Sunday, again, after a busy half week.\u00a0\u00a0 Today is more clean up and sorting day with no Taize\u2019 tonight because the students are gone on the long weekend with Presidents\u2019 Day tomorrow.\u00a0 A friend reports (and I am amazed) that the schools in Alabama do not recognize the Federal holiday.\u00a0 We will be going to town today by way of the house lifting to try out John\u2019s \u201cfix\u201d to the color and background of the pictures my digital Canon camera takes.\u00a0 Before I realized I wouldn\u2019t be going to town tonight, I had put in a special order for fritters and donuts.\u00a0 So, we were supposed to come home and work on cleaning up, but I spent all my time getting articles off the web for my colleagues, and working on other resource material building.\u00a0 Now it\u2019s time for bed.\u00a0 Tomorrow has its challenges, that\u2019s for sure.<\/p>\n
Monday.\u00a0 Slept in and then started on clearing the table.\u00a0 Have made pretty good progress in 3 hours but need to rest and eat lunch.\u00a0 We are both resting while the shrimp cooks.\u00a0 Have sorted out a bunch of old tests to toss, and am just loading receipts into a box for further sorting when there is more time. Found a number of books we can recycle to people at school on the geography faculty.<\/p>\n
All of the stuff setting around has accumulated dust from 4 dogs coming in and out of the back door to the patio and backyard.\u00a0\u00a0 Stuff has to be vacuumed before it\u2019s touched. Growing up in Atlanta, I always worried whether the cereal was closed tightly against the humidity, we worried about mold, and whether the Lysol was running low.\u00a0 Not here.\u00a0 It is dry most of the time and cereal, bread, potato chips or whatever is as apt to get crisper than less so.\u00a0 The flip side of this is the dust.\u00a0 It is a fine sharp-edged sort of stuff that, when dry, floats in the wind as easily as sprites and fairies. Apparently this environment is deadly to flees and hostile to ticks.\u00a0 Our dogs have been flea-less since arriving here in 1989.\u00a0 The brush down by the creek will yield a tick now and again, but not many.<\/p>\n
When we sat down to rest and read our email and news John found there had been a horrible earthquake in Christchurch, NZ.\u00a0 We have friends there and haven\u2019t heard yet if they are all right.\u00a0 We ate dinner and responded to more emails, and are too tired to do any more tonight.\u00a0 Perhaps early morning we will be back up to snuff with some energy.<\/p>\n
Well, surprise.\u00a0 We got an inch of snow tonight while we rested after supper.<\/p>\n
Tuesday:\u00a0\u00a0 This morning we awoke to heavy snow that accumulated to 4 or 5 inches, and now it is sun shining.\u00a0 John went out and cleaned the back patio and some of the yard so the Sears Delivery person can drive to the back door.\u00a0 Then he went out and cleared the drive out front (in front of the out building, where we park and turn around).\u00a0 I have continued to clean up and the delivery person will be here at 1:00. They arrived just before 2:00 and the new one is installed J at 2:35.\u00a0 I have to go to town to a talk of another job candidate at 4:00.\u00a0 Rushed in to school for the lecture and drove home to more snow that accumulated to 2 inches.\u00a0 The temps are to go down tonight, and we will have a cold several days.<\/p>\n
We had pizza tonight cooked in our new stove.\u00a0 Yum.<\/p>\n
Thank goodness we heard this morning from our friends in Christchurch, NZ that they had survived the earthquake with not too much damage to their house (but more than the Sept 2010 quake).\u00a0 And, our mutual friends who had been there Monday night, left Christchurch 3 hours before the quake occurred!\u00a0 With that luck they need to buy a lottery ticket.<\/p>\n
Wednesday:\u00a0 Slept in after a really early morning phone call at 7:15 a.m.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Then spent time on various email chores, and left for town at 1:00, John driving, with kitty in a crate.\u00a0 He dropped me off at the SAIL exercise class, and went to the bank, grocery store\/pharmacy and to have the stitches removed from the kitty\u2019s spay operation.\u00a0 After picking me up, we saw a friend walking back to his house from getting his paper, and so stopped to say hello.\u00a0 He invited us in for tea or coffee, but we just visited instead.\u00a0 Tonight I\u2019m going to CWU for a slide lecture by a former student:\u00a0 CWU Outdoor Speaker Series: Kurt McCanles\u2019 Two-Wheeled Adventure.\u00a0 After graduating last spring, Kurt took his bike and headed south, biking from Cancun, Mexico, through Central and South America, to Guayaquil, Ecuador, a trek that took 110 days and took him through 10 countries.\u00a0 He showed video snippets and many slides of the cultures and physical areas he traveled through.\u00a0 It was very well done and fascinating.<\/p>\n
Thursday morning I woke at 4:30 a.m., looked out on rapidly accumulating snow.\u00a0 5 inches in just a couple of hours! John cleared it in appropriate places.\u00a0 We left for town at 1:30.\u00a0 I played music at Hearthstone and John sat and read.\u00a0 We left 10 minutes early to make it to Dean Hall for a presentation by one of our former students (at the time 6 years ago he was an exchange student for a year from Australia).\u00a0 He was a great guy and at the head of all the classes he had from me and Elaine Glenn, his mentor.\u00a0 We have kept in touch and now he is a graduate student in Oregon.\u00a0 His Master\u2019s thesis was on Tibet, and today he gave a presentation about it with fantastic pictures and cultural information.\u00a0 I\u2019m so glad we went.\u00a0 It was well worth it.\u00a0 He was happy and surprised to see me there and gave me a big hug.\u00a0 He knew about my illness.\u00a0 His Ph.D. work (Geography at Oregon) will be on water resources in China.\u00a0 Okay.\u00a0 Dinner was part leftovers, chicken and rice and part new (fresh asparagus).<\/p>\n
Friday:\u00a0\u00a0 Busy day today.\u00a0 Starts with shoulder massage at Sr. Center; scholarship luncheon at noon (great pizza and salad); SAIL exercise class was cancelled because of a Pine Basket weaving workshop that went for 3 hours.\u00a0 So, I went from lunch in the Psychology building to Dean Hall with my box of books to share (unload may be the better word) with my Geog colleagues.\u00a0 Tired so am getting ready for an afternoon nap.\u00a0 John is already napping.\u00a0 He did a nice job cleaning up dishes today while I was away.\u00a0 It\u2019s down to 9 degrees as we head to bed, and is supposed to hit minus 5 tonight.\u00a0 Yikes.<\/p>\n
Saturday:\u00a0 Woke up to blinding sunshine on snow. The -5 forecast\u00a0 missed. It stopped dropping at +4.\u00a0 We are having a heat wave \u2013 it is going to make it to about 31.\u00a0 Lazy day till tonight when we go to the Trace Bundy guitar concert (finger-picking with both hands):<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.tracebundy.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n The web has other videos \u2013 just search using his name.<\/p>\n Hope you all have a good week.\u00a0\u00a0 Best regards from Nancy & John and all the critters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sunday, again, after a busy half week.\u00a0\u00a0 Today is more clean up and sorting day with no Taize\u2019 tonight because the students are gone on the long weekend with Presidents\u2019 Day tomorrow.\u00a0 A friend reports (and I am amazed) that the schools in Alabama do not recognize the Federal holiday.\u00a0 We will be going to … Continue reading “SATURDAY — the beat goes on”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-issues"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p72iNf-bW","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=740"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":742,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740\/revisions\/742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rocknponderosa.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}