Priorities

Maybe I'm simply cruel and unfeeling. I admit it's possible. But...

I saw a picture of a woman in a news story. The woman was upset that her "benefits" were being delayed, because she needed her benefits now to pay for food and rent.

The first thing I noticed about the woman was that she was obese. The second thing I noticed was that her body was covered with multiple tattoos.

To me, it seemed she could afford to lose her benefits for a few weeks. Maybe if she had put her money into a bank – or a piggy bank – instead of spending it on tattoos, she would have money now to pay for food and rent.  But she doesn't have money to pay for food and rent, because she used her money to buy tattoos and – well, you can't eat tattoos or pay rent with them.

This isn't about tattoos, its about priorities. What do you really need? What do you need but maybe not so much? What do you not need but would like to have? Food is a priority. A home is important, but not as essential as food and water. And so on. Tattoos are way down the priority list. But there are people who have spent their money on them and now they can't afford to buy food. They want you and I to buy their food by paying the taxes that fund those benefits. 

And we will fund those benefits, because it's the right thing to do, and we are the kind of people who want to do the right thing. But there's a fine line between doing the right thing and letting yourself be used. Sometimes the line is blurred. But as long as we have a choice, and as long as we are aware that we have a choice, then, I think, choosing to help others in those self-made situations is the humane thing to do.

Tariffs

Donald Trump is still threatening to put "steep" tariffs on imports from China and Mexico. I think that many Americans misunderstand how tariffs work. China and Mexico will not pay these tariffs. Americans will pay the tariffs. 

A tariff is a tax on imported goods that is paid by the importer. The importer resells the goods on the American market. The imported goods become more expensive for the American company to purchase. Therefore, those goods must be sold at a higher price to recover the cost of the tariff. But because the American people are usually the ultimate buyer and user of the imported items, it is the American people who will ultimately bear the cost of the import duty.

In other words, if potatoes cost more to buy from a foreign potato grower, then those potatoes will cost more in the American grocery store.

Let's say you run a company in America that builds motorcycles. You want to buy the engines from a company in China that makes a very good engine that is cheaper than the engine you could buy from an American company. To keep your selling price low, you buy the engine from this Chinese company. Suppose the engine costs $1000. Then the U.S. government imposes a 100 percent tariff on that engine. Now you, the importer, have to pay $2000 for each engine. A thousand dollars goes to the Chinese manufacturer and another thousand dollars goes to U.S. Customs for the import duty.

Americans buy a lot of things that are made in China and Mexico. If Trump applies a 50% or 100% tariff to those imports, a lot of things Americans buy are going to cost a lot more.

Morning Snow

I have published a number of snow photos lately. So here's one more that I just snapped. 

This was at 7AM. Sunrise is at 7:20AM today. The temperature is 17°F now. It is supposed to rise to 27° for the high today. Yay.

The blue tint in the photo exists because the sun had not yet risen and the daylight was therefore dim. On my phone's camera, dim light equals blue light.

Nuria just went outside and cleaned the snow off her Camry. She's going to work this morning. Like I've said: best employee ever. She's like the mailman. "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night" stays Nuria from the swift completion of her appointed ... uh, sales?

I have trouble sleeping. I usually go to bed at 9PM but rarely do I get to sleep before midnight. Or 1AM. Or 2AM.  I usually wake up after a couple of hours of sleep. Sometimes I get back to sleep for another hour or two, and sometimes I don't. 

Nuria just drove off, leaving behind a bare spot on the street. This second photo is brighter because it was taken after sunrise.

Early Days

When I was eight years old, my father had two jobs. He worked for Brown & Williamson, a company that made cigarettes. He also owned a laundry, and he spent many hours there working on washers, dryers, and extractors. (Extractors remove most of the water from wet laundry using centrifugal force so that the dryer can dry the laundry faster.)

My mother worked at the laundry. I was only eight years old and they didn't want me to stay in the house by myself. They thought I would get into trouble. They were probably correct. So they took me to the laundry and ordered me to sit in a metal chair for hours.

For an eight year old, this was torture. So my father dug up a copy of the Amateur Radio Relay League (now called the American Radio Relay League) handbook for amateur radio operators. He gave it to me to read to alleviate the boredom. It was very interesting, but mostly over my head. But I learned about simple things like Ohm's Law, capacitive and inductive reactance, and resonance. Beyond that, my brain had to grow a bit more to take it all in.

