whatever higher rates to which we eventually agree. We share our customers’ frustration, appreciate their patience and intend to do all we can to resolve this matter soon."
Unlike many of our neighbors, we have an antenna for use in inclement weather, so we can still watch Channel 11 whenever we want to.
I do miss being able to pause the program and fast-forward through commercials.
Most of the time, I'm satisfied with Microsoft and Windows 10, but once in a while it really ticks me off. This past weekend is an example.
When I shut my computer down Saturday evening, I selected the Update and Shut Down option. When I logged on Sunday morning, I had lost everything in Outlook - no Contacts, no Calendar, no Notes and none of the files I had created to hold correspondence related to flood damage etc.
I do back up my computer - not as often as I should, but probably more often than you do.
Once I logged into One Drive, I could see my Contacts file out there on the cloud, but nothing I tried would let me move it back where it belonged.
Finally in desperation, early this morning I crossed my fingers and did a System Restore. Luckily it worked and Outlook is back to normal.
My version of Windows lets me delay, but not eliminate, updates. There are programs to download that will supposedly let you stop them entirely. I haven't done that yet, but I'm leaning that way.
I promised to let you know, and yesterday's seafood feast surpassed expectations. The only thing wrong was that there wasn't enough.
The most exciting thing to happen at the old Boggy Thicket in a while is coming up this evening. We're planning a seafood feast for dinner tonight.
We've got shrimp, oysters, crab and some really beautiful scallops - the big sea scallops, not the little bay ones. I've eaten hundreds of them, but I've never actually cooked scallops before so I looked up a recipe on line. It seems so simple and easy I'm almost embarrassed to have asked for directions.
I'll let you know how they come out.
Our generator is back up and running!
The technician from Spring Generators (actually their service manager) was on time, knew what he was doing and had it fixed in just over half an hour. Great service - I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them to anyone needing generator service or a new generator.
Sure enough, the lights went out at 2:00 yesterday afternoon and were off for about three hours. Probably only a minor annoyance for folks who don't own a stand-by generator and are used to doing without electricity, but for us it was almost a major disaster.
We're so spoiled, we didn't know what to do.
The only candles we own are for aroma, not illumination, and the Coleman propane lantern from the camper had a disintegrated mantle. We cooked supper on the top of the stove, dished it up via flashlight and ate it in the final fading light of the day.
If the lights hadn't come back on when they did we would've been lost. The whole experience made paying today's service call a whole lot more palatable.
Looking at how inaccessible the starter is on our generator reminded me of something I hadn't thought of in half a century. I called this post a sort of a Christmas story, and if you just stay with me, you'll see what I mean.
In the early 1970's, before Xerox took over the market, my employer, 3M Company, was the largest copier company in the country. All of the machines we sold used a patented process with chemically treated or coated papers, then, in 1972, 3M entered into a deal to sell a dry process electrostatic copier manufactured in Japan by Toshiba but sold here under the 3M brand.
Summing up the presentation, Ron said (Here comes the Christmas reference.) "It's a really great little machine, but it was designed to be worked on by Elves."
That seems to be what happened to us this week. We were feeling all satisfied and pleased with our luck when our year old microwave got fixed free of charge, then I realized that our stand-by generator hadn't started up to do its weekly exercise on Sunday.
I went out and tried the manual start switch. The starter didn't engage, it just made a sort of buzzing chatter. My first thought was that the battery was bad - we've had to replace the battery a time or two over the years - but jumping it with the lawn mower had no effect at all.
Getting to the front of the generator is easy. The top lifts up and two bolts let you remove the front panel. That lets you change the oil and filter or replace the battery, but the starter is between the engine and the back panel. The manual does not give directions for removing the back and side panels, and when you check for starter problems it says to contact an authorized service representative.
If I were twenty years younger, or if the temperature was twenty degrees warmer, I would have tried it anyway, but instead I called for service.
The technician is supposed to be here Thursday.
