Another Autumn Potpourri

It is supposed to rain today, and it has threatened to do so, but not until I have cleared the yard of leaves. The heavy winds of the past few days have made my work easier by blowing the leaves to one side of the yard. I never bothered to do the reason why I raked, mowing the lawn, because the lack of rain has inhibited grass growth.

I decided to try using the hand saw on the scrawny maple in the front yard, which is coming down anyway. After cutting down, and cutting up, the top half of one of the two subtrees, I decided it was best to borrow a chain saw for the rest of the tree.

I and my sister the editor brought in Madre's plants off the front porch for the winter.

I built a new squirrel feeder for Madre to replace the one that fell to pieces due to age and weather. It has been a week since I set up the feeder, but so far the squirrels have not touched the cob on the feeder. Ingrates! :)

I bought a wrist cuff to measure my blood pressure. I am not liking what I have been seeing after the first several measurements, taken every morning and evening. I will be writing a personal Web page to store these measurements comparable to Glucopage, my Web page for my blood sugar measurements.

I went to Sam's Club in Kokomo to buy some peanut butter before the prices spike due to drought in the peanut-growing regions this past summer. But there was nothing there; even the pallets on which the boxes of peanut butter rested are gone. I guess bad news travels fast. I will try Sam's Club in Fishers tomrrow.

Fall Break at my university is tomorrow and the day after. I will finish updating the Macs while the students are elsewhere. Last week the new iMacs came in, and I have been experimenting with Mac OS X Lion. I am impressed with the surface features, but not with those changes due to politics (esp. Apple's relationship with Oracle, the new master of Java and MySQL). Lion's interaction with the DAVE file/print utility is going to make my life difficult.

postscript

I forgot to mention that yesterday I did some experimental cooking. I chopped some onions, celery and the bell peppers from Madre's garden and simmered them in a deep pot. I then melted some butter and mixed it with some flour I borrowed from Madre. I mixed the two items and simmered them for a couple of hours to make a gumbo. The result did not really taste bad, but it was … difficult to look at. It was disgusting. I had to toss it out.