When I was age nine I built electronic projects on a square-foot board. This was before transistors, so I used three vacuum tubes. One was an OZ4, a full-wave, gas power rectifier in a metal can. I don't recall the types of the other two tubes.

When I was 13, my father was taking electronics classes in Richmond, going to night school there. I asked him if I could go. He said it would be okay. So we attended class together. I took all the exams, and my grades were generally in the "B" category. You had to be age 16 to officially enroll in the class, so I received no credit for attending, but the class was interesting and I learned many things.

Also at age 13, I took the amateur radio license test and I passed it. So I began operating my own amateur radio station. I used Morse code, not spoken language, to communicate.

Also at age 13, I delivered the morning newspaper and spent two afternoons and a Saturday morning collecting payment for the papers and the delivery, so 13 was a busy age for me.

I wonder what 13 year olds do these days.

You Can Do It

One of my readers (LL) left this comment on my previous blog post: "I'm thinking you are a very lucky man to know about all these things and how to get the job done - if plan A doesn't work - you're smart and have a Plan B. I think it's so cool to be so knowledgeable about so many subjects."

Yes, it's very cool. Women are falling all over me, trying to get me to do cool things like connect their icemakers to a water line.

And that reminds me of when I bought my last refrigerator. For fifty dollars extra, I could get an icemaker. So of course I paid the fifty dollars, and I've used the icemaker every day I've owned that fridge. But the icemaker didn't come installed in the fridge. I had to install it.

Which means I had to hook it up to my water line.

So I went to Lowe's (where I purchased the fridge), to the appliance department, and found a salesperson. I said something like, "I need to hook up my refrigerator's icemaker to a water line."

So the salesman got me a kit containing all the parts I would need. I took it home, looked at the parts, looked at my fridge, and looked at the water line in the basement. I had to drill a hole through the kitchen's baseboard and through the wall behind the baseboard in order to access the basement stairwell, and then I had to install the line tap valve onto the cold water line. Installing the line tap valve didn't require anything more than an adjustable wrench. At the other end, I installed a "kit" onto the back of the fridge and ran the water line to it. Then I installed the icemaker in the freezer, which was simple to do, requiring only a screwdriver. After that, I had ice, automatically. 

Years later, I remodeled the kitchen and I had to connect the icemaker's water line to a water line under the kitchen sink. I had already done this job once, so the second time was "no big deal".

Some jobs are so simple that they practically do themselves. It only seems difficult if you've never done it. Then, it can seem mysterious. But you can do it.  Don't be intimidated. 

One of Those Days

Ever have "one of those days"? I'm having one of those days.

For some reason, I went into my garage today, the parking spot for my trusty Jeep Grand Cherokee. I call it "trusty" because it's 30 years old and going strong. I noticed the tires were low on air. No problem, right? I'll just drive to the nearby Sheetz gas station and pump some air into the tires.

The Sheetz station is about a half mile from my house so I got there quickly. I waited in line for access to the air pump. Finally the man ahead of me pulled his car up to the air pump. I saw him get the air hose and do something. Then he put the hose back on the pump. He came around his car and said to me, "The air pump appears to be broken. I'm going to ..." and he named a nearby location where there was an air pump. It was about two or three miles away.

I followed his car to the next air pump. He put air into his car's tires. At this point I was prepared to pull up to the air pump and pump air into my car's tires. But as the man was about to open his car door, I realized that I had forgotten to bring money with me. I mentioned that to the man, and the man gave me four quarters. That was kind of him. He drove away and I pulled up to the air pump. A sign on the pump informed me that the pump required five quarters in order to operate. If I had a dollar I could get change in the store, but I had no money at all. (Not to mention, no wallet and no driver's license.)

I drove back to my home and parked in my garage. I have a pump that slowly, slowly can inflate a tire. I began putting air into the left front tire, which showed 20 pounds of air pressure. It required 20 minutes to bring the tire up to 30 pounds. I moved to the next tire. Its air pressure was only 10 pounds, so it required about 30 minutes to inflate. Then I moved to the right side of the Jeep. Tires on that side were at 20 pounds. Altogether, the four tires took about an hour and thirty minutes to bring them up to 30 pounds. That doesn't include the 15 or so minutes I spent traveling to two non-functional air pumps.

