Hi,
Literary Update (not much to add):
My novella is a little over 40,000 words now. I hope to have the first draft of it finished fairly soon. [Note (11-7-2025): I was apparently kidding myself. For reasons I will cover later in the year, I still haven’t finished it.] I’ve already spotted a few structural problems with it but they should be easy enough to sort out (thanks to Scrivener). As soon as the first draft is done, the next phase will be reading it straight through from beginning to end, just making sure it flows well. Then I’ll start tinkering with the language a paragraph at a time. More on that later.
Other Stuff (lots to add):
As I mentioned in the previous post, we’re only three months into the year, and it has already been busier than I would like, Some of what kept us busy was minor, but whether major or minor, a lot of it was still time consuming. Let’s start with my EV.
I bought my 2021 Chevy Bolt (Evie Black) back in 2023. At some point I realized I had only been given one key fob. Maybe the first owner had kept theirs, so I ended up with the spare. Last year, on one of my first out-of-town trips, I was charging Evie when she informed me that the battery in my key fob was dying. Fortunately, I was (at that very moment) charging at a Chevy dealership in Central Texas.
Evie had been driven for a few years by then, so having a low fob battery made sense. That dealership replaced the battery before Evie finished charging, but I realized that not having the second fob could have left me stranded somewhere unnecessarily.
I checked online and found out that replacement fobs were very expensive, so I avoided getting one for a while, but in January of this year I went to my local dealer, bought a second fob and had it programmed. Several hours, and a little over $500 later (ouch), I had a bit more peace of mind.
Our house was built in 2011, and we moved into it that spring. After an especially pesky invasion by crazy ants, we hired a pest control company to come out four times a year and spray a barrier around the outside of the house to keep bugs out. It usually worked really well, but lately we started noticing small critters (like silverfish), inside, especially near the drains in our bathrooms. Our contract allows us to request an additional spray any time we notice a proliferation of bugs.
We put it off for a while because Minay is very sensitive to strong smells. They kick her asthma into high gear. So I scheduled a spraying inside the house for a day when Minay was going to be at a quilt shop that’s about 50 miles away. The shop was having a sale that day, which guaranteed that she would be gone for several hours. They sprayed. No new bugs so far, fingers crossed.
I try to visit my brother, Steve, at his prison, whenever I can. He used to be in a unit near Beaumont (a little over a hundred miles from our house), but was moved to another one late last year that’s only 40 miles away. A visit takes up most of a Saturday, but Minay and I visited him there last December, and I visited by myself once in February and once more a week ago. That visit will hopefully be my last time inside a prison (ever). I’ll cover the reason why in another post, maybe fairly soon.
Minay and I both had our annual physicals and some dental appointments (in February and earlier this month), and I also had a follow-up with my cardiologist to see if the medication he prescribed had forced my AFib into a regular rhythm. It hadn’t. He had already tried shocking my heart (a procedure called a cardioversion), but that didn’t work either. I had an appointment a few days ago to consult with a specialist about whether an ablation might correct the AFib for good.
The office visit went well. He and his assistant thoroughly explained what happens in an ablation. They insert a catheter through the femoral artery, going in near my groin, and up into my heart. They send a tiny camera and an ablation electrode through the catheter. The electrodes scar the area that is causing the arrhythmia, the scars block the faulty heart signals, and (hopefully) my AFib will be gone. I’m scheduled for an echocardiogram (sort of a sonogram for the heart) so the surgeon can study my heart’s size and shape to make sure I’m a good candidate for the procedure.
Mowing season started a couple of weeks ago (a week earlier than last year, which was a week earlier than the year before that — thank you global warming). The weeds got so high I just couldn’t wait any longer. I was a little worried that, after my thumb surgery, I might not be able to handle the vibration from the equipment, but it wasn’t too bad (the mower, edger, and trimmer are all electric, so the vibration could have been worse I suppose).
I have some old boxing training gloves I used to use when I exercised. This type of glove isn’t the thickly padded kind used for sparring. These are designed for light bag work. They have a slight cushion for the knuckles, but they also have a Velcro strap to support your wrists, which helped make the mowing a lot easier. Minay came outside after I was done mowing and we did some bush and tree trimming. The gloves helped support my weak arthritis-addled wrists through all of that.
I also realized while I was mowing that I still hadn’t removed the winter wrapping on our exterior faucets, so that was another chore, removing the covers and reattaching hoses to all of them.
Since we were past the final freeze of the season, a few days before the mowing I hauled our rain barrel over to its base, positioning it under the drain pipe, so I could catch an extra 50 gallons each time it rains. A few days after a rain, when the yard has dried up a bit, I drag the water barrel’s hose out to a tree, and drain the barrel. That’s 50 gallons of water I don’t have to get from our city water.
Speaking of winter freezes, we don’t usually get many deep freezes (down in the high 20° to 30° Fahrenheit range for more than eight hours or so). We only had two of those this season. There was a three day deep freeze near the end of January (morning lows dipped just below freezing the first two days, and down to 20°F on the last one, but, on all three of those days, it climbed out of those lows in the morning to highs in the 50’s and low 60’s). Then we had another freeze in February. That one dropped below freezing, with lows of 27° and 29° for two days. For those few days we never got higher than 44°.
