Category: Family

Weight Happenings – Last scale reading was 285, which means I am down about three pounds from the previous week. Part of that is because the household switched the weigh-in day. Some of that is me working the program. It does help when the entire household is on the program. I am ten pounds away from my first tollgate/minigoal/insert current terminology.

First Date Happenings – Well, the anniversary of our first date. Eight years ago two people who had been texting for a month screwed up their courage and met a place in between them. For our anniversary this year, we went to the theatrical screening of Hamilton. We both really like it. Then we went to the same restaurant we went to for our our first date all those years ago.

Birthday Party Happenings – Ward Manor is often the site of family gatherings due to location, size, configuration. So, it wasn’t exactly a shock when it fell on us to host the Grandniece’s fifth birthday party. The Wife loves to decorate and was excited to host. She made shirts on her Cricut for the birthday girl and the “Birthday Squad” who were helping with the hosting. That did not include me, mostly because I refused to wear a pink shirt. Eh, even I have my quirks. The party was catered by Publix, in as much as we ordered a bunch of various food trays as well as the cake from the grocery store across the thoroughfare from the neighborhood. There was a lot of set up including getting certain things out of reach from a half-dozen children under the age of 6. Including locking away some of our cats who don’t do well with being groped or who might bolt if a door is left open. There was also an “outside area” that needed to be set up, including a pretty decent size inflatable pool. At least we had a chance to get all the kinks out of the hose.

The Wife and I don’t understand this trend with certain folks of lateness. If I see an event starts at X o’clock, I assume I need to be there at X o’clock. Not X:30 or later. Different subcultures. Although slightly annoying for people who regard promptness as politeness. Still, once the guests started coming, we just kind of sat back and let The Wife’s Niece handle it.

Did I eat way too much? Yes. Did I have fun? Eh, more of glad I got to make a special day for The Grandniece. Was I complete exhausted once we got everyone out and the house somewhat put back to normal? Hells yes. And the neighbors were happy to take the inflatable pool off of our hands. Particularly when they heard the price – free.

Labor Day Happenings – Labor Day morning started with me finding the hall with some very odd streaks. Like the robot got a hold of some cat poop. Yet, the downstairs robot wasn’t supposed to be running. Grumble. Grumble. Grumble. Clean the hall. Clean the robot. Then we found the source of the problem. Freya, the youngest of the clowder found a streamer from the party. How did we know? Let’s just say it was streaming from her rear end until The Wife pulled it out like she was a magician drawing a string of handkerchiefs.

After much hemming and hawing, we took Freya down to the ER Vet. With it being Labor Day, our normal vet was closed, as was the urgent care. The vet did x-rays and couldn’t see anything that looked bad. So, the prescription was something Freya found most enjoyable – lots of treats and food to keep the digestive track moving.

I swear, between what we spent on the party and the ER bill, it would’ve been cheaper to take The Grandniece to Disney World for the day.

Car Technology Happenings – The Friday before Labor Day was very quiet at the office. It was just pretty much one other teammate and myself for most of the day. Anywhoo, I decided to just tackle a couple of my more simple tasks and spend the day listening to a book. Which is probably why I noticed the banner.

The Wife likes to use the Subaru app to remote start the Ward Wagon or the Wardmobile. Unfortunately, because both cars are Subarus, they use the same app. Which meant that The Wife down in Bradenton accidentally remote started the Ward Wagon up in Tampa. Fortunately, I saw the banner flash across my phone. Which meant just going out to the mostly deserted parking lot and turning it off. Then getting to let The Wife in on her little mistake. The small humors of life.

Garbage Can Happenings – The minor drama happening around the neighborhood surrounds the change of garbage collection. The county’s new contract meant we were all provided with new big garbage cans, but we were going to once a week pickup – and only what’s in the can. Not unusual for the area, but very different than what we are used to. Beyond the normal sturm und drang by the Nextdoor crowd, it means that we have the next month to do some heavy duty purging.

