Oscar Oscar Oscar

It is a modest Sunday in the second weekend of February. Superbowl 54 is a week in the rear view mirror. The Kansas City Chiefs won in a remarkable comeback to beat the San Francisco 49er's.

Susan is working a hockey game today and I am puttering around the house. I just finished balancing the checking accounts and now I am going to clean my closet. 

The Academy Awards are tonight but I'm going to delay watching until Susan gets home. Then we can fast forward through all the bullshit. Considering celebrities today and the recent acquittal of President Trump, I expect there will be a lot of bullshit.

Snow Clean Up at Icicle Fantasy Land

Icicles everywhere.

I woke up this morning to a light snow fall coming down but not sticking. After a nice breakfast of CheeseEggs and Ham, I got dressed and headed outside to do some snow blowing tidying up. I cut a path from the back door through the side yard to the front. I cut another path in the backyard to the hot tub.

While engaging in this activity, I noticed the giant icicle that usually forms near the upstairs bathroom was well on the way to being huge. I knocked off what I could from the bathroom window. However, I have some heat cord in that area and I had not plugged it in yet. I requires breaking out the ladder and climbing up there with an extension cord to hook it up. 

A six inch strip of my heat cord had been enveloped by the icicle and so a huge chunk of the icicle remained suspended from the dangling cord.

So now I had to break out the ladder and climb up there with an extension cord to hook it up. I broke it up as much as possible but a large piece remains while the heat cord does it's job.

I just went out and checked on it and it has fallen off. That of course, verifies for me that the heat cord is working.

Snow Blow Man

It's been a busy week for the snow blower. I was out on Tuesday morning and did the driveway and the sidewalk on three sides of my block. I ended up driving that day because when it snows, the bus schedule is not reliable. 

It snowed again on Wednesday night which had me out blowing on Thursday morning. I had to take a break because I ran out of gas. I quickly drove over to the local gas station and procured a gallon of Premium. I got back and had enough time to finish my rounds.

It started snowing last night just after I got home from work. It snowed well into the evening, requiring another round of snow blowing at 6AM. I know it's early but I do my neighbors sidewalks to mitigate any bad feelings. Of course, the neighbors I ignore on the other side of the street hate my snow blowing guts.

Sunday in SnowTown

Round Two of Winter Storm 2020 is happening as I type. It has been snowing for about an hour and if it keeps up like this, I think the 2 to 4 inches predicted in the forecast will come true.

Here are a couple of pictures from around the neighborhood.

If you look very carefully, you can see snow falling.

12:30PM: The snow has stopped. 

12:51PM: The snow has started again.

According to my weather station, it's 38 degrees out. However, I am having less and less confidence in my weather station as more systems on it fail. The anemometer which measures wind speed and direction doesn't work any more as well as the in door temperature sensor.

So I put a thermometer out side and it says 55. I'm going to give some more time to acclimate.

2:47PM: It's 39 degrees. The snow turned to rain and now it has stopped.

5:10PM: We are watching the Seahawks in their playoff game against the Green Bay Packards. It's not going well for the Seahawks. It's halftime and they are down 21-3.

It appears that the snow is over. Perhaps it will happen later tonight and if it does, I might post something about it.

Winter Storm 2020 Aftermath

It has warmed up substantially which has made the 5 inches of snow here at the house even heavier than it was last night. I got up a little after 8 and was firing up my snow blower by 8:30. The chute kept jamming with sloppy slushy snow. It made it very difficult to clear all the snow. Fortunately, my neighbors had gotten out before me and cleared their areas so I had less square footage to cover.

Nonetheless, it took about an hour and a half to clear everything.

There is more snow forecast for tomorrow. I am ready for it and I am also anticipating the arrival of plows in the neighborhood. They will clear the street but they will also create giant berms along the curbs and driveway entrances. Without vigilance of care, it can become a mess quickly.

We have inherited a cat that we don't want. We named him TwoToes because he has two white toes on one foot that stuck out to me.

He's very friendly but he's also very needy. He bit Susan on the arm when she was getting food for him. It wasn't malicious but that didn't keep her arm from swelling and turning red around the area of the bite.

She went to the doctor who prescribed antibiotics.

We are taking TwoToes to SCRAPS today. It's unfortunate but he is not our cat. Especially since Susan (a total cat person) is very weary of him.

Let it Snow

Anticipation builds as we await the coming of a Winter Storm.

Winter Storm 2020!

It's very exciting.

This has been the main focus of the news the last couple of days. This and an avalanche at Silver Mountain that killed three skiers on Tuesday.

The forecast is calling for between four to se7en inches to fall starting around mid day and making the P.M. commute a slide show of fun and dented fenders.

I'm on the bus of course so I'm not too worried about my commute, other than the buses running late.

The snow blower is gassed up and ready to blow. Now I just have to wait for the white stuff.

10:33AM: I just looked out the window and the snow has started. It's not even sticking yet. I guess I should take some pictures of the frosty progress.

