It's another gorgeous Sunday morning, so I decided to blog again although I really don't have anything to say. Well one thing I have to say is that last Sunday when I was blogging I should have looked at the date and realized it was my Mom's Birthday. Yup, I forgot my Mother's Birthday. Geez, Louise! Where does the time go? That was a rhetorical question, but if you have an answer, please let me know. I'd like to hope that I'm not really becoming more forgetful than usual, but I usually try to at least remember Mom and Dad's birthdays, no matter how bad I am with remembering dates in general.
I'll send her belated wishes this week.
I sent my passport renewal application in yesterday. It expires in September so I figured I'd renew it before it expired. I really hate putting my passport into the mail, though. It just feels so chancy to mail it to the passport office. Or maybe I just hate being without it. My only travel plans for the next little while are domestic, so I should be fine, but still.
I'm going to Palm Springs next week for a Board of Directors meeting. That should be interesting since it will be our first time meeting with our new CEO. Our CEO of 23 years retired at the end of 2011, so it will indeed be interesting to see how the new CEO and the Board interact. Palm Springs should be nice too. I've never been there, so I'll take pictures and post them if any of them turn out okay. Last year at this time I was posting pictures of my very first BOD meeting from Tucson. I was elected to the Board for a three year term, so I'm still on it for two more years. I enjoy spending time with the other Directors as well as the work of the Board. Some of them are colleagues I've known for years, and some are colleagues I've only just met through the Board. I've worked previously on other things with both of the two new incoming members this year.
I need to mow my weeds. I'm vacillating back and forth on whether to do that today or not. It's somewhat cool out, but the weeds are taking over, even though the grass hasn't yet decided that it's really Spring. I should probably mow and whack the weeds down. Neither the dogwood nor the holly I tried to grow last year survived last summer, but the two peach tree seedlings are both beginning to put out tiny green tips of leaves. They currently look like stick in pots, but the green tips are showing. I put the obligatory cat-kid picture that I took this morning into this post. The cats aren't much into cold or wet weather, but since it's sunny today they did go check things out this morning even though it was chilly. You can see the peach twigs in their pots, as well as the weeds that are coming up by the patio. The Bradford Pear trees in my neighbor's yards are beginning to blossom, and the crane flies are out in force. It looks like most plants are deciding that Spring has come. Even though we all have stories of freezing weather in March and even into April, I think I agree with most plants this year that Spring has come, especially given how mild a winter it's been overall. Yesterday morning the temperature gauge at the side of my house read 31 when I got up though and I thought, damn, I froze the aloe vera again. But the temperature gauge on my back patio read 36, although there was a thin skim of ice on the birdbath. So the temperature was probably right at freezing just before sunup. Poor aloe vera. They look pretty bad, probably because it's been a mild winter. I haven't been religious about putting them into the garage, so they've taken a couple of hits when the temperature dropped just below freezing. I've mostly left them out though to take advantage of the rain we've been getting.
Anyway, that's about it for today.
I really like Sunday mornings. I have nothing in particular to talk about today, but it's Sunday and I'm puttering around the house doing my Sunday chores. It started out this morning as a sunny Sunday, which is my absolute favorite type of day. It's become cloudy-ish, which isn't as good, but still okay.
Sunday puttering includes things like laundry and cat box cleaning and generally picking up the place. My cat-kids are so weird. The cat kids and I have been doing a running battle with the cat boxes. I have two cat boxes and I keep them in the closet of one of the spare rooms. As the kids get older I have to keep them scooped out more often as older kidneys require more frequent use of the boxes. Lately I had been moving the boxes closer and closer to the walls in the closet. The reason for that is that the kids have been missing the box when they pee. Not a huge problem since I have plastic down in that closet to protect the carpet from anything that might miss the boxes, but I still have to clean it up. The plastic just makes that easier. So anyway. I figured that if I moved the boxes closer to the walls, the kids would be forced to move more toward the center of the box, and would miss less often. Weirdly, the closer to the walls I put the boxes, the more often I had to clean up pee that missed the box. And it was always between the box and the wall! The only thing I didn't do was put the boxes up against the wall, not wanting to have to clean up walls also. Anyway, a couple weeks ago I gave up and moved the boxes back out about 6 inches from the walls. Those cats haven't missed the box at all since I moved them away from the walls! Go figure.
I did my taxes last night. Or rather, I plugged in numbers and Turbo-tax did my taxes. I went ahead and e-filed. I've gotten all the 1099's and charity acknowledgements that I'm going to get so there wasn't any use putting it off. Plus I did manage to get a refund, thanks mostly to my charity donations.