Weight Happenings – The mighty scale says 288, which means I’ve gained a pound over last week. Which, considering my work team went out to lunch and The Grandniece’s birthday party, I’m not surprised. I tried to keep the week on an even keel, but I guess I underestimated calorie counts for stuff. Hopefully, this week will be better.

For my long-time readers, you know I had a long hard battle to lose a bunch of weight about five years ago. A lot of weight. Like 150 lbs of weight. When I hit my goal weight, I bought my first kilt.

In the intervening years, between COVID, full-time telework, my own lackadaisical attitude, I put about 2/3rds of that weight back on. I stopped doing the things that made me lose weight, and as a result, I put it back on.

The Wife and I are back on the calorie counting wagon. It’s a hard slog of weighing and measuring what we eat. Making the hard trade-offs. It’s good because we’re doing it together. It makes the shopping easier and the decisions easier.

I’m working my way back to my goal weight, remembering the steps I used last time. One thing that helps is that I’m actually doing exercise this time. Not a lot, and not consistently. Still, that was more that what I did last time. And as much as I hate to admit it, being back in the office helps as well. I only take what I’m going to eat, and I don’t really have ready access to additional food. Well, I have some emergency food, but I make sure that is stuff I really don’t want to eat unless I absolutely need to.

Current weight: 287

First mini-goal: 275

Final goal: 200

We switch out between the Ward Wagon (Forester) and the Wardmobile (Outback) on a weekly basis. This keeps one of them from racking up too many miles at one time since I am the only commuter. Early last week, the Ward Wagon stopped recognizing my phone. This was disconcerting as I use my Carplay to listen to my podcasts and use Waze to navigate traffic on my commute. Replaced cables. Nope. Made my phone forget the car and rehooked it. Nope. My diagnosis was the USB ports were faulty.

The Wife made an appointment at the dealership for Saturday. In between that I had to deal with the biggest traffic snarl on the way to work (I still don’t know why EB I-4 was shut down, but it played merry havoc). Also found out the Bluetooth had a tendency to skip when playing my podcasts. No clue. As to that. Also had some fun buying some mounts for the phone.

Anywhoo, we get into the Ward Wagon for the 90 minute ride to the dealership. The Wife plugs in her phone and Carplay comes up. No issue. I plug my phone in. Nope. I reboot my phone. Carplay comes up. JFC. I made The Wife reschedule an appointment because I fucking forgot the first rule of IT.

A couple of weeks ago, The Brother and I were looking out upon the expanse of Ward Manor and saw this bird alight on our arbor.

I snapped this pic and decided to go back and see if I could figure out what it was after dinner. Then, I forgot. I was reminded about this bird the next day when another one showed up at the day job.

When I came home, The Wife suggested an image search because I couldn’t find it in my books. That’s when I found out that there’s a built-in image search on my photo app.

It’s a tri-colored heron.

Like a lot of the more unusual birds we’ve had at Ward Manor, it hung around for a few days and then vanished.

Wedding Happenings – This past weekend, BIL and SIL got officially married and all. It was a simple service with The Wife officiating. We’re all so very happy for the both of them. I had no official role, other than to walk The Wife down the aisle to take her place. This turned out to be fortuitous when her the shoes she was wearing spontaneously decided to strike their wedges and become sandals. Still, great joy and merriment was had by all. Particularly the grandniece who got to play herself to exhaustion.

North Carolina Happenings – Of course, the next day, The Wife and I drove up to Charlotte, North Carolina so she could do some face to face time with her team. My work is being “finicky” about folks working remotely, so I took personal time. However, I still ended up bringing my work stuff with me because of a large project going on and a short turnaround for one of my parts. So, while The Wife walked across the street to the office building, I logged into work. The nice thing about working while technically on leave meant I didn’t feel particularly guilty about switching from work to goofing off. I still managed to get my work done.