Not much happening here. You can't even tell it's snowing.

Here we are at 3:15. The snow has been falling steadily since it began and is still coming down. I don't know if it is going to turn into 7 inches, let alone 4 but we shall see.

In the hour after I took this picture, the snow started to accumulate.
Getting home on the bus during a snow storm is no walk in the park. I waited for half an hour outside work and the 20 minute ride took 40 minutes to get downtown. Once there, my transfer bus was 16 minutes away. Then it was delayed. After 20 minutes, the schedule said 50 minutes. I could walk home in 50 minutes. And so I did.

Now I am home and very happy to be here. 

There is a good seven inches on snow on the ground and it's still coming. I would like to get in a round of snow blowing tonight but I will settle for a little shoveling from the garage to the house.

I must say that I am impressed with the Weather Service. The snow fell just as predicted.

10:35PM: Here is a picture for the statistics of the night.

And here's another for the front yard.

The snow is wet and heavy. Great for making a Snow Individual. Unfortunately, it is raining now. So that individual would wash away. Hopefully by morning.

Christmas Wrap Up

We have made it through Christmas and tomorrow is back to the grind, with a brief respite on Wednesday for New Years Day.

I've had a week off which has been great. However, I don't seem to have accomplished anything to show for the time off. I had wanted to completely clean out my closet and throw a bunch of stuff away. But I am lazy so it didn't happen.

We got three new items for the house. First, a wireless printer. We have been without one for a while and it was becoming frustrating. so we are back in business on that account.

Second, a new scale. The one we have had for several years has been unreliable. I can gain or lose as much as 5 pounds every day. My weight has been hovering around 215. With the new scale, I have gained ten pounds overnight. I'm now hovering around 225. I may go back to the old unreliable.

Thirdly, we have a new wine kit to start. We'll probably do that within the next week. Sounds like a good project for the weekend.

In the meantime, it's back to work tomorrow. It should be an easy week as a lot of people are not back to work yet. i have plenty to do either way.

Merry Christmas from Us

Half String

We are back on track with our regular lives, but regular lives thrust into the middle of the Holiday Season. I am trying to get some lights up in the house but I am running into this problem.

Shown above are two strings of lights. The string on the left works on the front half and the string on the right works on the back half.  Together, they make one good string with lots of extra bulbs in case one goes out...and you can find it. 

I believe this is all part of a huge Chinese conspiracy to take more of our money for lights whilst driving us insane at the same time.

Complimentary Me

I'm going to take a moment to brag about us. So if you're not interested in that sort of thing, I suggest you don't read this any further. But I know you will.

We have finished this years' round of Sky Walk decorating. We did ten sky walks this year and finished our last one just last night. 

Everything went well except for last Thursday night when my defibrillator went off on me. I was up on the ladder and felt the dizzy spell coming on. I got off the ladder and went to the floor and it hit me. It's very shocking! (I love that line) 

There is a period of disorientation afterwards but when I came out of it, Susan was in panic mode (justifiably) and said we were done painting. The odd thing is that after the event, I am fine. I felt okay and I wanted to keep painting. That was not going to happen.

Here is a photo of us in the STA sky walk with our artwork. The theme this year was snow globes. Here are a few more pictures of our work.

Maybe now we can get on with our lives to finish decorating the house and get our Christmas Card sent out.

Second Snowfall of the Year

We woke up this morning to this lovely wintry scene. There was about two inches. It was enough to activate the Snow in the Neighborhood Overwatch Workshop (S.N.O.W.) which allows me to break out the snow blower before 9AM. In this case, it was 6AM.

How was I to know that it would all be gone in two days?!

Holiday Decorating

Leaf Day-The Second Wave

With Halloween mostly cleaned up, it was time for me to get to the second wave of leaves.

So I got out the rake, the leaf bags, the leaf blower and the Leaf Vac.

I had the Leaf Vac tuned up earlier this Fall. It Started right up and ran like a top. It turns out that the condition the leaves are in today is perfect for the Leaf Vacuum. They were dry enough to get sucked right up. However, they were also very thick, which was not great for the Vac.

So there was raking involved as well. I was out there for about three hours and I went from this...

to this...

And now I'm happy.

There are still a bunch of leaves in the street. The deal is that the leaves that fall in the street are the responsibility of the city. However, it takes them forever to get around to it. I'm always afraid that it will snow before the city comes by.

So I decided to be a helper. Sometime in the middle of last week, the Parks Department people showed up and blew all the leaves in the park into several piles. One is conveniently located just across the street from me.

So, as a helper, I decided to pile the leaves into my wheel barrow and transfer them to the city pile. I got one whole side of my parking strip cleaned up. But then, it was three o'clock and I had worked enough.

Anyway, I will take more over unless the Parks people come back to get their leaves.

Post Halloween Video

Halloween 2019

We're getting too old for this.

