uncommonly feeble and random thoughts

I struggled to find a title for this entry, but I think I got it right. Brevity. Gravitas. Maybe a bit of mystery?? Whatever. We  recently came to a decision about our next stop as a family. We formed the search party on the heels of our realization that, in our current quarters, we have no first floor shower. Which, to both the young and to overly optimistic elders, seems like a mere inconvenience. Until some life event dramatically changes the calculus,  and one is forced to adopt a new lifespan trajectory. Turn the page, stare into the abyss, and accept the fact that age is actually more than just a number. So, yeah. The "home" search needed action.  We looked around at six different places.  And we're now committed. It was not easy to come to the decision, but we think this place will be nice to go to. It's a little more than half the size of our house (no basement though). It's part of a facility that starts with independent living, which is our entry point, ...

 So much energy, humanity, humility, and humor... Trish was the most reliable, genuine, and hard-working person I ever met, and she is deeply missed. People with cottages have the gift of having a home life, and an away life. The cottage often provides a getaway, an escape from... well, whatever. Often, owners of both leave "the city" and upon arriving "up north" (in Michigan, anyway), they cross the cottage threshold and emit sighs of relief, both literal and figurative.  They can relax. And so it was for Trish, I think. She worked hard at both abodes, for sure. But I believe the lake lifted her spirits, what with the sunsets, sunrises, boat rides, entertaining friends and family, communing with loons and swans and hummingbirds, pursuing fine dining (both home and "out"), and just generally enjoying the great outdoors and its all-embracing laid-back ambience. Thank you for that gift, Erwin "Erv" Bettinghuaus, Ph.D. , who we lost July 7, 2025. Tr...

My Big Green Egg rests in a cabinet built by Custom Built in probably 2010. A half-slab of granite cut into a semicircle, of course with a supporting structure, finished with stucco to survive the elements, and casters. Not that I can actually move it anymore... Side note, when I asked the granite supplier what was going to be done with the cutout for the grill, I got the shrug of "um, ????" So I asked for that piece to get the same edge treatment as the big piece.  You see, I knew the Egg was then-currently living in the nest, which would make a stout support for the granite, and an elements-worthy companion table for the grill. Thus, the table, created because hey, I paid for that part of the slab, right???   But ten years went by, and then five more, and suddenly in 2025 the ensemble needed a refresh. So I bought some stucco for the exterior, some GitRot for the interior, found a bit of lumber, and some paint, and used up a fair portion of late July, half of August, an...

But not on my part... no siree, those days are gone. I even mow the yard sitting down. No, this is the story of the driveway replacement... aging concrete, but also with a three- or four-inch rise in one of the slabs, brought on by a tree root. Oh it also cracked the slab north-to-south entirely We hired a snowplow once, I can't remember why, and the pickup truck bounced when the blade hit the outcrop. A major impediment. And since we didn't quite exhaust our life savings traveling to Italy, we engaged a local concrete business to freshen up the joint. The first step, of course, is to remove the step (and front sidewalk). Here's the view of our front door:   "Able" is the concrete company, not a challenge as in "are you able to leap from the porch to the dirt, or more to the point, from the dirt to the porch?" Backing slowly away from that breathtaking view, we see the front sidewalk, or rather the lack thereof, with Linda's car parked at Bruce and T...