Scattered Thoughts . . .

D uring our last weekend out of town just last month, we noticed a few significant problems with Sheila's car.  Actually, between the poor weather and the car problems, our three hour drive to Saratoga became something like seven or eight hours.  That was a brutal trip.   To make matters worse, I was feeling pretty miserable.  I had the flu or some virus that started the day before our trip and I'm still trying to clear our my lungs a month later.  Well...  my lungs have been problematic since my first of six confirmed bouts with COVID but things have been worse this past month very similar to my bouts with COVID...   not as severe, but bad enough.  This started the day before we left for Saratoga. We made it back home safely that weekend and without any additional problems but her car definitely needed some work done before our next trip which happens to be coming up quickly. Once Christmas was out of the way, I ordered all the parts we...

Actually, the last two weeks of 2017 and the first three weeks (so far) of 2018 have been exceptionally lousy but this is giving me a very uneasy feeling about this new year.  In our case, it seems that things are constantly breaking. If it is not one thing, it is another. Touch this... it breaks. Look at something else... it breaks. Fix something... turn around and there are two other things broken. The list is so long at this point that I can't even remember everything that has broken in the past four weeks! The first two problems I can remember four weeks ago were related to our electrical and our furnace.  Our electronics were all acting a bit odd and quirky. Things were shutting down on their own. Other things weren't working correctly. After a couple of hours of troubleshooting with an electronics tester, I found myself at our circuit-breaker panel with the cover off testing the monster main lines coming into the house (something I'd prefer to avoid) ... the vol...

Although the lake house is fairly close to our home (only an hour away), it is still a bit isolated. Being isolated means that we must travel over to New Hampshire to do our food shopping. This is only a half hour away but it is still quite different than our usual five minutes to the market from our home in Waterbury so , whenever we are at the lake house, we plan a trip to Woodsville, NH before and after every weekend so we can refill our pantry and refrigerator.  Woodsville is a nice little town so we actually enjoy making this food run twice a week. Plus, the prices in Woodsville are only 50-60% of the prices in Waterbury where we usually shop and the quality of the produce is far better in Woodsville! So we actually enjoy this little excursion from the lake house. Here is a short two minute video of the kids in the back seat of the car on the way to Woodsville... it is abundantly clear that they really do enjoy this trip to Woodsville... no fighting (okay... there is ...