After spending so much time putting air into my tires, I wondered if the battery was still charged. So I got into the Jeep and I turned the ignition key to the Start position. The engine would not start. The battery was dead. I got my charger and put it on the battery and plugged it in. It's charging now, as I type this. When the sun goes down, about two hours from now, I'll go to the garage and remove the charger from the battery. Or maybe I should go out later, like 8PM. Or maybe I should leave the charger on the battery all night. It's only charging at about two amps. Nah, the last time I kept the charger on a battery all night, the battery exploded when I tried to start the Jeep. You can read about it here.

History

My house was built in 1946; it's getting old and creaky. I was born in 1946; I'm getting old and creaky. So I know how my house is feeling. Still, I suspect my house will continue on into the future for a much longer period of time than I will.

I moved into my house in 1951 when I was 5, almost 6, years old. I attended a community college when I was 18. I moved out of the house when I was 19 to attend college in Richmond, Virginia. Then I moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, when I was 20 to attend Virginia Tech. 

After graduation, I moved to Burlington, North Carolina, where I worked for five years, designing missile guidance systems and trouble-shooting production problems. Sometimes I had to travel. I flew to Kennedy Space Center in Florida, to Allentown, Pennsylvania, to several West Coast cities, and to a few places in-between the coasts. I left that job in 1974. A friend and I bought a camper van and we traveled the country, from east to west and north to south.

We went to Chicago. We went to Indianapolis. We drove across Montana. (I blogged about Montana here and here. I blogged about Denver here.) We went to North Dakota. We went to Wyoming and watched Old Faithful do its thing. We went to a World's Fair in Spokane, Washington. In fact, we drove across all the northern states on our way to Seatle, and then down the Pacific Coast Highway as far as Los Angeles. The Highway doesn't go all the way to LA on the coast, so we drove through central Oregan and then through a redwood forest in California and hit the coast again at Crescent City.

Then we drove back to the East Coast. We drove across the "southern" states, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas – close enough to Dallas that we could see the skyscrapers – but we didn't want to see a big city nor become immersed in its traffic, so we kept driving.

It would take weeks to write about all the people and places we saw – in fact, I don't think I could cover everything I saw and did if I had only a few weeks to write about it. It was historic. I suppose everyone has a time in their life that they look back on with amazement at all the places they visited and all the people they met.

At the time I made my trip around the country, there were no cell phones – hence, no cell phone cameras. And I didn't take my film camera. So I have no photos of that trip. Or rather, the images I have are in my head: images of my friend, his two dogs, my dog, and the camper van that carried us and our hitchhiking passengers. The images carry feelings for me. Sometimes I wish I had taken a camera on the trip and returned with photos, but I have many other photos that I never look at, so I don't think it really matters. 

For a while after that trip, I bought surplus electronics by sealed bid at government auctions and sold it by mail order through classified ads in electronics magazines. Much of what I bought was non-functional and I had to repair it before I could sell it. Long tractor-trailer trucks would often stop in the street in front of my house and I would load the equipment into the truck, sign the bill of lading, and send the equipment on its way.

Later, I worked in Roanoke, Virginia, designing schematics for electronics and laying out printed circuit boards – at first manually with tape and mylar, then later I performed both jobs on a CAD system. I was also the Buyer for all the electronics, so I spent a lot of time on the phone. I enjoyed both aspects of my job, both Design and Purchasing. I lost that job at the end of 2000 when the company went out of business. The world wasn't ready for self-navigating mobile robots.

Three Poems

In the book that is my memory, on the first page of that chapter that is the day I met you, appear the words "Here begins a new life."
– from La Vita Nuova

I haven't always been a blogger. I used to write poetry. The three free-verse poems that follow this sentence were written many years ago.

Poems From Another Lifetime

When it’s 2AM
and the night is quiet,
I seem to not fit the world.

Said the wrong things today,
spoke when I should have listened,
was silent when I should have spoken.

At 2AM it comes to haunt me,
to live in my head and make me feel that
something in me doesn’t fit the world.

I get through the noisy day,
until it’s 2AM
and the night is quiet, and then

I seem to not fit the world.

II

My connection to you
is more than who you are
and what you do.

My connection to you
is lifetimes of love.

Perhaps you were my daughter
many lifetimes now.

Perhaps I was your son
not that long ago.

Maybe we were brothers
or sisters
or lovers.

Man and wife
or children together.

I look into your eyes
and see someone that I know
well beyond our time together.

I loved you long before we met.
I had forgotten how much.

Now,
I remember.

III

Warm rains have come and gone,
Melting the winter snow,
Cleansing the earth's gentle heart.

Sun shines brightly on my face,
Gently cheering me,
Softly warming me.