The drive up was mostly uneventful. No real traffic or weather issues. There were a couple of items of note. The Wife’s flip-flops broke, making her two for two on shoe destruction that weekend. The nice thing about living in the future is that she ordered another pair of her casual shoes for delivery to the hotel. The other weird thing was Siri randomly deciding it needed to give me directions at 2X speed.

Sunday night’s dinner was raiding a nearby grocery for a few items that we missed in the whirlwind of packing and wedding stuff. The Wife was fascinated that this grocery store had a wine bar in the middle of the store. Monday night’s dinner was at a Cuban place that was pretty good. It was as good as anything I would get in Tampa (which is high praise for you outside of Tampa). If we have to do this trip again, it will certainly be on our list. The one thing Monday’s dinner showed was gaps in The Wife’s knowledge of Spanish/Cuban fare. Since I grew up in Tampa and was briefly married into a Cuban/Puerto Rican family, I’ve absorbed a lot of food knowledge over the years. Enough that I take it for granted that anyone who’s spent enough time on the central Gulf Coast would know. Let’s just say there were some food items that I was very surprised The Wife was unaware of. This means some trips up to certain Tampa restaurants are required.

Wednesday we got up at oh-dark-early to make the trek south. Tuesday was rainy in North Carolina to the point there were flash flood warnings. We figured leaving early enough we would miss the weather. Yeah, not so much. We did get hit with some pretty heavy rain on the way down. Once that cleared out, it wasn’t a bad ride down. Until we hit the major road leading to Ward Manor. I swear we spent more time in traffic there then we did on any of the highways. At least we got home and unpacked before 2pm.

Kickstarter Happenings – Several months ago, The Wife convinced me to pick up an Olight Ostation to recharge my AA batteries. I really liked it and wished it also came in a version that would recharge my AAA batteries. Then I get an email that Olight has a new version on Kickstarter. After talking with The Wife, we decided to back the project to get the Pro version. If there’s one thing we learned last hurricane season, we need to make sure all of our batteries are charged quickly. Plus, I’ve moved household electronics to use AA and AAA instead of CR123’s.

Color Coordination Happenings – One of my quirks that The Wife doesn’t really understand is my shirt rotation. My “work uniform” is a polo and cargo slacks – except for Fridays when the slacks are replaced with a kilt. I have a line of different polo shirts that I’ve accumulated over the years. I grab the next one in the line, find the appropriately matching slacks/kilt and accoutrements and prepare for the day. I recently purchased two new kilts. The Wife was enamored with one that had greens and browns. She asked if I was going to be wearing that last Friday. I told her that depended on the rotation. She gave me that look she always gives me when I say something that just does not compute in her worldview. Later on, she asks which end of the row I pull my polos. You can see where this went.

Me: It’s as if a ghost put a shirt in the front of the rotation that would match the kilt you asked about.

The Wife: Well, if it was a ghost, at least it’s a color coordinated ghost.

I wore the new kilt last Friday.

Upstairs Happenings – The shuffling to decompress The Wife’s home office and turn the loft area into a shared craft room continued with some major moves. It was a lot of “if we want to move this here, then we need to move that there.” For example, we moved what is essentially a mobile kitchen prep table from her office into mine. Which involved me moving a corner cabinet. Which meant I had to move my rack I use for my airsoft rifles. Not to mention taking down all of my various toys and such.

My original idea of making it into an aircraft carrier for my mecha will have to wait due to space issues. But version 1.0 of toy display seems to be okay.

It will be interesting when I am able to assemble Superion.

Amazon is so helpful scheduling Prime Days right around The Wife’s and mine birthdays. We get to spend all of those helpful gift cards on sale items.

This year was the DVD year. After Milton and some other outages, The Wife and I decided that we needed a small collection of DVD/BluRays for the times streaming was unavailable. We already picked up a few series that we both liked, so I expanded the collection with “Downton Abbey” and “Lower Decks” as well as “How the Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom.” That last one is an anime I really liked.

I also picked up a new twelve bay charger for AA and AAA batteries.

I did pick up a flashlight – an Olight clip on. I haven’t used much of Olights, so I figured I would give one a try. I do love their big AA battery charger.

