Day FiftyFive: Happy Cinco de Mayo... Sammy Hagar wouldn't have had any problems on the road today... and lastly French Toast, kinda like Shepard's Pie and consuming the enemy after battle... are we confused yet? Ya I was a bit overwhelmed by the time breakfast rolled around, we narrowly beat the garbage men to the side of the road this morning. Cake was gone by the time I made it to the kitchen but Lawson still has a piece of Banana Bread left so... School... Lawson had School this morning... he logged into his class chat and did some work, their eggs hatched just the other day too so there was that too... gotta say I like his school better than any of the others that the kids have attended. He wanted to play some more Minecraft today but kept getting distracted... I spent most of my day waiting for him at the computer... he's only going to be another 10 minutes for sure... then a friend would call, or a video needed watching, ok I'll be there right after this... he did learn you can make KD on the stove as well... he only knew how to do it in the microwave, likely more safe for him to do in the microwave. So I took yesterdays photo Heather took of me and the boy in our new Tie-Dyed Shirts and made a cartoon avatar for no real good reason... sure it looks kinda cool but Heather seemed to think there were other things that may have been a little more pressing that needed dealt with today, she could have been correct but don't tell her that. So in honour of being the 5th of May, we had Tacos for dinner... got out the tortilla press, made the flat bread, prepared all the accoutrements to go along with the meal... made a pretty good spread out of the whole deal... Lawson, dinner's ready. What are we having? Tacos. Do they taste good cold? Ya I guess... He was in the middle of his own battle, pretty sure the kid he was playing with is at least somewhat French... not sure how that worked out for him on this historic occasion... hope he didn't pick the wrong side. LOL Started watching Frankenstein from last weeks National Theater YouTube upload, not bad so far... need to watch the rest of it by tomorrow before it's gone. So here is what I wasted my time on today (should look a little like yesterdays photo):

Cartoon Rod

Day FiftyFour: Monday, I could never get the hang of Mondays... how do people who have jobs do it? Woke up at 3:30am Shit, can't sleep now... 6am might as well just stay up... 6:10 ZZzzzz..... 9am wake up again for breakfast, Cake for me, Banana Bread for Lawson... Drum-roll please! Opening the bags of shirts and rinsing them out... two thumbs up. (photo below) Into the washing machine, a few times with them... don't want those to run with the other clothe in the wash next week and have multi coloured other things. Omelettes for lunch, summer sausage and medium cheddar... After lunch we played some more Minecraft. I helped build a little on the homestead while Lawson played with the Mobspawner, which seems to be working well, we did make one improvement, lights in the spawner we can turn on and off from outside which controls the spawning process. When Heather got home we split the rest of the cake and Lawson ate some more of his Banana Bread while we pondered dinner. For those tuning in from any place else on the planet, we are still cold here... -14 deg C this morning when Heather went to work. However in the day time it does warm up a bit every once in a while, enough to melt some of the ice on the river out front... Come July I might be able to cut the Lawn. Well, I'm not doing particularly well today after digging in the basement all yesterday... maybe tomorrow we will get back to fixing things. Don't forget people tomorrow is cinco de mayo. May the Forth be with you for at least the rest of the day.

Lawson and Rod wearing TieDyed Shirts they made.

Melanie T
They look great!

Rod Turnbull
Got another one here if you want one.

