July Flashback

I've sort of revived my old cooking blog with the story of the spaghetti squash. I'll try to post more often there, but that would mean trying new things, and I haven't been cooking a lot lately. But it is fall, and that's when I tend to turn into Betty Crocker.

I spent much of yesterday having a flashback to July. You may recall that I spent much of July dealing with repairs to my water heater closet. The work didn't get entirely finished. There was one part of the water heater installation that wasn't done, there was one section of sheetrock that wasn't completed, and the door wasn't painted. I ran into the contractor when he was working on a neighbor's house back in August and mentioned these things to him. He said he'd get back to me. Wednesday, I was thinking about having to maybe get nasty and get in touch with the HOA to say these things hadn't been done, but before I did anything, I got a call from him yesterday afternoon. He was working on my next-door neighbor's house (the same problem I'd had with the water heater cabinet) and wanted to come by to finish the work. Of course, the "I'll be right over" at three turned into showing up at six, and there was one part he was missing to do one last thing, so he's supposed to come by this morning. He's only an hour late, which is early for him. I'll start nagging in about fifteen minutes (he made the mistake of giving me a phone number).

But then it should all be done! This has really been an epic saga.

Because of all the waiting, I got no work done (it's hard to get into the right mindset when you think you're going to be interrupted at any moment). Instead, I did a lot of knitting, since that also counts as work and is very time-sensitive. Today, though, I'm planning to do a real retreat to brainstorm these revisions. I've got some good Black Forest ham, some good hard rolls I baked yesterday (something else I did while waiting), and some Honeycrisp apples, so I'm going to take a picnic to the woods with my notebook and sit in the quiet and solitude and work out all the things I need to work out. That way, I can hit the ground running on Monday.

Meanwhile, my main e-mail is down, which is making me twitchy. My fan mail address is working, but I keep getting an error message with my main business/personal address. The annoying thing about the error message is that it says they're experiencing technical difficulties, but then give a link for troubleshooting it. If it's their technical difficulty, there's no real troubleshooting you can do. Why leave the sense of doubt that it might be our fault? By going through a different home page, I can at least see the headers of messages, so I know I'm not missing anything critical, but I can't open any message without getting the error notice.

On the bright side, that means I can hang out in the woods for a couple of hours this afternoon without feeling like I'm missing anything.

And I just got the call that it would be another hour to an hour and a half before they get here, so I'm going to go do my brainstorming in the woods and call them when I get back. Given the time management I'm used to, they won't be here until after then, anyway, so I don't want to put my plans on hold to wait.