Monday Meanderings - 12.22.2014

The other day I noticed a man walking down the street wearing a safety vest, a hard hat, and a loaded-down tool belt. A while later, he knocked at our door. He said he was with Comcast, which is about to take over Time Warner, and after showing me his credentials asked if he could take a look at the utility pole in the backyard. After assuring him it was okay to do so, I watched him approach the pole, enter some information in a digital tablet he was carrying, then he put his ear to the pole and listened! After a bit, he moved around to the other side and listened again.

He did a number of other things, like measure the pole's girth with a giant caliper he was carrying, measure the height from the ground to the cable drop with a large extending measure, measure the distance the pole was from the nearby fences and then take a few photos, each time entering his findings on his tablet. When he was all done, he once again put his ear to the pole and listened for a good two minutes! I'm thinking of walking down there to see what my utility pole has to say.

Hooray! The Senior Activity Center has reopened and is cracking pecans again! I had searched to no avail for some other option to deal with my 40 pounds of pecans, so I was glad to haul my sacks down there and stand in a looong line to drop them off. They are overwhelmed at this point, so it may be a while before I get a call to come get them. Meanwhile, every time the wind blows another batch falls from the tree. It's a race between me and the Vietnamese lady to see who gets to them first.

I'm looking for a replacement office chair and Saturday we went to IKEA to check out a highly-rated chair. We have been IKEA fans since Julie and Jason introduced to those iconic blue stores in Prague, and we have several furniture items from IKEA. However, I made two major mistakes on this shopping trip. One, it is the week before Christmas, and Two, we went on Saturday. I was prepared to buy the chair, but after a long, long, unsuccessful search for a cart and a look at the impossibly long lines at checkout, we decided to come home empty handed. There's always next year.

Under the category "You can't make this stuff up, folks" here are two recent news items. The first a social media posting from the American Statesman -

"Police have located a Buick LeSabre police had thought possibly stolen from the home of an elderly couple. It was in the home's garage."
 
 And the other a news item on the Huffington Post -

"Robert O’Neill, the former United States Navy SEAL who shot and killed Osama Bin Laden, had his home mistakenly invaded by members of a street gang this morning shortly after 1AM. O’Neill was uninjured; the five intruders remain hospitalized."