Minor progress, a new door, and a warm trip

I'm  not sure why I have written a blog post in a while, plenty has happened since my last post, but perhaps none of it's "blogworthy", not like that has ever stopped me in the past. On the home front, slow progress has been made in the downstairs bathroom. The walls have been painted twice, as has the ceiling. We still need to pick out a mirror to replace the old medicine cabinet, and I need to paint the trim. I've decided that I'm going to redo the molding around the floor, and repair the old tile the best I can. We discussed replacing the floor tiles, but that would probably have to be extended into the kitchen so that will have to wait. For some reason, the door no longer shuts, which is an unfortunate problem for a bathroom, so I'll have to look into that

This is what a broken thermostat looks like. Felt the need to
insert a picture of it for some reason. 

The thermostat suddenly lost it's mind sometime over the summer, and as the colder weather moved in, we had a problem with the heat coming on randomly.  I learned two things during it's replacement. First, doing so is incredibly easy. Do not hesitate to do so if the need arises, just carefully follow the advice about tieing off the wires so they don't fall down into the wall. Second, the complexity and corresponding price of thermostats, is amazing. You can pay $30 or $300 for something that essentially does the same thing. I chose near the bottom, getting a basic electronic version that has a timer and can adjust the heat for the time of day, and day of the week. After thinking about it, I couldn't think of a good reason why I would want to adjust the heat using my phone, Alexa, or while a thousand my away., although some of those fancy ones look really cool.

The new door. The old one is loaded in their truck for a trip
to the dump. 

The garage door was installed. It looks terrific and almost immediately one of our neighbors complimented it. It made me realize that the neighbors were probably sick of looking into our garage, even through I had gotten used to it. A side benefit which I had not thought about, it that I no longer have to lock up everything of value in the garage. Also, it's really nice to see how clean the garage stays when the door is shut. No longer do we have leaves blowing in, and a thin layer of dust accumulating on everything. One thing of interest is that they no longer install an outside keypad, unless you pay for and order it. The control pad inside the garage hooks up to your wifi and they have an app for your phone (of course), that controls your door. One remote is standard, as most cars have garage door openers as regular equipment. I easily programmed the Toyota,  but the Dodge is giving me fits.

Bread.

We finished our fall baking. Each year we make 8 large loaves of bread and around 15 tins of cinnamon buns to be given away to our closest friends and families. After about 30 years of doing this it has gotten almost routine, which encourages errors of course but this batch looks quite good. We did a much better job controlling the heat this year with our new oven, and avoided placing the bread on the bottom rack, where they had a tenancy to burn They are all in the freezer and will be distributed next month.

Cinnamon Buns

The first and last time
 I wore this tie.

We had a beautiful but brief trip to southern Florida in the middle of October to attend a wedding. It was nice to escape the wet and dreary fall we have been having here in NY. We had a late flight into Fort Lauderdale, arriving at around 11 PM.  After baggage and getting the rental car, followed by a 50 minute drive to the hotel in Palm Beach, we finally got to bed around 130 AM, late for us old folks. The wedding was on the beach Saturday and weather was perfect. Certainly it was warm, but a nice breeze off the water kept the sweating to a minimum despite the buttoned up shirt and tie. No sport coat, thank God. The tie was linen, with a floral design, and was very admired by one of the local fireman that had arrived to honor the couple with a local fire rig. He asked for it, and I happily gave it to him. I wasn't being all that generous, it only cost me $8 bucks but both he and I have a great story. He said his wife would love it. Hope that works well for him.

I mentioned the lousy weather we've been having this fall. It's been wet and cool but not cold. This combined to delay the leaves falling from the trees, and they're only just now finishing up. This of course has delayed the annual leaf clean up and I hope to get them in before the snow falls. Unfortunately, it's looking like real cold air is arriving this week, and with it some snow, so I'd best get going on that.

Holiday Season

Tree is up and decorated. Missing the top
ornament though. 

It's never been clear to me whom or what decided that the Holiday Season runs from Thanksgiving to New Years, but I don't have a problem with it. I suspect that it was driven by commercial interests, i.e. retail and shopping, but it has been around for a long time. Certainly it has been so for my entire 50+ year life. I remember early on seeing advertisements on television saying "Seasons Greetings" beginning with Thanksgiving programming. I know many, if not most people, get upset when they see the wrapping paper and Christmas trees showing up in stores in October, but it doesn't bother me and having worked in retail in high school and college, I understand the reasons behind it. Certainly, the retail giants would not put the holiday items out if it didn't make sense and money for them.

For Cindy and I, decorating for Christmas begins just before Thanksgiving. It is early but logistically it works, with both of us at our jobs full time, and it allows us to enjoy a month of time with the house beautifully decorated. We both love the holiday season, and it fits into our more leisurely winter lifestyle. Evening consists of dinner in the living room, with a fire in the fireplace, Christmas tree lights on, village pieces lit up on the mantle. Cozy, peaceful. and bright. A defense shield erected to resist winter's cold and gloom.

