Thanksgiving et al

This week is Thanksgiving week, so Happy Thanksgiving to all.

It has been pretty quiet since my last post. We put 605 miles on the Honda last week, burned 18.6 gallons of gas, about normal for us. I did a Walmart run yesterday; Pam will do grocery shopping today while I do some more work on the tractor. I found another item to repair on the tractor; the exhaust manifold is leaking because of a blown gasket. Not expensive to fix, $12.00 or so for new gaskets and hardware, but it will take a couple hours to do the work. The 64 year old nuts that hold the manifold in place are rusted and corroded; removing them will be a real pain.

My mother is home and doing well. I called her yesterday to see how she is doing, and she says she is feeling better. Her plans are for a Thanksgiving get-together with my siblings and a few family friends, with my mother not doing any of the work. I hope this comes off OK.

Otherwise the week was pretty mundane. We finished the last of the yard work for this fall. All the flower beds have been layered with leaf mulch, hanging baskets have been taken down and emptied, and winter fertilizer applied to the lawn. Space heaters were brought into the house to do some spot warming in the cat room and bathroom. The doors to these are normally closed so they don’t get much circulation from the rest of the house. One more heater is parked near the computer desk. The days Pam works from home  require quite a bit of computer use – she has to search course catalogs from institutions of higher learning – so the computer and the space heater are running several hours each day. The extra warmth feels good. We generally keep the place cool with the thermostat set below 65 degrees.

Life is mostly made up of the regular and mundane. I replaced one of the light fixtures in the garage, went to the opening of a new store in Grand Junction (Tractor Supply Company, or TSC) and learned how to do photo collages in PhotoShop Elements.:

Han and Naja’s wedding photo collage

As with most of my photos, clicking on the photo will open a larger version. In most browsers, clicking on the large photo will zoom in on place where the curser is placed. This can give you some nice close-up views of  photo details.

TSC turns out to have a pretty good pet supply area with much lower prices on one of the dry dog foods Pam buys, Blue Buffalo. Price at TSC is about $7.00 per bag less than at the pet store. I suspect we will be dropping by TSC from time to time.

Pam has started to work on our Christmas card list and getting cards and materials together. Seems the card list gets a little shorter each year as some of the older generation passes on. It’s always a bittersweet task to update the list. Still, we look forward to Christmas communications each year. Most likely we will get our outside decorations up the weekend after Thanksgiving.  Although not extensive, we do drape lights on the garage, fence, and front windows. This year we plan to top a tree from the lot and put it up, fully lit, on the deck. Should be fun! If you missed it last year – I didn’t post it until very late – we did have an electronic greeting card, animated and with music, at http://www.appleattic.net/christmas.html that you may enjoy as we begin the 2012 holiday season.

Happy Thanksgiving!

That’s it for now. Thanks for looking in!