Hey There!
It's 8:10 AM EDT, 72°F, Humidity 84%, Wind 7 mph W, sunny, AQI 61
The weather here has been quite nice lately. Temperatures have held in the upper 70s-low 80s, it's been cool enough at night, the humidity is present but not oppressive, and the sun has been shining. Rain has popped in here and there, but probably not enough for local farmers. It's been a very wonderful summer weather-wise.
Yesterday was something of an errand day. After morning routine and a walk of 1.7 miles in the park, I settled down to try and get things done. DW asked me to bring upstairs her overnight bag from Tuesday, and I commented once again how much I liked that bag. For some reason, that set off a hunt for a clamshell bag for me, because the feature I most liked about her bag is its clamshell opening. I tend to work with backpacks for short trips, but all of them open from the top and do not unzip all the way. So between her looking for bags and me looking for bags, I settled on an Osprey Daylite 26+6, which with the available points I had, came to $66 and change. It normally sells for $110, so I think it hits the space of being an inexpensive bag that has high quality materials and features. I should come tomorrow sometime.
The search for the bag took us until 12:30 PM, at which point we had to get on to other things. I had a couple of goals yesterday in terms of getting errands done, and so I set out to do them].
Errand one was a Salvation Army delivery. We had a box of stuff for them, as well as a box of shoes I wasn't using, and so I dropped those off. I honestly never know if dropping things off at the Salvation Army is a wise choice, but it certainly is the easiest, and enough people around here do shop there. So I tend to think of the people shopping more so than the organization itself.
After that, I went to the local farm supply store to have my propane tank filled. The guy who filled it for me was quite chatty, telling me how it was his last day at work before vacation, and boy did he need a vacation, and how his father and grandfather had used the lumber from a local church that had been torn down years ago to build three cabins, and his sump pump wasn't working on his boat. He was fascinating to listen to, as it sounded like he had much deeper roots in this community that I do (and I've been here since 1988). When I was leaving the store after paying for the propane (which is much chaeper than those exchanges), he was talking to another guy about all the stores that used to be on the road back in the day (K-Mart, Hills). Kind of fascinating.
When I got home, DW had put on the NASA channel to watch the solar eclipse from Spain, and so we got to see the corona spread out very nicely vial TV from Leon, Spain. We had gone to the total eclipses that had occured in the US over these past 10 years, and we enjoyed this one on TV very much.
Then I tried to do two more things on my list, both failures. I tried to fill out the paperwork for my upcoming colonoscopy pre-check appointment, but was stymied when I could not electronically sign the documents. I have no idea why they send these documents out that people can't sign. I must be missing something. So I will wait until I walk in the office to do that.
I also tried to call my podiatrist to get an appointment for new orthotics, as well as to look at an odd injury along my ankle. But I missed his Wednesday office hours, so I will have to do that today.
After all those errands, I dove back down into the bag rabbit hole to see if there were any other interesting and inexpensive options, and there were. Let's just say I spent the entire evening multitasking - looking at bag videos while doing something else. I grilled hamburgers for dinner with the new propane tank attached, and watched some bag videos. I watched the ballgame (a nice win with lots of offense for a change!) while looking at bag videos. When the game was over, I spent another hour looking at bag videos. I learned a lot about bags, such as the difference between a personal item bag and a carryon bag, but I have to tell you, the world of bags is intense out there. I suppose I shall be thinking about this for a while, looking at the bags I have and wondering if I should give some of them away and re-think and replenish my bag game.
Anyway, I finally closed the computer (which actually ran out of juice while I was watching a video because I forgot to plug it in after using it while grilling) and headed to the kitchen to clean up. Bedtime came in around 11:10 PM.
That's all for now. 'Til We Meet Again!