Recovery Happenings – The Wife’s recovery from knee replacement goes apace. She’s been walking more on her own without aid of cane or walker. She goes out two or three times and walks up and down our street – or at least part of it. It helps that she can have a bit of a stubborn streak, which pushes her to do more and more.

Day Job Happenings – I, unfortunately, needed to go back to work. We have a few major projects going on outside of my normal duties that I’ve been dragged into. The “perks” of being good at your job, I guess. The day job has given me an RA to work from home while The Wife recovers. Which, with gas prices, is helping. Particularly since we’ve needed to purchase a bunch of stuff we weren’t expecting. One thing I picked up was a Soundcore Select 4 Go portable Bluetooth speaker. Why? Because I’m working upstairs while The Wife is recovering downstairs. We have Echoes so she can call me if she needs me. However, that means I can’t use my normal headphones. And the Echoes suck for spoken word. The Soundcore is pretty decent for listening to podcasts and audiobooks, and for listening to the band I’m currently binging (don’t worry, it will show up on Metal Tuesday – might have to do a full month of them).

Grandniece Happenings – The Wife’s niece is working on a certification, and needs to use The Wife’s office and computer. Which means The Grandniece tags along. She is a ball of energy. I tried burning off some of that by taking her to the local playground. She complains that I make her walk the two blocks to the playground, but it’s all part of my nefarious plan to burn energy. The Grandniece also got to get a close look at some of the wildlife as we had a sandhill crane hang around for most of the day. The bird is bigger than she is, but she was fascinated by it. On another note, the grandniece, being a child of the twenty-first century, is always wanting to play with our phones or tablets. Since Amazon was running specials leading up to their Prime Days, we scored an Amazon Kids Fire Tablet for her to play with. I intend to let her play with it with limits on screen time. She was already annoyed when I put it away because we were eating dinner and wouldn’t give it back. It’s going to be a learning process.

Sandwich Happenings – One of the big discussions we have is lunch on the weekends. Generally we want something easy to put together and doesn’t take long. Anywhoo, we were in Hobby Lobby doing yarn stocking up before The Wife’s surgery and I saw a Hello Kitty sandwich press. It reminded me of an old sandwich press that Mom had back when I was in my teens. Hrm…. I checked on Amazon and got an updated version. So far, it’s been good for weekends or when I don’t have a lunch ready.

Art Happenings – During our various trips to Hobby Lobby to mainly get yarn, we ended up with a couple of “artistic” Star Wars wall pictures. It took us a bit to figure out exactly where we were going to put them. Finally found places upstairs for them. Well, one is technically upstairs, but it’s in the stairwell.