Morning beckons me, night is gone.
Memories linger bittersweet,
Longings now hidden.

Questions haunt me,
Ghosts of the night,
Chased by the sun.

I would live that night again,
Dream the dream,
Feel the wonder.

Though my heart is wounded,
The sun shines now,
I live, still.

A Tale of Three Toothaches

A few years ago I awoke in the darkness of the night with a toothache. The ache kept me awake until morning. Then I called my dentist.

My dentist said to come to his office right away. So I did that. He examined my tooth, took x-rays, and told me to see an endodontist. He recommended one. 

Soon, I was sitting in the endodontist's chair. The endodontist was a pleasant young woman with a ton of fancy equipment in her office. She examined my tooth, then she performed a root canal. Later, she capped the tooth. The procedures cost $3500. As I said, this was a few years ago, so today the cost might be much higher. 

A year or two passed, and then one night I awoke with a toothache in another tooth. This time I did nothing. The pain went away and returned around 3PM. Then, it went away again. But it returned every day for ten days. Then the pain disappeared and hasn't returned.

Another year passed, and one night I awoke with a toothache on the other side of my jaw. Just as before, I did nothing about it. The toothache lasted for seven days, then it disappeared and hasn't returned.

I'm not offering medical advice. I'm just describing my own experiences, for what they may be worth. But I cannot help wondering about that first toothache. What if I had done nothing? Would it have gone away? Could I have avoided a root canal and a crown? I'll never know.

Early Years

My commenter (LL) on my previous post said when she was young, she made 50 cents per hour. That reminded me of my first paying job: newspaper delivery. I was 13 when I started that job.

Newspapers today are a shadow of what they used to be. Newpapers were thick and heavy. I had about 80 to 100 weekly papers and about 120 Sunday papers. I delivered the weekly papers by rolling them up and then loading them into the basket on my bike. I biked down all the streets on my route, delivering papers to both sides of the street. I was bitten by dogs three times. On Thursday afternoon, I spent several hours collecting money from the first half of my route, and on Friday afternoon I collected from the second half of my route. I spent several hours each day just collecting. On Saturday morning, I would go over the route again and try to collect from the homes where no one was at home on Thursday or Friday. 

The Sunday papers were so thick and heavy that it was impractical for me to deliver them by bicycle. So my father got up early every Sunday and we would load the bundles of newpapers into the trunk of his Buick Electra, and we would begin delivery. I would grab a newpaper and run to the first house and throw it on the porch, then run back to the Buick and grab another paper and deliver it to the other side of the street. Back and forth I ran, for several miles, delivering papers from the Buick's trunk to the customer's porch. 

It was a hard job, especially when the weather was bitterly cold. And how much money did I make from this job? After paying for the newspapers, I cleared about seven dollars per week. That's right - a dollar per day for working at least 30 hours per week. 

During the weekdays, I always stopped at my grandmother's house on the way home. She would make me a big stack of pancakes, with butter and syrup, of course. I could eat much more then than I can eat now, because I was always on the go. And being young, my metabolism was no doubt higher than today.

One morning as I was leaving in darkness, I saw a dark spot in the yard. I went over to it and saw that it was a hole. I returned to the house and went to my parents' bedroom.

Me: "Dad, there's a big hole in the front yard. It's about three feet across."

Dad: "Get the flashlight and see how deep it is."

So I went outside with the flashlight. The hole was lined with brick and was about 12 feet deep. It was clearly the remains of a well. I returned to the house and told my father the bad news. That was the end of his night's sleep. From somewhere, my father acquired the side of a large crate and covered the well with it. Later that day, a dump truck arrived and filled the hole with sand.

After my parents passed away, I moved back into that house. The well, filled with sand and soil, is still in the front yard. Nuria uses it as a flower garden. I put bricks around the perimeter of the flower garden, and Nuria planted decorative solar-powered lights among the bricks.

But where did the well come from? My neighborhood was part of a plantation in the Civil War era, and the plantation may even have been much older than the Civil War. The eastern half of Virginia is full of history, and history contains its own surprises. 

Time Traveler

When I was a very young child, my parents and I lived with my grandparents. They heated their home with a coal stove. At the end of their backyard, next to an alley, there was a small shed. The shed contained a "bin" where coal was stored. Periodically, a truck would drive through the alley behind our house, and it would stop and unload coal into our coal bin. One of my chores was to go out back periodically and fill our coal scuttle with coal and bring it to the house.

