Can you believe November’s almost over?

November 29, 2011

Peoria, AZ

Wow, time sure flies when you’re busy.  It doesn’t matter if you’re having fun.  Fortunately for us, the past couple of weeks have been mostly on the plus side.

We’ve completed all of the doctor and vet appointments for now, and everything is fine.  Merlin’s leg is healing, although it will probably be a while before he’s not running on three legs.  The anti-inflammatory medicine helped a lot and he’s able to walk on “all four” to an extent now.  We’re optimistic that he’ll be able to work this out without requiring surgery.

So, what else have we been up to?  Well, we’ve done some cleaning and started getting the house ready for the holidays.  The first holiday is Thanksgiving, of course, and we spent that with our friends Ana and Larry as we have since we settled on Arizona as our winter headquarters.  They we married on 11/23/1978 -- Thanksgiving -- and this year, their daughter got married on Thanksgiving as well.  It was a fine ceremony and a great after-party (“reception” is so last generation), and we were honored to be there for Alex and Brian.  I took a bunch of pictures with a specialized “app” on the iPad, just for effect.

And, much to Geri’s delight, I’ve started to clean out the mess I’d built in the spare bedroom.  Between things destined for Goodwill or eBay, there was just a lot of stuff in there.  Now, 90% of the Goodwill stuff (mostly older clothing items) is gone to a better place, and everything I felt was eBay-worthy is listed for sale.  In fact, one item is already shipped and five more have bids that’ll “win” once the auctions close next Sunday.  

Otherwise, I’ve been spending some time migrating my day-to-day computing over to the iMac.  I’ve found a series of free apps to handle things that I’m used to doing with Microsoft Office on the PC, and I’m getting the hang of the integration opportunities.  Having spent money I didn’t anticipate on the iMac itself, I’m trying to be cautious on the add-on expense.  My next project will be to reorganize the desktop -- the literal one -- by moving things around in the study to make the space more effective.

Once that’s done, it’s time to paint!  This year, we’re planning to paint both bathrooms and our bedroom.  Of course, painting is probably not the extent of the renovation, as we’ll likely tile the floors at the same time.  Fortunately, since we already have the right tools, that won’t be a huge challenge.

And, tomorrow is “Christmas Decoration Day”.  We’ll get out the boxes of stuff and deploy the decorations we have used for the past several years.  Geri will get the tree up and I’ll tackle the outside lights.  With temperatures in the upper-70s, this will be a piece of cake compared to what we used to face in the Northeast.

Meanwhile, we’ve continued to eat well.  We’ve had a couple of nice Porterhouse Steaks (for two), Geri’s made several of the salads she’s famous for, and we’ve restarted our “try a new recipe at least once a week” program, mixed in with “old favorites”.  I’ve started our annual reorganization of the “wine box” as well, trying to identify wines that probably coulda/shoulda been consumed by now, making room for the haul we brought back from this fall’s West Coast travels.  It’s a tough job, yada yada yada...