By March we were sure we wouldn’t have another freeze like the really serious one the whole state experienced in 2021 (which kept all of Texas in a deep freeze for over a week), so it felt safe to reinstall the rain barrel. Back in 2021 we also lost power for a full day during the freeze. Fortunately Minay has a ton of quilts, and we have a gas stove, so we could cook and make coffee and tea, read, nap a lot, and snuggle under quilts while we waited for power to return.
During that freeze, the pipe behind our kitchen sink froze solid. Once we got power back we warmed the pipe with a hair dryer on full heat, and then left a small table lamp under the sink until the pipe thawed. When we had plumbing work done last year, we discovered that the pipe had an outlet on the outside of the house (probably the main reason the pipe froze), so we had the plumber spray foam insulation in the wall to protect the pipe in the future.
Just to be sure, though, just before each of this year’s two brief freezes took place, we put a lamp underneath the sink again before the freeze, with an incandescent bulb in it (LED bulbs barely put out any heat at all), closed the cabinet doors, and covered the sink top and front with packing blankets to keep the warmth in. That worked great.
When Minay creates a new pattern for a quilt, I usually take some pictures of it and edit the pictures in Photoshop to get them ready for the pattern’s cover art. The owner of the pattern company started paying me for the extra time I put in to make the photos print ready, and asked me to also take pictures of other people’s quilts and prepare those images too (I must have been doing an okay job).
It’s an intensive process which involves us mounting each quilt (usually on our back fence because the light is good there. We’ve done that with three quilts since the beginning of the year (two of Minay’s and one from another quilter). Minay’s were relatively easy, but this other quilter makes huge quilts. Mounting it vertically was impossible. The fence is 6 ft., 6 in. high (including the bottom rot board), but that quilt was so tall it dragged on the ground. We tried several ways to hang it (in one we just draped it over the fence, I deleted the ugly buildings in the background and put a forest in their place). That looked nice, but the quilter didn’t like it. We finally mounted the quilt horizontally (which barely fit), and I rotated it in Photoshop. We spent about five days taking and editing those pictures (periodic rain, overcast skies, and wind fought us along the way). Finally we came up with something acceptable.
The fence, by the way, is still standing after last year’s drama, and (after a lot of negotiation with our HOA), they have agreed to hire a contractor to install a concrete berm or barrier of some kind behind all of the houses that are backed up to that ditch. It hasn’t happened yet, but maybe they’ll do it soon and my erosion problem will be fixed.
This has gone on too long, so here (quickly) are a few of the other things that interrupted or slowed us down since the first of the year.
The exterior lights on our garage and front porch kept burning out. After my unsuccessful attempt to replace them by myself, we hired somebody to do the job (something I’m beginning to realize will start happening more and more often as I age).
Minay, who has incredible hearing, noticed that one of our toilets was ghost flushing (briefly flushing all on its own). I didn’t hear a thing. I’ll take a stab at cleaning the flapper and the seal, and see if that works. If not we’ll hire someone (darn).
[Update, we hired someone. They replaced the flapper and we had them drain our water heater while they were at it.]
On March 20th, Minay gave a quilt presentation in Brenham called Bone Structure, one of several talks she does at local quilt guilds. It’s about how quilters find the “bones” of a quilt, and how to use that quilt’s structure to design their own. Her talks are popular, partly because she’s knowledgeable about the subject, but also because she’s a very gifted quilter and brings tons of quilts to show the group that illustrate the point she’s making in each talk (show-and-tell is always popular with quilters). I go with her each time to be her Quilting Roadie (help with setup, refold quilts after they’re shown, etc.).
Our calendars are now reasonably empty for a while, (except for my 60th high school reunion on May 2nd though the 4th). It’s 300 miles away, and I’m considering going, but haven’t decided yet. Cons: It will be a long drive, I’ll be away from home for three full days, I’ll have expenses on the road, and the cost of two nights in hotels. Pros: Seeing old friends.
Minay is also working on a new quilt for a talk about using panels in quilts. She hasn’t named the quilt yet. At the moment she’s just calling it the Bird Panel Quilt. Here’s a shot of it, hanging loosely on her design wall (no batting in the middle or backing fabric, just the pieced top). The panel part is just the birds on stained glass in the middle. The rest of it is Minay’s piecing. It’s beautiful now, but I think it’s going to be spectacular once it’s quilted.
So that’s been a rundown of our busy few months. I’m surprised we found time to sleep and eat, much less get anything done.
Hope to see you in a couple of weeks.
Michael
Standard Disclaimer: Please post a comment below if you would like to. All comments are personally moderated by a grouchy old guy, though, so posts by self-promotional schemers, spammers, and lunatic ranters won’t make it through. Everyone else, whether your thoughts are positive or negative, please feel free to speak your mind. Thanks.