Tuesday, November 18th

Day 18

The date will tell you this is being posted on November 19, but to me, it's still the 18 as I have not gone to bed yet, haha. Today was a great day. I spent the morning at home puttering with stuff, then drove to the town north of here and dumped a truck load of garbage at their land fill. I do what I can to recycle, reuse, reduce, give away, and all that stuff to keep things out of the landfills, but lets face it, some things just gotta go there. I don't bother with having my garbage picked up at the end of my driveway because there's just not enough of it to warrant paying what they charge. It's just better, and cheaper, for me to take it myself. It only cost me $3 to dump this load today. Gas of course counts in too, but in this case I was on my way past there anyway, so it was barely out of my way and the gas would have been minimal.

I went to the town north of that town, haha, where my Mom lives. She's 85 and not been feeling too good the last while, inflamed joints caused her a great deal of pain and the meds she was put on helped a lot with that, but between them and a cold, she's not been her usual self the last while. It was very nice to visit with her today. While I was there I cleaned out her food storage closet, took everything out and washed the shelves, then washed the can tops as I put them all back, arranging them as I did so. She really appreciated it, and I came away with some goodies from that closet, haha. One of the things she sent home with me is an ashtray (even though I don't smoke) that her mother gave to Mom & Dad (Granny passed on when I was pretty young, I believe it was 1964), so it's a great treasure if you ask me. It has a dog laying on it. I'll take a photo of it to post for you... real soon.

Mom & I went uptown and did some grocery shopping so she will have what she needs in the house for the next several days, and we took a bit of a drive around. We both really enjoyed it and Mom felt a bit better for having gotten out for awhile. Back at her home we cooked and ate a wonderful dinner.

I left Mom's about 7pm and drove back to that town where I dumped the garbage, and went to Toastmasters. I evaluated a speech that was very well done. I left the meeting a bit earlier than the rest so they could vote on whether or not to accept me as their newest member (done in all Toastmaster clubs). I later received an email welcoming me to the club. YES!!

After I got home I got a call from one of my neighbors. They are having a company come tomorrow to trim down their walnut tree, and due to where it is, they need to park the big truck in my driveway and work from there, so she called to ask permission for this. Of course I said yes. We had a very nice chat until her phone battery died, haha. They lived in their house before I moved here, and I've been here for 18 years now, and we've had a good relationship all these years.

DW, my parrot, has been in her cage all day. I used to let her out all the time, but lately.... well, if you follow this blog you know she's taken to eating wall paper and flying over to visit the chinchillas. Tonight I discovered she's also ruined a good basket that I liked a lot. I had let her out when I got home, but she wasn't out for long when I found her chewing on the basket and saw that she'd obviously worked at this job a lot before too. After several bad bites (or from her point of view, good bites), she flew back to the top of her cage and I used her bath dish to get her back into the cage and lock the door. I really love this bird and hate to lock her up, but see this is going to have to be done and freedom with be occational rather than the normal state it has been up until now. I'll take pics of some of her 'work' for you, but not tonight, haha.

Well, enough for now. I have much to do, then off to bed. Yup, it's been a good day.