Winter Monday

It's a beautiful winter day in central Virginia. At 3PM the sun is shining brightly and the temperature is 54°F. I just went out to the garage and cranked up the lawn rocket. I mean, the lawn tractor. (Sometimes when I'm driving it, it's a lawn rocket. That's when I'm flying across the yard, with the uneven earth bumping my butt up and down on the seat.) The tractor's battery still works. So I put a charger on the battery and in an hour I'll go out and remove the charger. I try to boost the charge every week instead of letting the battery sit dormant through the winter as I usually do, so that maybe, when spring and grass-mowing season arrive, the battery will still start the tractor. The battery usually lasts for two seasons, but with periodic charging and luck, I may get a third season out of this battery. 

In six days my partner Nuria will return. She left to fly to Costa Rica on January 9, but it feels like she's been gone six months. I wonder how it feels to her. She's with her family, and she's been visiting her doctors and her banker and she took a two-day trip to a beach with one of her family members—daughter, or sister, or both—and I'm glad she's getting some fun. I'm sure it makes living with me more tolerable.

I'm charging Nuria's Garmin. I gifted her with it a couple years ago. Bad idea. She's never used it. I've never used it. I've tried to use it, but it's too difficult. I used to have a Tom Tom and it was easy to use. I thought a Garmin would be similarly easy, but I was wrong. If I need a GPS on the road, I use Waze on my phone. It's easy to use and is a very handy program. It is not without the occasional error that sends me in a circle, but those are easy to figure out and get out of. In times gone by, I've driven all over the United States, from Atlantic Coast to Pacific Coast, from Montana to Texas, with nothing more than a paper road map, and I never got lost. I didn't care if I did get lost—it would simply have made the adventure more interesting.

It's almost 4PM. In other words, it's time for breakfast. Breakfast is the first meal of the day, regardless of when it's eaten. It is the meal that breaks the fast of not eating since the previous day. Hence the name "break-fast". I haven't eaten anything today and at 4PM I'm becoming mildly hungry. Until next time, stay safe.