I had the great good fortune to visit with my grandfather today. We’re trying to talk him into going to dinner with us tomorrow night. I’m sure he will, but we just have to work on him a bit more. We are determined and persuasive.

We also stopped by to see my aunt and uncle, who married us in 2009. (And I officiated his daughter’s wedding in 2016, but that’s a different story, I suppose.) Sat with them for a bit and then strolled into town to do town things. There are the regular provisions to procure. And then, of course, there are three or four items we can’t find at our own local, inferior grocery store. Each trip we return with cans of this and boxes of that.

It’s never cans of that and boxes of this. Have you ever wondered why that is?

I think it is because the this would run right out of the boxes. Leak right through the paperboard, right onto the shelves and floors.

I stood on a ladder for a good long while yesterday. It was time for the annual light bulb changing event above my mother’s television. It requires a great climb and I am still agile enough for the work. The hardest part is moving a giant ladder in from the garage and into the living room.

Since I brought the ladder in for that, there was no reason to take the ladder out the back and get onto that gutter my mother asked me to look into. There was a slow drip, for days, she said, after a big rain. And could I see what was going on?

What was going on was that the gutter needed to be cleaned. The backyard of the house sees great sun, but that gutter does not, and the asphalt runoff from the shingles was just sliding down into the gutter, never drying, always accumulating and now, in spots, had started growing moss.

Grab yourself a spatula and some bags and start removing the gunk. If you can find the right size spatula or spoon, or garden hoe, you can make shorter work of it. Because it is a long gutter, I filled up most of a garbage can.

It was also a very tall ladder. And it might have impacted my run today, which was a picturesque and slow 3.69-mile experience.

I discovered a road running alongside the nearby high school. The map tells me it runs all the way to the water. I didn’t grow up here, and I didn’t run all the way down the road, so the road was new to me and I’m taking the map’s word for it.

But that first little bit of that new road:

It turns out, you can miss the pines. This morning I realized I miss the pines.

I ran about six-tenths of a mile down the road. It sounds like nothing, a thousand yards, but it felt like a lot. Anyway, the road apparently branches off three different times before they all drop down to the river and a little creek inlet. I didn’t go that far because life has taught me that if you get to the water you’re going downhill. Which means you have to go uphill.

And none of that for me, thanks. I just ran through pastures and by one little house. There are more down by the water. I know they are there because several cars passed me by. Several nice cars.

I always wonder what that’s like. In my neighborhood there are a lot of sidewalks and walking paths. And of course there are a lot of young people running around. You begin to see the same people if you are out there enough. But, here, where we are running just now, it’s just roads and houses and businesses. There are broad shoulders on the highway, but I can’t recall having ever seen a lot of people running around these parts.

I bet the local folks don’t see a lot of people running around here, either. And I bet these last two days cars going by have been wondering what that crazy fool is doing out there.

I wonder that every time, too. But at least I am wondering in slightly warmer temperatures this week.

(Spatulas are good for cleaning gutters. If you have an old plastic one you can cut it to the proper width. A good spatula speeds up the process, then, hopefully reducing the time you spend on a ladder.)