There were some household goods we needed that got purchased, but the last personal purchase were some toys. Hasbro is releasing a new version of the Aerialbots, and Walmart had Silverbolt on sale. Plus I picked up Air Raid from Amazon. I figure by the end of the year, I will have the new and awesome Superion built and in my home office.

Day Job Happenings – We got word this week that the threat of a RIF has abated. So, for the foreseeable future, I will be gainfully employed at the .gov. My position is still under review to determine if I should be at the grade I’m currently at, but I can weather a loss of grade much better than I could weather the loss of job. Plus, there’s this inexorable relief – like a Sword of Damocles has been removed.

Fourth of July Happenings – For our Fourth this year, the plan was to have dinner over at BIL and SIL’s place. SIL has her granddaughter down for a couple of weeks. I was asked to smoke some ribs for the dinner. Small problem. Rain. Plenty of rain. I still gave it a go. Worked for a bit, and then fire went out. We ended up finishing the ribs off in the oven. Not my finest smoking work, but at least folks enjoyed them.

We also had The Wife’s Niece and our grandniece over for a “sleepover” as we were going to the zoo the next day. The grandniece was very interested in my Autobot Blaster toy. It’s rugged, so I didn’t care if she manhandled it.

Dinner was good because we got to see The Wife’s Nephew and his wife. We don’t get to see her very often due to everyone’s different schedules. She works at Apple, so she gets to field all the questions about “what iPhone should I get” and such. The Wife and I have discussed with MIL that she should get a new phone. Also, we think she should get an Apple Watch. The fall protection is a big reason, but also the phone locator. We’ve been discussing it for months. Nephew’s wife had her convinced over dinner. It was very amusing.

After dinner, we shot some fireworks off in the backyard. A pretty decent Fourth.

Zoo Happenings – Saturday the group of us traveled up to Tampa to go to ZooTampa. Since I have lived in Tampa for the better part of five decades, I will always think of it as Lowry Park Zoo. We managed to get into the park just as they were doing the macaw flights. Imagine four large parrots flying at head height around a large plaza. It was pretty neat.

Sometimes I forget how big, how loud, and how pungent some of the animals are.

Here’s a series that NatGeo did a few years ago.

I would highly recommend stopping through if you are in the Tampa Bay area.

House Happenings – Over the last year or so, we’ve gone through three different lawn companies. It’s always the same. They tell us they can do everything and then it just goes down to mowing and edging the lawn. We’re on our fourth company – this one run by a cousin of The Wife’s Niece’s SO. The cousin wants to break into our neighborhood – and he considers us family – so, his team has been taking care of all those little details we asked for. Like getting rid of some shrubbery the builder put in that makes it hard to make full use of our postage stamp of a driveway. I’m sure the HOA is going to get bitchy at some point, but we’ll deal with that when it comes along.

Vehicle Happenings – With me now having to go into the office five days a week, The Wife and I knew that we needed to get another vehicle. We were holding out to see what future plans my day job was going to unfurl, but leadership is being cagey as hell. I don’t even know when they will reveal our new re-org. Anywhoo, there’s been a couple of close calls with The Wife not having a vehicle at her disposal while I’m an hour away.

So, last weekend, The Wife and I moseyed up to the dealership where we bought the Ward Wagon. We told the salesfolks we were interested in this Kia Carnival, a Subaru Ascent, and a Nissan Pathfinder. So, what did we end up coming home with? None of those!

Ward Wagon 2.0 is a 2024 Outback. It was the one that was in the right price range with the right features.

And an action shot.

Retirement Happenings – This week, The Brother “retired” from his day job at the same .gov where I work. He’s been there for nearly 30 years, and took advantage of the early retirement. He has a plan to start up some projects and do some retraining. It’s just weird that he and I are not going to be working at the same “company” like we have for the past sixteen years. I’m sure it’s even stranger for him not going to the place he’s worked for pretty much all of his adult life.