Melanie T
I was waiting for a pic, I now realize you mean shirt

Melanie T
I've been loving the addition of photos

Day FiftyThree: Cake for breakfast, all is good, well maybe not all but breakfast was. Today's mission, think about all other unfinished missions and pick one to complete. (Spoiler Alert: this doesn't even get accomplished today) So Tie-dye shirts made it high on the list and build shelves for the kitchen cupboards also made the list, started the day out optimistically. Tie-dye shirts , well Heather orchestrated the colour management systems and material preparation, the shirts were divided between the mankind in the house and got creatively bundled and wrapped in elastic bands (see photo below). Heather passed out the dye and stepped out of the splash zone. Lot's of squirting took place and the coloured shits got stuck in bags until tomorrow. Number 1 project not finished, not our fault, just a timing issue, they will get rinsed out tomorrow and cleaned again before use. Lunch, Adults: Pizza (not Lawson's favorite), the Boy: made himself some pierogies. The basement, argh... the machine to make the shelves is under an epic pile of crap... ok lets go as far as possible before needing that... The wood I have is wide enough to make a shelve, my table saw will make it almost through the slab, cutting half way on one side and turning it over and cutting half way through the other... now the 1 inch in the middle, that's were the shit show starts... now my hand saws are in a largish bag that normally hangs on the wall over there... currently not over there... did it fall off? Is there another epic pile of crap against that wall? (the answer to question 1: no, question 2: yes)... so I dug out that pile to no avail. However the 1st epic pile I mention might contain the saws as well and unlike the pile I just dug through, that pile does have a tool I need at the bottom of it (no, not the saws), the planer, which turned out to have a broken dust collector, not a big deal right, what's a little dust? Well let me tell you, with a planer you are not really collecting dust as much as turning big slabs of wood into wood chips... and it takes about 2 minutes to fill a garbage bag... so when the dust collector isn't hooked up to the shop-vac it just blows all over the room... ask me how I know. So the saws were not there either. maybe the wall with the shelves, seems I piled more stuff in front of them, ARGH... and no, they were not there either but I did manage to move all the piles around the room into a general mess all over the room. I did find a broken miter saw there, bent the blade a little more on an angle and got through the pieces of shelve after almost cutting through the table of my table saw with it... I wondered why it stopped cutting. I ran the smaller slabs through the planer... yes there are wood chips all over my piles of crap now. It's going to take me a week to dig out down there again... next time remind me to go buy a piece of wood that will almost fit because in theory it's possible to just make that... spending the $5 would have saved my 40 hours of work by the time I finish cleaning up. So on the way up for dinner I found my bag of saws at the bottom of the stairs in a pile of tools heading to the basement. I think I mentioned this before: ARGH! CrackSlaw, I like crackslaw... and for dessert, Jello with whipped cream, Mmm. Only 12 carbs so far today... going to have to have a second or third dessert to make the numbers proper for the day, ROTFLMAO... maybe more cake. Played a little Minecraft with Lawson to round out the day, shelves will be put off until tomorrow.

Lawson Tie-dyeing T-Shirts

Day FiftyTwo: No rest for the wicked or anyone else here for that matter... Why do we all need to be up before 7am on a Saturday? Went back to working on the kitchen, need some shelves in two of the cupboards today... wait, that involves cleaning the basement and finding the little clips that hold the shelves up... here, hold my beer. OK let's start with something simple, you make me breakfast and I will try to drag my ass out of bed to eat it. Heather can make omelettes too, I made the coffee. Then after breaky I got to cleaning out the cupboards to see what kind of a job this was going to be... the job got smaller once I enacted the haven't used it in ten years it must be garbage rule. The garbage bag filled up quickly... then I got to an item that had likely just been over looked, which happen to be at the same time the wife decided she needed the box grater that was in the dishwasher being washed at that moment in time... actually the spare flat cheese grater was in there too... I said here try this and passed her the box... What's that and where did we get it? Pretty sure I don't remember. It was some slap chop spinning thing with razor blades of death inside a large cylinder with a manual crank on the top. OK so much for the 10 year rule, that item got saved by the bell, cleaned, reboxed and put back on the shelve for next emergency. Yes, I'm still waiting on parts for the food processor. And did you know we have enough water bottles, canteens, travel mugs, thermoses and reusable beverage containers to host and army of thirsty people during a drought. They got taken off the shelves around the kitchen and put in a box... a big box. And cake pans... you would think I was in the business of making birthday cakes and what-not for events all across the north... must be 100 damn cake pans, muffin tins and pie plates. Changed the light bulb over the sink... not as easy as you may think, it's over the pot rack. So the cakes Heather was baking came out of the oven... OK one cake and one loaf... I will include a photo below or above or where ever the hell Facebook decides to put it today... your job, circle the 5 zucchini. (comment below and I will let you know if you are right) - We ate Chocolate Cake for lunch. Then after putting off the basement for weeks, I had to go there... and clean there... looking for 2 small bags of clips to hold up a shelf. Found them! but it was then dinner time... I'm starting to like Pizza and Wings Night every Saturday. It was late... didn't have time for a movie after diner, took a shower, mowed the hair on my face and everyone went to bed... No the shelves didn't get put in, no the calking around the sink didn't get done (but I did find the gun and the tube of calk)... and yes, the kitchen is more of a mess now than when I started.