It's been an incredibly mild winter. Only 12 days have dropped below freezing, and we've had essentially no freezing precipitation. That's mild even by Dallas standards. Plus we've had quite a bit of rain, which I'm TOTALLY delighted about. If we're going to be able to water at all this next Summer, it'll be because we're getting rain now and it's working a little to alleviate the drought conditions. Weirdly I think the DFW metroplex is the only part of the state that isn't still under drought conditions. We've had more than 7 inches of rain since the start of the year, and that's almost 4 inches above normal so far. Keep it coming I say. The reservoirs in the area are still almost non-existent. It's actually becoming more and more cloudy, so I wonder if it will rain again today. It's not forecast, for what that's worth.
My new coffee pot is working fine so far. It makes random ticking noises though, which has me a little freaked out since the last one did it's meltdown. I imagine I'll get used to it, but right now every random noise it makes causes me to sit up and take notice.
Yesterday I sent a few hours surfing the Internet looking at Realtors. Just for the record, there are too many realtors in the DFW area. How can I possibly decide on one!? I can see that it's probably going to come down to a coin flip. I can at least narrow it down a tad by only looking at people who cover the areas I think I'm interested in, but that doesn't narrow it down much. *sigh* Wish me luck on this one.
I guess that's it for today. Nothing exciting, just a few random thoughts.
Lately I've been having a little bit of an issue with coffee pots. Yes, coffee pots. Weird, huh. I'm more than a little addicted to coffee, so it's important to me to have a functioning coffee pot when I'm here on the weekend. The problem is, I'm kinda picky about my coffee pot. It's for a good reason. On the weekend I like to make 10-ish cups and just slurp it as I do stuff around the house, chores and whatnot. You can get a feel for my level of addiction by the fact that I often finish the 10-cup pot I make.
Anyway, if you've tried to buy a coffee pot lately, you know that most of them are made with an automatic 2 hour shutoff, I suppose to protect us from ourselves. That way you can't leave it on and burn anything down with it. The problem is, if I get up at 6:00 am on a Saturday or Sunday, I'm not ready to quit drinking coffee at 8:00 am. And I'm not really that fond of re-heated, nuked coffee. I buy coffee from Gevalia, and periodically they gift me with a coffee maker, but they always have the 2 hour shut off. So when my old decrepit white coffee maker (with no automatic shutoff, that's how old it is) began to look really bad I searched around until I found a coffee maker that you can program not to shut off until after 4 hours. Cuisinart. The Cuisinart and I have been coexisting happily for a couple of years.
About a month ago I was sitting here working on my computer about 4 hours after I started the coffee, and all of a sudden I heard the sound of something frying. That's a little startling given I don't used any appliances in my kitchen beside the microwave and the coffee maker. I thought, "What the hell is frying?" and walked into the kitchen tracing the sound of popping and crackling. Lo and behold, I discovered the coating on the heating plate on the coffee maker was frying!! I jerked the pot off and the coating was popping and crackling and literally frying off the heating plate. I jerked the cord out of the wall, but it was so hot it just kept frying. So I dumped water on it, and created a huge steam cloud in the kitchen. Then I submersed the whole coffee maker in water in the sink, just in case anything was burning inside it also. As near as I can figure, the heating plate began heating up instead of shutting off at 4 hours. I'm glad I was home. Well, I never leave it to shut of automatically anyway. I'm too type A. I turn it off if I'm leaving the house, but who knows if it would have shut off?
Anyway, I dug around in my garage and found one of the Gevalia coffee makers. Yes, it shuts off at 2 hours but I figured I could make 2 small pots if I was going to want coffee all morning. Or I could be really radical and drink less coffee. That coffee maker and I have been getting used to each other. This morning, I got it ready and when I pushed the 'on' button, nothing happened! "Don't tell me!" I tried another outlet. Nope. I tried a third outlet, just in case. Nope. So I dug around in the garage and unearthed my old white decrepit coffee maker and made coffee, so I could get going this morning. And I thought about the first coffee maker Gevalia ever sent me, that grew a swarm of ants, and I began to wonder if I'm some sort of a jinx on coffee makers.
I dropped by Bed, Bath and Beyond when I was out running errands today and picked up a new coffee maker that can be programmed to stay on for 4 hours. That's the shiny new thing in this picture. It's the first silver coffee maker I've ever owned, but hey, I'm trying to break a jinx here. I decided to try something different. And you can bet I'm not throwing the old white coffee maker away. It's lovingly packed away in my garage, waiting for the next coffee emergency.
