January 12, 2024

            Today is Friday, are you required to Fry things today? Not everything fried is good, but some things fried are good.

            Ole retired people should not climb on ladders; I am an ole retired people, and I climbed on a ladder yesterday. In an attempt to explain, I wanted to remove the Christmas lights from the house and from around the flower beds. To remove the lights from the house one needs a ladder as they are attached with plastic wire ties at a few locations.

            First, the ole senior person had to go to the shed and retrieve the ladder. Ladders are heavy for ole senior people, and it was difficult for this ole senior person to carry said ladder possibly 100 feet, before reaching the first location, where this ole senior person would need to actually get onto the ladder.

“Would you believe”, this ole senior person had to climb more than 10 feet above the ground in order to reach the plastic wire tie, and then this ole senior person realized that this ole senior person did not have the necessary cutting tool to cut the wire tie, so this ole senior person climbed back down the 10 feet and acquired a pair of pliers. This ole senior person had to climb up and down that ladder 8 different times. I would not believe it either, I did say “would you believe”.

I did climb on the ladder three times and two or three steps was as high as I was trying to go. I did get the lights down safely. Removing the lights from the house is easy after you remove the wire ties, you just pull the wire and the lights come off the house. Those around the flower beds are more difficult. I pull on the wire but most of the plastic stakes that hold the light up off the ground, will not come out. That means this ole senior person had to bend over too many times to pull the stakes from the ground. There were likely 125 plastic stakes that needed to be removed.

Once I had all the stakes pulled from the ground, I started rolling up the wire that has the lights on it. I have a rule when I am doing many things like picking up debris from the yard, and it is, “you never get everything”. So, using that rule I decided to double check to see if I got all the plastic stakes while I was rolling up the wire, and I found one stake still stuck in the ground that I had missed. Double check everything.

You may not know that they test fire rocket motors, in a community about 10 miles away from where we live, but they do and they do it often. They fired one a few minutes ago and it vibrated our house a little. It is not like an earth quake but you can feel the vibration.

I did get the lights removed yesterday, I did go through the totes and picked the ones we will keep and those that we will toss out. I did put the ladder and the extra totes back in the shed.

After getting Dave from work and Alex from school I returned home and my favorite wife allowed me to take her out for supper, it was good, service was also good.

Today I hope to rest, but I do want to bring one of the kerosene heaters and an electric heater from the shed to the garage. With the predicted cold weather, we will need some heat in the garage as there are flowers that should not freeze which we keep in the garage. I have never used the kerosene heater so I will do a test burn today.

I guess I will stop boring you now, and see if I can get a cup of homemade coffee, I will go set in the front room and relax, from all this data entering. We hope you have a good day and please get ready for the cold weather so you can stay safe.

Ladder climbing senior.

Senior ole person who hopes the cold, don’t get too cold, to long, Don the Ford   

May today be better than your best day, but not as good as tomorrow!