I Don’t Get Out Enough

Evidently being able to write a weekly blog means I need to get out and experience life on a regular basis so I have writing material.

And that’s just not happening lately.

Here’s what we’ve been up to for the last few days:

• We’ve been making photo scrapbooks for the last couple weeks. What that means is while I look through old photos and letters, reminiscing and fighting feelings of melancholy, Jenni places photos in chronological order, trims, and glues them on pages to be placed in photo albums that we can enjoy for years and pass down to our children.  In all fairness, the project started out as her side of the family but with all good photo projects it morphed into something much, much greater.

• We had a filet of salmon in the refrigerator. We never buy salmon. But our daughter-in-law had fixed some for us back before Christmas that was so delicious, I asked Jenni to make some for us.  As we were gathering trash today to take to the dump station, I noted the package in the refrigerator and suggested we have it for dinner tonight.  Jenni wondered aloud how long it had been in the refrigerator which meant having to remember when we last went to Aldi’s grocery store.  We couldn’t recall.  We looked at the calendar hanging on the refrigerator and couldn’t convince ourselves it could possibly be as old as the last doctor’s appointment we had in town.  Well, using the saying that made our children cringe growing up: “if you don’t eat this, I’m going to have to throw it out”, we are proceeding with salmon on the menu tonight.  I’m sure it’s fine.  Wish us luck and check on us tomorrow.

• Last night just as we turned the lights out and crawled into bed, we heard a bump. Each of us thought maybe the other had made the sound but we quickly ruled that out.  It’s funny how people on opposite sides of the bed can hear a sound coming from a totally different direction.  Jenni was worried her glasses had fallen on the floor so she turned the light on and got up.  No, that wasn’t it.  I said I thought it had come from outside but Jenni didn’t want to hear my hypothesis on that, so we went to bed and ignored the bump in the night.

• I have told y’all before about the rats that like to crawl into our car’s engine block and build nests. By the way, all the suggested home remedies we received have failed.  I’ve driven two months with Irish Spring soap under the hood.  I polished everything I could polish with Armor All.  I covered the stormwater drainage grate with wire to cut off the rodent highway through the drain pipe.  We haven’t seen the large rats lately, but we still have mice.  For this reason, I have two large rat traps at the corner of the house.  This morning one was missing.  I have one wired to a weight but the second one was not tied down.  Of course, it was the one missing.  Following a brief search, a few feet away I found the trap with a large mouse in it.  At least now we know what the sound was last night.

That’s what we’ve been occupied with lately.  Exciting stuff.

I guess I don’t need to leave home after all.