In the middle of nowhere. 

We went out to get our tree, a Spruce of course, a week before Thanksgiving. We've been going to the same Christmas tree farm for years. The owner expects to see us before his official opening, but he doesn't seem to mind and is, I think, a bit amused by us. There is a problem though, in that he stopped planting spruce years ago, since fir trees have become more popular. Each year it has gotten tougher to find a tree that we want, and this year we finally struck out. It was sad to tell him on the way out, since we both knew we'd never be back again. After a couple of fails, we began to get nervous that we may not find a spruce. However, I took a recon trip one weekday morning and investigated a tree farm we had visited many years back. I was thrilled to see acres of spruce, nothing but spruce. Cindy and I returned a few days later and found our tree quickly. The farm is a throwback to the old days, with no attendant, at your own risk mud roads, and an honor system for paying, that consisted of a hole in the side of a small barn. You pay what you think the tree is worth. Awesome.

Over a brief Thanksgiving break from work, after decorating the tree, I also put up the outside lights. I'm old school there as well, going with 4 strings of C-9 lights. Not energy efficient at all, but they give off a warm glow that you cannot get with LED lights. I like that you can change out some of the bulbs with twinkle bulbs that give a very random and slow flashing or twinkle to the lights.  I did buy a couple of LED spot lights that I am using to eliminate the side of our house, which is now easily visible from Grand Boulevard since the leaves are off the trees.

Delicious bread. Some light, some dark. 

Also, Cindy and I spent a full day baking Christmas bread, which we will distribute to family. We are still getting used to our new oven and adjusting the temperature, so some of the bread turned out a bit dark, others a bit light. That was somewhat by design, as some like the bread darker, others lighter.

So, while we may be a bit early with things, we are pretty much ready for the holidays. It's nice to just relax and enjoy, and not be a part of the frenzy. We still have some shopping to do, but Cindy and I have really cut down on the gift giving at this point. We really don't need or want all that much, and it really helps keep the spirit of the season while lowering the stress.

Baking and raking season

A good start

The Fall season has been mild so far. We have had a frost in most places, but with the clear skies has come generally warm afternoons under October sun. This has kept the leaves on the trees a bit longer than usual and I think has limited the Fall color a bit. We had enough leaves to rake so we did our first batch earlier this week. Limiting the amount of leaves this year was the leaf mold that attacked the Norway maples. Wet weather in the first half of the summer allowed the mold to spread through the area including the trees along the park fence at the north end of the property. These maples make up a good percentage of our trees and they dropped their leaves early which ended just getting mulched up by the mower. The rest of our trees, a silver maple, some sugar maples, linden and a hickory were unaffected by the mold and seem to be holding on to their leaves longer than usual.

First fire of the season

One night did get cold enough for our first fire of the season. The fire drafted well and it was a nice hot fire, almost too hot and we ended up sleeping with the fan on that night. I did get the chimney inspected and the report was mixed. The chimney is fine, and safe to be used, but an odd 90 angle in the flue makes it impossible to clean properly. Any debris that falls down from the top is inaccessible from the bottom due to the right angle run of the flue. The chimney guy suggests that next year we install a clean out on the outside of the chimney so they can access the entire flue. Also, he did say there was some loose brick and mortar which may need to be repaired at the same time. Stay tuned.

One batch of cinnamon buns. We made two batches. 

As mentioned in the subject, it is indeed baking season and we did two large batches of cinnamon buns. It's actually pretty easy to do. We use a recipe that came with our first KitchenAid mixer many years ago. All the mixing and kneading is done by the mixer, so we just have to roll out the dough, put down the filling, and roll it back up. We do doctor up the drizzle coating and filling a bit to give it our own stamp on them. They came out real nice.

Next on the baking list is our Christmas bread. We follow and old white bread recipe from the church cook book to make large round loaves. This is more work for me since the amount of dough overwhelms the mixer so that I have to hand knead the bread. It's kind of messy and back braking since the kitchen table is just too low for me. Another problem is our overstuffed freezer. We just don't have enough room to store the bread after we bake it so we're going to have to work on that.

Fall decorations are up. Note the empty flower containers in
front of the porch. They're filled with rocks and dirt and I'm
too damn lazy to move them.  

Cindy had the idea that corn stalks would be nice to have at the front of the house so we went out to look for them. I was shocked at how much money they wanted for those things. There are vast fields filled with them awaiting to be ground up for silage so they really should not be all that expensive. Anyway, we ended up getting three nice bundles at a local farm market for $15 bucks. I tied them to the columns at the sides of the porch and in the center. I really like the looks of them and they are appropriate right through Thanksgiving. I intend to get my money's worth out of them!