I observed that many lumps of coal had impressions of plant stems and leaves on the surface of the coal. I was four or five years old and too young to know about fossils, but I thought it was interesting. These memories are from about the year 1950, but I remember them still. Though it was long ago, in my mind I can still see those lumps of coal and the fossil leaves imprinted onto them.

Also from that time period is the ice man. Many homes did not have refrigerators – the technology was fairly new and prices were high. So, many families had an "ice box", literally an insulated box into which a block of ice would be placed on a shelf inside the top of the icebox. I can recall the ice delivery man. He drove a yellow truck and he would stop at certain houses and unload a block of ice for that home's icebox. There was a factory nearby that produced blocks of ice. The ice man bought quantities of ice and delivered it to his customers.

Soon, oil heat came into fashion and coal and coal bins disappeared. Refrigerators became affordable and the ice man and his blocks of ice disappeared. How many things we take for granted today. I wonder, what will disappear from tomorrow's world? If anyone knew the answer to that question, they could become a millionaire – or perhaps a billionaire. 

Saturday Morning

In a blog I posted yesterday, I said that there was still a little snow on the ground, and more snow was due to fall during the night. And it did.

Looks like we received about five inches, just what the weatherman predicted. The current temperature is 28°F. The forecast calls for a high of 38° today followed by a low of 17° tonight. I expect to have this snow around for a few days.

Nuria is supposed to work today, and she is outside cleaning the snow off her car. I told her to stay at home today, but she is not hearing it. She is the most loyal employee God ever created.

Before I could finish writing this post, Nuria's car was clean.

But You Wouldn't Want to Live There

I was writing an email to a friend when I was prompted by an inner voice to include this text:

I think our lives -- the path our spirits travel, with obstacles and rewards -- were put in place by God so that we might learn lessons. Sometimes we learn by succeeding, and sometimes we learn by failing, but it is the experience that teaches us. Never take a measuring stick to your life, because you don't know what God is measuring. Just know that you will have to go through the experience again and again until you learn its lesson, and the lesson involves love. Love for your fellow humans and love for yourself, because you are a creation of the Creator and therefore you have the Divine inside you. Everyone does, even though not all of us may be able to see it in our everyday lives.

My friend asked me to expand on this subject, so I decided to make it a blog post. 

If there is a God, and if God is good, then why does evil exist and why is there suffering in the world?

Imagine a world where there was no suffering and everyone was happy all the time, only because that is the way God commanded it to be. If you were always satisfied and if everything went your way, how would you feel about that? You'd probably get tired of it faster than you think. Life would become boring. And there would be no escape.

An episode of The Twilight Zone titled "A Nice Place to Visit" was based upon the premise that a place where a person can have everything they want would quickly become a nightmare. There is a Wikipedia entry on this subject. You can read it here.

More Snow Coming

Snow began falling in my part of Virginia on January 5. The snowfall ended early on the 6th with an accumulation of about two inches -- a very light snowfall. But now it's the 9th and the ground is still mostly covered with snow, with patches of grass here and there. The snow lingers because the weather  has been cold, with nighttime temperatures in the teens and daytime highs of only about 33 degrees Farenheit. 

Date: January 5. Backyard (below).

 

     

Date: January 9. Backyard (below). The forecast: more snow.

Today is January 10. There is still a lot of snow on the ground. 

The forecast calls for more snow tonight.

First Snow

I posted a blog titled "The Subaru and the Snowstorm". But as night fell, so did the snow. I just took this photo from a front window in my house, the first snow of 2025:

Nuria took a photo, too, for her "girls" in Costa Rica. Of course, her three girls are in their 30s and 40s, but two of them have children that might be interested in seeing snow. Too bad they're a thousand miles away, but at least today we can take a picture and have it ready to transmit within seconds. 

It's the first snow of 2025 for my central Virginia city. The forecast calls for snow early tonight, changing to a wintry mix (rain, snow, and sleet) then changing to rain and snow for tomorrow. Fortunately, Nuria has tomorrow off work. Depending on the condition of the roads in the morning, the store may be closed tomorrow. 

It's midnight – time for me to go to bed. G'night, everyone.

The Subaru and the Snowstorm

The weather forecast calls for possible snow later today, then again tomorroiw. I told Nuria that she might have snow to contend with when she leaves work at 5PM today. Then my thoughts turned to an incident that happened many years ago.

I was living and working in Roanoke, Virginia at the time. The company was located at the Sheraton Drive exit off I-81. It began snowing and everyone went home, except for one employee named Melissa. She stayed and worked late. 

