Mindless Chat and Other Stuff

 I just switched my writing font from Aptos to Arial. I am not sure why, as Word is pretty determined to have me use the former. It may be a classic ‘old fogey’ thing. I also like Times New Roman for some things. But when I write, I revert to Arial 12. Stuff it, Word.

All of this ‘Word’ labelling can be annoying as well. I used to play on-line Scrabble. Sadly, it got improved and dressed to the nines and saddled with all sorts of add ons and it is now Words with Friends, version 2. There was just a fill in posted that asked how we liked the latest addition to the gizmos and gimmicks. I told them.

Our finish carpenter has, um, finished for now, packed up and departed for another job. He is due back in a few weeks to do more finishing in our downstairs. But, for now, I have doors on rooms and closets, tile on the landing of the staircase, baseboard and quarter round throughout and really nice finish panelling in the kitchen where we eat. He did his cutting in the garage and so I also have a layer of sawdust on the floor there, even though he did sweep it out once. Otherwise, he cleaned after himself amazingly well, in spite of his sad report that he had left an open tube of epoxy in his toolbox and the stuff was now floating his tools. Not only a fine carpenter but a fun and gentle man. Referrals on request.

Now Grammarly wants me to substitute ‘despite’ for ‘in spite of’. Weird. I do have to ignore some of its strictures if I want to sound like myself. And I do.

I have to quit playing here and go and vacuum a ton of dirt off the front hall floor. We have had no snow, but we do have dead leaves, sawdust and dirt from the laneway. All of these things seem to want to migrate into the house. JG is off to the city to see about a repair to our big canister central vac, but I have a small hand pushed one that is about to get a workout. After I post this, of course.

Sunday will be the first day of December when one can think about Christmas. Just because the stores have been decked out for three weeks is no excuse. I read about people who have already decorated the house and surrounds, and I pass several houses where the house and yard are full of shine and half deflated Christmas ‘stuff’. Our prompt for this month’s photo club is 1.) a Santa Claus parade and 2.) red and green. Muttering to myself. But it is an interesting club. Members from phone photographers to highly outfitted mavens. We put photos from the prompts up on a screen and discuss. Politely but with determination. I got one kudo last month from the ‘orange’ prompt but there is one purist who does not approve of cropping, and so I did not get overall applause.

I did get applause on Wednesday evening. We held our annual dinner for the hall staff (Watson’s Corners Community Hall of which I have often written). I have worked there in various capacities for about thirty years now and our hall manager recognised this in a speech and I was loaded with flowers and thanks. It was sweet of them and I admit to tearing up a bit. You have to notice that this is one really big bouquet.