Again, I am starting the previous Sunday. Following my first night out in a year, I returned this home this morning in sunshine but with spray from wet roads. My night in Leavenworth, WA was interesting and ended this morning with an enlightening breakfast before hitting the road for home, over Blewett Pass. The valued advice on enhanced vision opportunities that I have been looking for to help my friend’s father, came at breakfast. The gal’s mom has been legally blind for the last 30 years and has to use a CCTV and magnifier to get through life. Being a Library Science professional, she needs more than most not to lose her ability to “see” and read. She shared all her resources from Pierce County and WA State and gave me business cards of key people to contact for help.
I returned home ready for a nap. I was awakened from a deep sleep by a couple of phone calls. The interesting one was from Sears about rescheduling an appointment for the oven range. It was a recorded message I must call back about on Monday.
Sunday night Taize’ only had a piano and 2 violins for music accompaniment. We did fine. Dinner after was great: pizza, salad, and two choices of cream pie (Cocoanut & Chocolate).
Monday: Slept in. Took care of small things off and on all day. Worked on answers to the questions I was going to be asked in the Hospital District interview. I wrote out answers and then read through them a few times to prompt my memory. It was Valentine’s Day, and I spent a lot of time responding to people on email to whom I had sent an animated card.
Tuesday: Continued prepping for the interview, while it snowed big flakes outside. We got over an inch of accumulation and then it changed to rain and took it all away. I went back to making some shorthand notes with bullets on items I wanted to cover. I took the small piece of paper with me, but I didn’t refer to it during the interview. I think it went well. There was a younger woman who followed me in. I was in with them for 25 minutes, as planned. They will let me know within a week their decision.
Left the hospital and went to the grocery for my apple fritters order and old fashioned chocolate covered donuts with nuts. While there, they had another dozen donuts of various types, including two apple fritters, for $2.00 off the dozen price ($5.98). These are all large and nice, with some turnovers and filled ones, and maple bars. What a deal. We can freeze them. Went from there to friends’ house and visited till the gentleman and I had to leave for the nursing home to play music. There were just two violins tonight, his and mine, and a piano player. We entertained with church hymns for an hour and then I came home to a warm bowl of chili.
On my way to town I went by the house being lifted, and was totally surprised to see how much they have lifted it! It seems to be more than 6’. I didn’t have time to talk to the workers to ask how high it was, but I took more pictures for my “story.”
Wednesday: Started out the morning reading emails and looking on the CWU site. There I found that the President’s Office was offering complimentary tickets to the Spirit of the West Saturday afternoon (1:00 p.m.) concert at the CWU Music Hall with 4 recognized western music performers: Don Edwards, Juni Fisher, Doris Daley, and Adrian. I mentioned it to John who was “willing” to attend with me. Also, finally took the pictures off my camera of the house lifting (above the flood plain), and sent off to John to enhance the colors on. My camera takes with overtones of blue. Also, yesterday was a shady day and it was late in the day when I took them. Today is sunny so I hope to get some better pictures.
[—– John notes: The pictures Nancy has been taking over the past two weeks (the house raising) have had a bluish tint or “cast” as it is called by photo folks. We need to change the setting in the camera’s software under the heading of “white balance” to fix this. We found the original box within which resides a Spanish version of the manual for the care and feeding of her camera. Great! We either have to learn Spanish or find the English language version – buried on a counter. While we search, I’ve been using a software package to eliminate the blue cast, resize, and crop the images. Oh well, it is seasonally cold outside and getting colder. By late next week we will be about 20 degrees below normal; that’s going to take us really close to zero by next Friday morning. Not, then, doing much outside, I have been reading on the web about things, including digital cameras. Here are links.
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/whitebalance.htm
Ken Rockwell has a huge site with much good information and an attitude.
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/white-balance.htm —–end]
I went to SAIL exercise today, then by the CWU Prez office to pick up the tickets for Saturday, and then off to a lecture that is part of the interview for the first candidate to be brought to campus to fill my slot there. It snowed very hard this afternoon, right after I filled our ‘09 Subaru with gasoline and drove to Dean Hall. I sat and watched the snow for 15 minutes before I got out in it and walked to the building. Tonight, time was spent proofing a handout for a colleague and grabbing an article from the Wall St. Journal for another colleague (see I’m retired but still working), and I spent time sending out job announcement to “my” jobs list. It’s called Northwest Geography Jobs and has about 500 people subscribed to the list serve.
Thursday: Started slowly by sleeping in. [ I think that’s called not starting! J ] Mostly been doing emails when I should have been cleaning off the table to make way for the oven/range delivery. It’s easy to put off such “work.” Nothing much today other than delivering a purchase from Costco to my neighbor, and going to play music at Dry Creek.
Friday: Goodness. What started out slowly, ended full of stuff. We both slept in longer than usual, with no early morning 7:30 or 8:00 phone calls; however, we did have a wrong number looking for “Laura” at MIDNIGHT when we were sleeping soundly. Not nice. There were probably two other times during the night that one or more of the dogs wanted out, or John or I had to visit the bathroom. None of us can make it through the night. At least the kitty can go in her litter box, but we have to let out the four dogs into the backyard. We do not have their “doggie” door operable now in the cold weather, and also cannot operate it with the kitty until she knows how to come and go from the house to the yard and back to the house. We’ll wait for that learning experience till spring and nicer weather.