It was dark when I received a phone call from Melissa. She was at work and her car was stuck – the snow in the parking lot was too deep for her vehicle. So I climbed back into my Subaru, which had four wheel drive, and returned to the work location. Though the snow in the parking lot had gotten deep, the Subaru had no problem driving in it. I picked up Melissa and we got back on I-81.

The interstate highway was empty of traffic, except for a snowplow that was applying salt to the road surface. I followed the snowplow until I had to exit I-81 and turn onto I-581, an interstate "spur" that goes through the heart of Roanoke. I can still recall driving down I-581. There was no other traffic, in either direction, north or south. My Subaru was the only vehicle on the road. I drove to the Colonial Avenue exit and dropped off Melissa at her home, and then I drove to my apartment on Walnut Avenue. I didn't see any moving vehicles on that entire trip, except for the snowplow. I had no problems driving in the snow – the Subaru was a champ. I parked in the apartment's parking lot and returned to my apartment. 

By morning the snow was deep enough that the Subaru and I had to wait for the parking lot to be "pushed" before we could leave. That was fine; I had nowhere important to be. I looked outside at the white landscape for a while, then returned to my rocker-recliner chair, picked up the TV remote, and switched on the TV. I was prepared to go nowhere for a while.

Macy's

It's New Year's Day plus One.

Nuria left the house at 9:15 this morning, off to her job at Macy's. She loves working there and she's very good at what she does, which is to sell products and sign up customers for credit cards. She is a natural-born salesperson. She could sell snow to Eskimos. For example, while the young salesgirls in her store stay behind the counter and chat with each other, Nuria is out on the floor asking customers how she can help them. When she sells a product, she asks the customer if they have a credit card, and if they don't she asks if they would like to apply for a credit card, and she'll sign them up for that. She hustles. Nuria once worked for a clothing manufacturer. She was Administrative Assistant to the Vice President of Manufacturing. She has an impressive resume, which I blogged about two years ago here.

Nuria wants to see snow. I like snow, too, as long as I don't have to shovel it off my front walk, or clear a path from my back door to my garage. I used to live in Roanoke, Virginia, and sometimes we got a good snowfall. In fact, there were times when I couldn't drive my car out of the parking lot of my apartment complex because the snow was above my car's bumper. Even though my vehicle had 4-wheel drive, there are limits – you can't drive when the snow is above your car's bumper. That car was a Subaru. My current vehicle is a Jeep Grand Cherokee and it has higher ground clearance. It, too, has 4WD (of course). It would take a lot of snow to stop it. But today, central Virginia is sunny with an occasional cloud on the western horizon. In other words, it's a beautiful day. 

Nuria is supposed to be getting off work at 4PM. Often, her manager will ask her to work until 5PM or later. She always says "Yes" to that request. She loves working at Macy's. It's a shame the store will be closing in three months. Nuria tells me about all the shoplifting that she witnesses in the store. The store apparently is losing money despite selling a lot of high-end products. I think the store is being shoplifted into oblivion. As I said, it's a shame.

New Year's Day

Today is/was New Year's Day, 2025. My partner Nuria is at work. Yes, Macy's is open today. But only for another three months. Our Macy's will be closing forever in March or April. Nuria is so happy in her job at Macy's. After Macy's closes, I hope Nuria, if she wants it, can find a job equally satisfying as her Macy's job.

I drove to Walmart and bought a box of firelogs and a few other items. Then I went by Macy's and chatted with Nuria for half a minute. She was busy, of course, and I didn't want to take much of her time. 

I intend to burn one of the firelogs tonight. I'll put the log in the fireplace insert and I'll set fire to the log and leave the insert's doors open with its fans running, blowing warm air into the room. I like to turn off the living room lamps so that the room is reasonably dark, and then Nuria and I will sit on the sofa and watch the flames dancing on the burning firelog. It's almost hypnotic.

Anyway, I was back home with my Walmart purchases when I thought of my Jeep. In particular, I thought about the crankcase oil. I hadn't checked it in a long time. So I went to my garage, raised the Jeep's hood, and pulled the dipstick out of the crankcase. The oil level was one quart low. I drove to Autozone and bought a quart of 10W-30. I drove home, parked the Jeep in my garage, and poured the oil into the engine.

My immediate chores were complete. I returned to the house and began writing this blog post. I was tired from all the hard work I almost did. 

I hope your New Year's Day was more interesting.