Keto Cake and Some type of Loaf

Day FiftyOne: Boy is up... not 7am yet... last night Heather says, Let him stay up for a while, that way he will sleep in... sure glad I took her up on that advise... imagine if he wouldn't have slept in, he would have been up at 5am. He went and played some hockey in the basement. I started the morning with a little taste of Dark Chocolate and a White Russian... has social distancing and staying at home finished yet? I was told it was going to last 14 days and then we would be ok again... have I just missed the return to normal order from the government? Lawson got the works for breakfast, ham, eggs, home-fries, toast, juice... hoovered it up like there was no tomorrow... there is still going to be a tomorrow, yes? I wonder some times. Seems the boy had a lack of focus today, bounced between different video games, with and without his friends, to videos on a variety of topics... even played a little Minecraft with his old man. For lunch he had breakfast food again... Big Ole Pancake with bananas, butter, chocolate and caramel syrup on it... looked like carnival food. Turned around and that was gone too. So I thought about making bread, which involved getting the stand mixer onto the counter top... now where was that counter top? Hmm... maybe under that pile of stuff. So I started digging and putting stuff away. Mission accomplished ✔ ok, it was a bit dirty so it got cleaned as well... hence when I noticed a piece of the end trim coming off... well we can't have that. Mission was aborted and reassigned. New mission: Fix the counter top. Goop-off and razor blades to clean up the surface, some extra strong and sticky water proof gluey stuff and Bob's your Uncle... OK and maybe cutting a piece of lumber to hold it in place for a while to let things dry a bit. Heather got home and made Beef and Peppers in the instapot... one of the best gift's I ever bought her she claims... then thought about what she had said... ok one of the best kitchen gadgets I have ever bought her... and just when I though gift giving was going to get a lot easier. LOL Everyone had a long day, we all packed it in early... bread tomorrow maybe.

Day Fifty: Yep, hit the big Five Oh today... Days are becoming less productive... fought with online banking for the better half of the day. Stopped by the post office the other day on the way home and picked up the stack-o-bills. Hence the online banking today, 2 new bank cards to activate, unlike the mess the other day when they send me a card to an account that the computer created on it's own in a spasm when first setting up the account with their crappy web site... grrr... ok after being on hold for an hour, they figured it out, reversed the bogus charges, send a new card... did I mention we got cards in the mail... so now the button that was supposed to be there for the other card but wasn't mysteriously appeared. I'm not an old fart that's inept when it comes to online shit... but you can't generate a button that the code is not producing... well at least not from my end with my limited access to the banks programming. But all came out in the wash, sent money everyplace, even to myself, which I then sent to other people to pay more bills... Did I mention I picked up the mail? Oh and Heather got a box, I should tell her about that... likely the yarn she ordered for the new blanket... she's doing it in the family tartan, should be interesting. After Banking I cleaned the fridge... now let me tell you, it's a fair size... the size that things go in and get lost. Honestly that's not always a good feature. But today's mission was the stuff in the door. Ask me, hey Rod, what do you keep in the door of the fridge? Well I'm here to tell you, it's something else, a world of never ending happiness... sorry went a little crazy there for a second. The door of the fridge contains the shelf dedicated to different types of vinegar, a section that houses butter/blocks of Crisco, our refrigerated herbs and spices, and a lower shelf that we mostly ignore... that's the one that was the concern today. After all it's space in the fridge that could be used for something more important than stuff we never use. What put me on this track was looking for a container to put the Italian Dressing I made the other day in... so that shelve mostly housed the old bottles of dressing that we never use, mostly because they suck, but the nail in the coffin is what's in the bottle. We read labels now and I can safely say none of those things wouldn't have made it into the house on one of today's shopping trips, high carb, high cal, reduced for quick sale labels... seriously? How long does a bottle of dressing have to sit in the store before they put a reduced sale sticker on it? Sure it was cheap but... SO... out of the dozen bottles I tossed out today the most current expiration date was 2017... some dated back to 2013... We don't eat it... Lawson has never liked 'Sauce' on any of his foods... so they sit there in the door and are mostly ignored... at least for the last 5 years or so. Did you know there were 5 bottles of Ketchup in there? Still is actually. One was sugar free, ok so that's different, we use it... but then there are those times when you are out of town or camping and Lawson needs some ketchup on something we make, so you just buy another bottle... 5. The Vinegar shelf expanded into the new real-estate in the fridge... don't ask. Threw a load of dishes through the dishwasher... haven't opened it yet to see if it worked... a tomorrows project. Lawson ran out of the homemade bread today, might have to do something about that tomorrow.