So, at Noon, I started the day with playing music and eating at the town’s “soup kitchen.” It’s always a nice full meal – no soup or bread yet. Today’s chow was a cheeseburger, with tomatoes and lettuce, and other stuff I didn’t put on mine (onions, pickle relish). I had mayonnaise and ketchup. They had fried cubed potatoes spiced with parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme (sounds like an old song). And for dessert, pound cake with strawberries and whipped cream. Three of us (guitar, banjo, and fiddle) played and sang for 45 minutes and then we left there and went to the Fairgrounds for the “open mike” part at the Spirit of the West, Cowboy Gathering. It was scheduled from 1:00 to 3:00. There we listened to others on the program before us, but we played as a subset of the Kittitas Fiddlers & Friends group at 2:15 for 7 minutes. We squeezed in 3 songs: T for Texas, Waltz across Texas, and Snow Deer. The makeup was comprised of 3 fiddlers (one occasionally playing his mandolin), a clarinet, a banjo and a guitar. It was a subset of our group, but we had fun and did a good job. We stayed around and toward the end there were a few minutes before the ending at 3:00 and the organizer asked us to come up and play some more. We did, without our banjo player, who’d left. We played Blue Skirt Waltz and Never on Sunday. It was fun.
Saturday. Morning cleaning and sorting papers in the den, followed by a brief lunch and trip to the Spirit of the West 1:00 p.m. concert. It was SO good and lasted longer than we planned. We didn’t get out till after 4:00 and then went grocery shopping. Home to email and more cleaning but have had 3 phone calls and not gotten the email even looked at yet. My feet are cold, so I think with down boots and heavy socks already on, I need to wrap them in a blanket.
The concert (names mentioned above) had a 19 yr old from N. California ranch, young girl, guitar player, songwriter and singer with a big booming voice. Second was an older woman from Tennessee, also a very fine singer and guitarist. Next was a Canadian woman who mostly told us stories in poetic form. She was great. I didn’t expect to enjoy her but we both did. Then the last person was a guitarist, songwriter, singer in his 70s. What a wonderful performer with a fantastic voice and great picking skills. He sang two encores—really cool, and his time was more than any of the others. I believe he was on stage for 50 minutes. Notes, pictures, and links here:
http://www.ellensburgcowboygathering.com/artists.php
We came home to some interesting mail. I was not chosen for the position I interviewed for this week, as a Board Commissioner for the Hospital District. Just as well, because after prepping for the interview and learning all about the expectations of the job, I wasn’t sure I wanted it, but I gave it my all anyway and feel good about the interview. I do wonder who was chosen and about their background. There was a younger woman following me into her interview. Could be that age (and my health) was a factor; I’ll never know. I guess I will know soon enough who was chosen. No, I do not intend to attend the public meeting the end of Feb. to see who is appointed. Hopefully, I can read about it in the paper. Besides, March has 5 Thursdays and music play dates and I really do enjoy those.
The other piece of interesting mail was from our eye doctor, a check refunding part of John’s $96.01 bill (we had paid $30 at the time, for the Optimap scanning). I had paid that recent bill and then questioned when the paperwork came through from insurance and Medicare. It made no sense to me and I thought we had been overcharged, so first I called the doctor’s accountant, who told me I had to pay it because John’s deductible had not been reached. Then I called the insurance company and asked for an explanation. The person helping me was also confused by the numbers and said he would submit it for reworking. I guess I was right, and today in the mail we have a check for $74.01 as a refund, but NO explanation. I need to check my records again to see what the $22 went toward on the bill. Medical charges and paperwork is the most confusing mess of accounting there is, in my opinion. A person has to be on top of everything, and I should have learned my lesson not to pay bills right away until all the paperwork is in, even after speaking to the office. However, in this case, it apparently was their error. What if I had not been paying attention? How do people who are not as savvy as we manage? I guess the answer is a lot of needless bills are paid without question. This is one of many we have found in error over the past 2 years. I wonder how many we missed. One charge last year was at my family physician’s office for an office call for me from a different doctor I have never seen and for a date when I was not in the office at all. It’s in a town 30 miles away, so we know when we have had appointments and have them on the calendar. At first they tried to say it was for lab work (hence the doctor on call’s name was on it, but I insisted I was not in the clinic that day and they needed to reimburse my insurance company and Medicare for the false report).
Now I’m sitting here with slightly warmer feet , with the blanket wrapped around them. I will end this now and send to John to put on the blog this week. Thanks for hanging in there with us. He will get to it after dinner. He just came back to the kitchen to work on the dinner, baked chicken – with mashed potatoes and beans.
Hope you all have a good week. We have to work hard tomorrow and President’s Day to get the path ready to bring in a new stove/oven and take out the old.
Best regards from Nancy & John and all the critters.