The unnecessary basement ceiling project is moving right along.
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And after the husband didn’t like the look of his zip taped seams?
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He decided to paint the whole thing white. Another completely unnecessary expense and waste of time. Who’s going to see it… the mice?
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Here he is vacuuming cobwebs out of the windows.
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Man with vacuum is such a rare sighting…. I had to get a close up.
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A giant pause was taken when the cables to our satellite tv were reached. This is sacred ground and must be dealt with properly to avoid interruption in service. He’s only seen Rio Bravo, El Dorado and The Sons of Katie Elder 122 times. Wouldn’t want to miss the 123rd showing.
Until I read this book I never gave much thought to inhaling space vomit, but trust me… NASA has.
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On that happy note much research has gone into vomit training and simulation.
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I’ve never eaten Progresso vegetable soup, and now? I’m quite sure I never will.
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There’s a job for which you will never see me volunteer.
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Since motion sickness is a natural response to a novel or sensorially perplexing motion or gravitational environment, astronauts have to go through it all over again when they return to Earth after a long mission. During the weeks or months of no gravity, their brains have been interpreting all otolith cues as acceleration in one direction or another. So when they move their head, their brain tells them they’re moving.
Astronaut Peggy Whitson described her first moments on Earth after coming back from 191 days on the International Space Station like this: “I stood up and the world was going around me at 17,500 miles per hour, as opposed to me going around the world at 17,500 miles per hour.” It’s called land- ing vertigo, or Earth sickness.
I’m sure I’m not the only who’ll be complaining today as it seems the entire United States was slammed by what they called a bomb cyclone event yesterday.
The wind? Insane. It gusted almost 70mph at our house.
The rain? A deluge that flooded roads, businesses, and homes.
Our nightmare started yesterday at 8:00am just as I was about to step into the shower. Bam! No power. Which meant no shower, sandwiches for lunch and dinner and an epic 13 hour gin rummy tournament by flashlight. Temperatures during the day were mild with a high of 52 degrees, but by nightfall it was frigid.
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Thankfully we have a fireplace…. and while it won’t heat the whole house, it did manage to keep the living room at 58 degrees when the outside temperature dropped to 7. Of course my husband the Marine runs the operation.
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Which means throwing giant logs on the top to get it truly blazing.
This does not always end well.
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Because sometimes the logs revolt and pop back out. Giant cloud of smoke, sparks that burned the carpet? You betcha!
But as we sat in the dark enjoying the smell of smoke and scorched Berber, the fun was just beginning. Yes, just as we were about to call it a day and go to bed… shingles started lifting and literally flying off the roof. We watched them sail into the backyard, the neighbor’s driveway and the road. Good times!
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Or not as it turns out.
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Five new leaks as of this morning.
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Did I mention Lord Dudley Mountcatten is utterly terrified of the fire? Positively and absolutely. He fled to the furthest reaches of our bedroom and cried nonstop. Which meant instead of sleeping on the relative warmth of the living room couch, I had to snuggle his highness in the frigid bedroom all night and got no sleep whatsoever because to top it all off? Our neighbor’s wood stove caught fire at midnight.
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Thankfully no one was hurt.
It’s 1:00pm now and we’ve been without power for 29 hours. I haven’t slept nor showered and just discovered it’s not easy to make tea and toast in a fireplace. I have to say …. I’m more than ready to fill the house with electric current. This pioneer woman thing is getting old.
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Here are a few pics I grabbed from friends.
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Our little downtown park.
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Not sure if you can tell, but the water is right under the bridge.
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Yikes!
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You’re looking at a pier and a parking lot. Or rather, you should be.
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We may be cold, dirty and hungry… but I’m still glad we don’t live there.
So many items popped into my head when I read this… but if I’m going to have to choose one:
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The milk box.
(No, I didn’t grow up in Palmyra, PA … but I couldn’t find an image of the dairy that provided our back porch with a milk delivery box so this will have to do.)
Young people today are amazed when you tell them a milkman actually came to your house twice a week and left the milk, cream, and butter you ordered in a zinc lined metal box. And while I admit I vaguely remember ours as the service ended when I was quite young… never running out of milk had to be the ultimate convenience. Some dairies left ice cream as well.
Now that’s a delivery I can totally get behind.
Your turn.
What item did you grow up with that no one sees anymore?
Yes, I’ve found another one of those quirky Mary Roach books to share with you. This time… we’re going to space.
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If you missed the last few books I shared, you should know Mary’s research tends to go a little beyond the norm and there will be some colorful as well as uncomfortable subjects discussed in future posts.
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“Early in my research, I came across a moment- forty minutes into the eighty-eighth hour of Gemini VII-which, for me, sums up the astronaut experience and why it fascinates me. Astronaut Jim Lovell is telling Mission Control about an image he has cap- tured on film. “a beautiful shot of a full Moon against the black sky and the strato formations of the clouds of the earth below.” reads the mission transcript. After a momentary silence, Lovell’s crewmate Frank Borman presses the TALK button. “Norman’s dumping urine. Urine [in] approximately one minute.” Two lines further along, we see Lovell saying, “What a sight to behold!” We don’t know what he’s referring to, but there’s a good chance it’s not the moon. According to more than one astronaut memoir, one of the most beautiful sights in space is that of a sun-illumined flurry of flash-frozen waste-water droplets. Space doesn’t just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.”
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Sun struck frozen pee.
And we’re off!
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For all the excitement of preparation and training, I can imagine there would also be a lot of mind numbing down time.
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Butt lubrication is probably not highlighted in the NASA press pamphlet.
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The lunar two step?
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Want to test how astronauts react to stress? No toilet would definitely do it.
Just when I thought our nightmare with the IRS was over?
This….
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My husband’s annual social security benefit statement came the other day but something was off. It showed an IRMAA deduction and results in his check being $76 less than it is now. Since there’s supposed to be a large increase in Social Security next year… that made no sense.
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The calculations were made on our 2020 tax form? Of course they were! That’s the year the friggin’ IRS screwed up and moved a decimal point on my husband’s Marine Corps retirement income. It took me 6 months to clear up that mess and get them to correct the form.. but apparently they didn’t do it in time for Social Security to make their calculations.
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Yeah. I wish!
So…. thanks to the *%#<!*%* IRS, I have to gather proof they screwed up and file an appeal with Social Security to correct their numbers and get them to reset the benefit amount.
One tiny decimal point. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
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Where there's only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.
River's world..... 