I’ve spoken before of my delight at how my watch gives random badges. I had a three-day streak of surprise fun.
Did I know it was World Bicycle Day? I did not. But I’m glad I biked and got this badge.
Did I know it was Global Running Day? I did not. But things worked out for a second day in a row.
And who knew it was World Environment Day? Not me. But I’ll take the threefer.
While there are many downsides to being a cat-free house, one upside is that I can finally move forward with my plan to switch out my bed for a Murphy Bed or Wall Bed. I couldn’t take action before because the cats slept on the bed, so I couldn’t put it away during the day. Here’s a four-corner view of the room before I get started.
The desk area will stay the same; that part of the room works for me.
You can see that some planning crept in, there are paint chips on the wall. You can see I also took this picture, folded my hanging laundry, and then took the last two pictures.
The postcard rail will stay, but the room color will probably change. The fun desk will go; I have plans for a different kind of desk.
I’m looking forward to getting started with the changes.
Well, it has happened. My CDN timer has finally given up the ghost. Other than showing the time (which you must set exactly at noon) it no longer counts down or up.
In my correspondence files, I have a letter written on July 1, 2006 to the CDN corporation. I had purchased their timer at the hardware store, and it promptly gave up the ghost, so I sent off a letter of complaint. They wrote back offering to replace the timer and this one arrived shortly after.
And so I got almost 19 years of use out of it. Excellent customer service CDN, and well done hearty timer that survived being regularly dropped by me for almost two decades.
Sadly the recent drop brought the good record to the end, so I must say goodbye to this companion.
I’ve been brushing up my grammar skills using this skill builder book.
While they seem to think this will only take four weeks and that learning will occur quickly and easily, I took much longer than that, because I wasn’t working every day, and also because I also made a ton of flash cards to help me memorize all the grammar terms.
Unfortunately, you can see from pre- and posttest results that I improved by a little less than 3 percent. I can say though, that during the posttest I was much more familiar with the terms rather than taking a by-ear guess.
Onto my next learning journey: verb tenses.
The house is creeping closer to being ready to sell, and I took some pictures of some small details I love.
The fact that there is a utility room. Everyone has always called this the utility room, something that I didn’t realize was nomenclature of the period until I was reading a small booklet about Richland Washington’s Alphabet Houses, and noticed that all the plans had utility rooms. It would be called a laundry room now.
But also I love that cake cover style light cover, which is probably original to the house.
Here’s a closer look.
In the grandpa bathroom, a tiny room off the utility room, no one ever cleaned out the grandpa medicine cabinet, so here it is, last used in September 1990.
It includes a handy list of first-aid hints held up originally by cellophane tape. The other taped up item says, “Yet, it’s a pretty good and very simple remedy. It is not infallible, but very frequently will settle a queasy stomach. Use a two per cent salt solution (one-half teaspoonful of salt in three ounces of water). Then take a tablespoonfull of this solution.”
At some point in possibly the Oregonian, the was an article about someone in real estate (agent? photographer?) who kept a collection of cool light switch plates. I understood the appeal.
Here are two very cool light switch covers. I didn’t notice until I was taking the picture that they have mirrored backgrounds.
And here’s one of the two probably original bathroom switch plates. (From the other bathroom, not from the grandpa bathroom.) This one is cracked, and the other is not, but the picture of the non-cracked one came out blurry, so you will have to make do with the cracked one.
I also like the grooves on this switch plate.
Grandpa also had grandpa items in the big bathroom. Here they are, patiently sitting there since the George H.W. Bush administration.
I took the medicine cabinet contents home and put most of them out on the street for people to take as needed. They were all gone within hours, even that empty English Leather bottle.
I’m a Portland Monthly subscriber (support local media!) and received two different offers in short succession. One promised me the lowest rate you will receive, the other was alerting me to the fact I could save 67% off the newsstand price.
I don’t think I’ve ever paid the newsstand price (I went online to subscribe), so that was a moot point. But comparing the two offers, I did catch Portland Monthly in an untruth. While the three-year renewal rate was $42.00, thus $6.00 less than the $48.00 off-the-newsstand rate, and the two-year renewal rate of $32.00 was $4.00 less, the one-year subscription renewal was $20.00—$4.00 less than the lowest rate I will receive.
Which letter did I respond to? After checking my records and discovering I’ve been a one-year-at-a-time subscriber, I went online and renewed there. Where the rate was $20.00. The same rate I’ve been paying annually since the genesis of my subscription.
I stopped by the Starbucks in the Fred Meyer near my house because I needed to buy 6 ounces of coffee to make a cake. Like I usually do when buying coffee to make cakes, I explained that I wasn’t a coffee drinker, but needed a small amount for cake baking. The nice young man working there did some figuring and quoted me the price of $1.77, which was fine by me. I handed over two dollars and was on my way, holding the coffee behind me on the walk home, so I didn’t have to smell it.
The next day, I had another look at the receipt and discovered why the price was so low. I had been elevated to senior pricing!
While I’m still several years away from getting this discount for real, I was happy to take it in my 50th year.
While looking for the age requirement for the Starbucks senior discount, I have discovered that Starbucks does not have an senior discount policy! But! Some baristas might apply one if you ask. So I got doubly lucky. Thanks, Jayden.
I did some activity on a holiday I don’t celebrate, and Garmin rewarded me with this pretty badge.
There is also a Lunar New Year’s Eve one; I earned that one too.
I smugly thought that I had earned a badge every year, but I see I missed 2021. January 25, 2020, I did not yet have my Garmin watch.
Here’s to the new year.
Hank Green, of the Vlogbrothers, was killing time on a video (for algorithm reasons?) and so played through some of the games he plays. One of them was TimeGuessr. I was intrigued.
In this game, you are given a photo and then must guess when and where the photo was taken. It’s quite fun.
And I did really well my first time out, like here where I was only 241.4 meters off! (Though 5 years off.)
And like this where I was only 4 years off, but amazingly 12.1 miles away even though I had no idea what I was looking at except it was somewhere in Asia that used a lot of English in their signage.
I don’t have a lot of room in my schedule for daily games, but I would like to dip into this one now and again.
Getting things done didn’t come as naturally to me in 2024 (and 2023, (and 2022, and 2021, if we are being honest)) as it had before. Early in 2024, I made two sheets of basic stuff, one for my stuff, and one to stay on top of my aunt’s finances.
The sheets took probably 10 minutes to make, and they worked very well. You will notice the additions that appeared as the year went on. The delimitation for books and movies was particularly important. It’s really hard to catch those up in one session at the end of the month so switching up the goal to the 15th and the last day helped.
With my aunt’s stuff, it was nice to cross things off as I canceled things no longer needed.
You will notice that I gave myself the last week in December off. A just reward after a year of good work.
I’ve drafted new sheets for 2025. Let’s see if they work as well as these did.
