Recuperating on a Gray Day

Wow! Two posts in two days—that’s got to be a record for me.

With the medications doing their thing, I’m now feeling almost like new. Oberfuhrer Frau Sandy, my Nazi guard, allowed me my daily outing yesterday, and even let me out of her sight for a while due to my obviously upgraded condition. She did some shopping while I went to Lowe’s and got some wiring supplies for a small project to be done in Homer. Then we went to look at granite and tile samples, because she is freaking out about how to decorate the bathrooms in the new house. I think my role was to encourage her sweetly, which I did, and she made some excellent tentative choices. I say tentative, because Sandy, like most women, can change her mind quicker than a subcontractor can snatch a check out of my hand.

We then had dinner at a new Thai restaurant in Irving—the Blu Ginger—very good, but a little pricey. Feeling good about the uncharacteristically healthy meal, we settled into Homer for the evening, where I began the task of adding a 110 volt light underneath the vent hood above the stove. The light installed at the factory was a 12 volt DC version, and it didn’t provide enough light for me to be able to discern the difference between ham hocks and my own fists when cooking. Realizing the potential danger of not knowing exactly which was which when wielding a sharp knife, I decided that better lighting was essential. So, I removed the microwave above the vent hood and tied into its AC power source, running a pigtail down through holes I drilled in the vent hood, where I installed a light bulb receptacle and rotary switch. I stuck in a 75w bulb, and voila! I can now do surgery! Sandy marveled and offered effusive praise, of which I felt deserving and lapped it up like a bulldog drinking beer.

Last evening, the local TV weathercasters announced with their typical “sky is falling” alarm that the DFW Metroplex would fall victim to an ice storm in the morning. Much air time was given to live shots of scores of sand trucks standing by to attempt to save the hapless drivers from themselves. As predicted, the freezing rain began about 2:00 a.m., except that it wasn’t, ah, freezing. The temperature was 35 degrees when I awoke this morning, so all the hype and overtime paid to the road crews was to no avail, as there was no ice anywhere. Can’t say I was unhappy, however.

As I am writing this, the portable icemaker I recently bought on the recommendation of Gordon Pierce is happily churning out ice on the kitchen counter behind my computer desk. This is the coolest gadget, and it has solved a huge problem in keeping an ice supply in Homer. It is amazing how much ice it produces, which is lucky, because we are heavy users of ice. Sandy is an iced-tea-aholic, and each of the myriad of glasses she drinks in a day must be completely full of ice. I happen to agree with her—I think because we grew up in the South, where it would be improper to serve iced tea any other way. (A sure-fire way to identify a Yankee in our midst is to observe the amount of ice in his or her glass of iced tea. If there are only a few cubes floating at the top, well, you’ve got yourself a carpetbagger, for sure.) Unfortunately, there are many Yankees among the wait staff at restaurants we frequent, so we have developed the habit of instructing them to bring a spare glass of ice when they bring the iced tea. To supply our habit in Homer, we found ourselves buying sacks of ice a couple of times a week. Happily, the icemaker changed all that. Thanks, Gordon, for the recommendation. By the way, in keeping with our somewhat disturbingly infantile penchant for giving names to inanimate objects, the icemaker will hereinafter be referred to as “Igor.”

Next week promises to be much warmer, so we are expecting a lot of progress on the house. We’ll see.