The video above shows the yard after we had everything set up. I took it about 4:30 and amazingly, we were ready to go. Our many thanks go out to Randy, Bob, Mark, Ron, Kelly, Rob and Kyle. Without the help of these fabulous friends, we could never pull this off.

We don't have very good statistics for this year but I would estimate we had somewhere around 1500 people (mostly kids) come to the door. Our first Trick or Treaters showed up just before 4:00 and we shut everything down at 8:30.

We still have candy left over but it's good stuff. We managed to get rid of the 500 Twizzlers we had from last year.

I took the day off to get everything ready and Susan took half a day. Randy, Kelly and Rob showed up early and we got a lot of stuff set up quickly.

The pallets that Susan had me attach shelves to worked out great and we'll be using those again. The pumpkins all looked great.

Here's my favorite pumpkin that I carved this year. If you can't figure it out, you're too young.

Susan carved her traditional cat pumpkin and once again, it came out perfect.

To revisit my original thought at the top of the post, we are getting to a point where we cannot keep this going much longer. It takes a lot of energy to set up and manage.

By the time we shut down, I was completely drained. I'm still very sore this morning. I think that is an indication of the kind of shape I'm in more than anything else.

I'm happy to say Halloween is behind us. Now for the clean up.

Grape Run 2019

We have just returned from our Wine Tasting Weekend in the Columbia Valley region of Washington State. Prosser, basically.

We usually go down about this time of year to procure grapes for home wine making. This year, they had a freeze near the end of September and a lot of grapes were lost. That really sped up the harvest and there were no grapes for us this year.

We're going to end up buying a kit from Jim's Home Brew just so we have something the ferment this winter.

It was a lovely weekend as usual and we bought a lot of wine, as usual.

We returned to Spokane in time to go to our neighborhood Halloween party. It was held at a neighbors house down the street and they decided to do it outside. They had two fires going and we had lots of food and lots to drink. It was a fun annual event which means that Halloween is days away.

I'm taking Thursday off so we can get ready for the big night. We have a lot to do this week. I better go!

Eighteen Days to Halloween

We have been breaking out all the Halloween stuff and believe me, it's a lot of stuff. We are also beginning the task of acquiring candy and believe me, we need a lot. For this year at least, I've given up on my pledge to buy 300 full size candy bars to give out. We just feel we need the money to cover 1800 kids this year.

Today, I completed putting up a modified version of the Axworthy Flying Ghost. The thing has always been a major pain in the ass to put up and then to take down. I decided to make it easier on myself  to put the thing up. Yes, it's all about me!

Rather than three posts in the yard, I have modified it to run between the two trees in the front of the house.

Here is how it looks.

Susan, as always, is badgering me to add a second ghost but I'm not excited about that idea.  It's a small enough span that one ghost is fine and she is not the one who has to get everything back on track when it falls off.

The one thing I am worried about is that it is in great danger of being whacked as kids go under it. We are going to have to be very attentive to whackers.

We will be on whack patrol.

Attention Scumbags

It sure is nice to be around smart, stable, honest people you can depend on. That is because there appears to be so many stupid, unbalanced, dishonest shit for brains Scumbags out there.

The picture above displays a small part of what I have to do regarding the afore mentioned Scumbags. The wicker chairs on the front porch must be secured from Scumbags. 

This all comes up because I was putting the chairs away for the season and got a little pissed off at how difficult it was to disengage the chain from the chairs. Then I was reminded that if not for the chain, we wouldn't have any chairs at all. Hence, this mini tirade!

EffU Scumbags!

Autumn Work

Today, with the death of our cat Oscar, we have accepted that Autumn is here. So we are trying to clean up the yard and put away some flower pots. I have already taken down the massive vines of hops and I need to trim back the grape vines.

Once we got the flowers packed up, Susan went to work on more window scraping and I set about to get those two last window panes installed. I bought two panes of glass at Home Depot that were 11" x 14". I needed to cut them to 10.25" x 10.75". 

I butchered the first pane and then broke into unusable pieces. Susan showed me the proper way to cut glass and I easily installed that first pane.

Then it was back to the Depot to get another piece of glass.

That one cut easily once I knew what I was doing and the installation is complete, glazing and all.

So now our day is winding down and it is time to go to the Hub for some richly deserved frosty malt beverage. 

Oscar 2000-2019

When we went to bed last night, we were pretty sure Oscar was not going to be with us in the morning. I've been thinking that for the last several days. We sat in front of the fireplace and he sat on our laps, very weak and not moving much. I'd like to think he was comfortable and content.

At the end of the evening, we placed him on the warm floor in the bathroom and he passed sometime during the night. We took him to the Vet this morning and arranged for a cremation.

So now we are catless and expect to be that way for a while. Oh, there will be cats. Susan will see to that. But when will there be cats? That is the question. Perhaps we can start the Cat Game. I predict there will be cats by Thanksgiving.

You were a good cat. Rest in Peace, Oscar.