It was a calm weekend around here. There were two big highlights. Someone ordered a pickup meal from Longhorn Steakhouse in Florida and used my email as the space filler in Darden Restaurants’ data mining operation. I made fun of their meal. Why do you order seafood, in Fort Lauderdale, from a steakhouse?
And why do you order it for curbside pickup? Do you like lukewarm fish? And chowder? In August? It was 80-something degrees in Fort Lauderdale this weekend. Did you need to warmup? With a shrimp lobster chowder?
How does strawberry lemonade even figure into this? I’m no purist about lemonade flavors, or so I thought, but the more I thought about all of the bad flavors in this styrofoam box and paper bowl … lemonade should be lemonade flavored. Otherwise you’re just telling me about a lifetime of taste bud punishment you’ve inflicted on yourself.
All of this, somehow, costs 41 bucks. But not me. It wasn’t my meal. I did get a survey, and don’t you know I filled that out. I made several pointed comments about Longhorn, and their curbs. But not their service. No need to cause problems for the people working there.
And don’t you know? It worked.
I got a coupon for a free appetizer. There isn’t a Longhorn within less than a half-hour from here, so who needs an appetizer?
The other thing that happened was that my lovely bride did her first time trial this weekend. Just you and your bike against the clock. At the end she found herself on the podium. Third place is great! And enough to send her back again for more.
Otherwise, this weekend was the deep breath in before the semester begins. Classes start on Tuesday. At some point on Sunday I stopped stressing about it. It’s weird. I do more work throughout the term, of course, but I’ve spent a lot of time working on stuff and trying to layout materials and anticipate problems — and then throwing some of that work away and starting over because of, sigh, reasons — throughout August. That whole time has been worry, one stress, one series of second guesses after another. I figured that would all go away after a class or two, or a a few weeks. It usually does. But, last evening, it just disappeared. The classes will be the classes and they’ll be useful and we’ll do fine.
It’s let me do other things. I cleaned one corner of my home office this weekend. And I did a lot in the on-campus office. The Yankee and I have been sharing an office for the last two years, but she’s being moved to a different building, and we moved her this weekend. I’m keeping the old office, so we packed her up Saturday. I brought in a big box of books of my own, which have been sitting in storage for the last three years. I rearranged the desk and generally lamented losing my roomie. What, we’re just supposed to see each other at home? That’s hardly enough.
We had a nice reading date this weekend, and so I point once again to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second installment in his Revolutionary War trilogy. I’m in that bittersweet part of any book you enjoy. You want to plow through it. You want it to last forever. This is an excellent read. Highly recommended.
But I have once again had it confirmed for me that I wouldn’t want to be an 18th century sailor. I’ve been sure of that for a long time, but that impression is confirmed.
There was a bit in here about some French sailors who had been kept on their vessels for more than a year, the details of which were inhumane. But that’s war, and that was navy life, and they didn’t have the comparative advantages of the USS Abraham Lincoln, the sailors of which, by all credible reports, have been on a nightmare service cruise.
If you have the opportunity to have three different people come out to do work on your home in one day, definitely don’t do that. We did that today. It took up the whole day, about six or seven hours, but it was productive. First, we had a guy come out to give us a quote on chimney repairs. There are a few light problems outside and, distressingly, we had some water get inside during last Thursday’s monsoon. That first guy glanced at the chimney from the ground, said we needed a new crown, that his shop would make a customized job. We talked about the stucco. He came inside to look inside the fireplace, and found some problems. He quoted us a price off the top of his head and asked for a 50 percent down payment. We asked him to put his quote on a piece of paper and sent him on his way.
We had an electrician come out, his second time here. Nice fellow. This is the end of a saga that has stretched from April to now, and involved four different companies. He stayed and worked for a long time, trying to figure out the intricacies of this, and the idiosyncratic wiring that had been done to that. Finally, finally the poor guy got things the way they should be. (One of those companies that had been … let’s say involved … won’t be getting a lot of calls from us in the future. They’ll get a letter. I’m pretty close to naming names.)
As he wrapped up his work a second chimney guy came. He deployed a drone so he could actually see what was going on up top.
The previous guy just glanced up that way. We talked about the problems and the options. He had a sneaking suspicion that he could fix that leak straight away, so I trimmed the hydrangea for easier access while he sealed up the flashing. That paired nicely with the spot weeding I found myself doing while chatting with the electrician earlier in the day. Then he, the chimney guy, did some sealing of the places where the lower levels of the chimney touches the house.
He came in with photos, and showed us the before shot of a big hole in the stucco, and someone’s slapdash silicone solution. He said he figured it’d been there for about 10 years. As ever, we muttered the previous owners’ name.
So maybe the leak is fixed. As our guy said, we can’t interrogate the water. If it comes back inside in the next huge storm, though, I’m certainly going to try.
Anyway, that was the weekend and Monday. Somehow I got done, today, all of the things I needed to do — emailing this class and that class, changing some settings on Canvas, doing a little roster prep — but none of the other things I also wanted to do. And that’s OK. They’ll be there for another day. Just not tomorrow. Classes start tomorrow!