Day FortyNine: Went to bulk barn for needed supplies... now they walk you around the store and get you what you ask for... seems good and all until the words don't come out properly and you get the wrong stuff... I was kinda wondering why the bin wasn't in the same place that I'm used to getting it from, I would have never even found that other stuff. Well it leaves me needing to go back to bulk barn again in the very near future to get what I actually needed and didn't get. Well I did get the sidekick to the Dr office which was the primary directive... took until mid afternoon. After dinner we all watched another episode of The Flash, looks like that series is coming to an end soon. Played some scrabble and packed in the day. Sorry no fun to be had today... need to redo most of it when my brain works. Argh.

Melanie T
I quite like the Astro A10, but if you want wireless you'd have to go A20

Melanie T
His Marley's might actually work too if they have a mic

Rod Turnbull
I might just have to find an adapter to get the mic to plug into the controller... although it would be nice to have a more quiet home...

Melanie T
Rod Turnbull the controller doesn't have aux???

Day FortyEight: Garbage day, woke up late, got garbage to the curb in a team effort as the truck pulled up. Dealt with computer issues as Lawson tried to get connected to the internet for his weekly online class. Got a few more things working for his school stuff and he did some of his online work. Lawson it really getting into playing the X-Box with his friends. At some point I really need to get him a headset so: A/ the whole house doesn't rumble with the warfare going on through the stereo and B/ So he stop monopolizing the phone, he currently plays with his friends on the phone and the phone on speaker phone because he can hear them online but they can't here him. The echo is extra special.

Day FortySeven: Mondays... gotta love Mondays Today Lawson designed a treasure hunt in Minecraft... his best one yet. Good use of red stone logic circuits, command blocks, barrier blocks and interaction with items, some in a way he had planed and others I abused in a way he didn't suspect. Drinking the water from the sink, you needed to use a bottle of water in a chest, opened a secret door behind the book case to find one item, others were behind paintings, under bridge and under lava... he expected me to use an item I was given that is lava resistant to drop in the lava and set off a trigger plate that popped an item out of a secret compartment under the floor... However, be cause Minecraft is Minecraft I used a fishing rod to get that one by casting to the bottom of the lava pit and hitting the unseen trigger plate... who knew fishing line was lava resistant? LOL Cleaned up the garage some... trying to make room to work on my car. I found a work bench I didn't remember I had... seems it takes up the whole one wall.

Day FortySix: So another lazy weekend morning, Passed on breakfast I was trying to get some graphic work done on the computer. Heather and Lawson took to the kitchen today and baked home made bread the kind only the boy should eat... ya well I haven't seen bread like that since we moved up here, excellent crumb, not mealy like all the store bought bread now, even the good brands have cut corners and are putting out crap now... and a crust... like a real crust... hard and tap on it to tell when it's done kind of hard... not a fly landed on my loaf and now I have squashed bread kind of crust... Fuck it, I ate some anyway. It was worth it. Dip that stuff in a nice mix of Olive Oil and Balsamic Vinaigrette... Argh... Droool... Ack! Well completely screwed eating for the day up so I made some Italian Dressing (I did mention we have spices and ingredients for almost everything right?) If I die in all this COVID Crap, the rest of it is in the door of the fridge in the 6 years expired poppy seed dressing bottle, don't throw it out, I just made this... it's still good. Oh why did I make dressing? For a sandwich of course... can't have a proper Italian meat and cheese sandwich with out all the right stuff. Damn I think a lot about food... and yes I made the Souvlaki today for dinner... more drooling... Heather and the boy did stuff all day... not sure what, I kept to myself in the bedroom all day. What started out as a little graphic job kinda got out of hand and I put out this thing below. Now I'm thinking hey, that would look good on a T-Shirt... or stickers... Oh I know! Gold Foil Stickers!!! Coffee mugs? Shot glasses... I really gotta start selling this shit online. Out of the millions of people on the internet someone has to be at home shopping for stuff they don't really need. So how many people are left reading this stuff... hit the like button if you are still alive out there... don't worry I won't see it as a sign of weakness that you are so doing nothing that you are continuing to read these after a month and a half... Push the like button I know you want to... Go on do it, do it do it...

Bob's RaceCar - Furyious