Playing With My BRAND NEW Refrigerator!

My husband just got into his beddy-bye for an afternoon nap after a very busy day of walking a few kilometres to doctor's appointments, cleaning hundreds of dead mosquitoes off our car after our Sunday trip out of town, (yes, the little turkeys are still hanging on, invading house and car, biting like crazy while we await a good hard overnight freeze to finish them off), hauling ice packs out of the old broken down fridge and helping haul it across the kitchen so our new one could be pushed into place.

Yup, we have a brand new, never before used by anyone fridge/freezer, so new the tapes were still in place to keep the veggie and cheese drawers and outside doors closed for transport.  WE ARE DELIGHTED!  

While it was having its initial hour of emptiness to cool down properly, we headed to Chuck's Roadhouse for a VERY late lunch...about 2:30pm.  (The food is good pub grub type food and their 11am to 5pm lunch menu features excellent prices for just the right sized portions of food....the Baja tacos and Cuban sandwich were delicious, although my husband said the fries could have been crispier! While we waited for our food we had a good look at the 2010 Harley Davidson bike on display....the front disc brakes were kind of new to us....fascinating to look at.)

As soon as we got home and checked that the cold level inside the fridge was correct I started removing all the frozen foods from the camper freezer so I could organize them properly. This new freezer compartment has a SHELF so it was much easier to arrange the foods and separate the meats from the breads and veggies while the small bags of frozen herbs and fruit fit easily into the two shelves in the door.  The main refrigerator unit is just slightly smaller than our old fridge, BUT the two inside the door shelves are twice as wide. They held what the old door shelves held, plus all the other condiments and jams and sauces that didn't fit in the door of the old fridge. So, plenty of space even with the cheese saver drawer tucked into the shelving in the centre of the unit.  A quick wipe off of the exterior to remove a bit of dust and another quick wipe inside the fridge before it got cold, then the joy of having a NEW REFRIGERATOR had me laughing and crying at the same time.  I do not remember the last time we had a brand new fridge in any of our previous rental homes and we started renting in 2001!!  Twenty-five years of well used fridges and freezers. What a blessing this new unit is. 

Yesterday I had a long distance chat with an Island friend who told me she knew "it was a long shot and an unlikely possibility" that we would get a brand new fridge in our dilapidated unit and I agreed with her.  Well Penn....the Lord answered your prayer for us with a resounding "YES!"  And here is how it happened:  when the office manager called this morning assure us that a refrigerator had been secured she explained to me why it had not shown up yesterday when we expected it.  Turns out there was indeed a used one sitting in the warehouse that she earmarked for us and it actually was delivered: to the WRONG UNIT!!!  Since there are tenants in this unit....who no doubt wondered upon returning from work last evening why there was a different refrigerator in their home, (and what happened to the food in their old one I have no idea).....the refrigerator wasn't able to be removed from there and then re-delivered to our place, SO since it had been the only used one in the warehouse, there was no other option but to order a brand new refrigerator from their usual supplier of such newness.  THAT Is how WE ended up with a brand new refrigerator.  Penn, thank you for encouraging me yesterday to feel free to at least ask God if it was possible to receive a new fridge, even if still being prepared to accept an older one.  I didn't truly believe you and I would see that kind of answer.  (I realize there are a couple of other friends and family who also told me they were  praying for a new unit and I thank you so much and hope this answer encourages you in your prayers as much as it did me in mine.)

Oh happy day!!  We have leftovers from last night's meal at DarBar thawing for a late dinner.  It has been a blessed day.  Tomorrow the blessings continue with coffee hour with my Thursday buddy and Friday we are having friends in for dinner.  That will be a lovely start to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend! 

The weather is supposed to be less than wonderful between here and southern Alberta on Sunday into Monday of the coming week but then things should dry out and warm up a bit for our quick trip west. 

 

SLOOOOOOOWWWWLY Goes the Refrigerator Replacement, Hohoho!!

 In honour of the Cherry Cream Soda font I MUST use pink for this post!!

The saga of getting another fridge continues.  By 1pm today we realized we likely were not going to hear from the refrigeration technician, so my husband hiked across the parking lot to the office to ask what was going on.  As we suspected, the employee from the management company struggled with his English comprehension and didn't understand why we still had food in the refrigerator portion of the unit if it wasn't working, didn't realize that my husband was NOT telling him that unit was still working and didn't understand why there was over twenty dollars worth of ice slabs in plastic bins in there keeping the food sufficiently cold as to keep it all from being wasted.  He apparently told the tech that our fridge was still working so there was no rush on the order.  Sigh....why are we not surprised. Even the staff for whom English IS their first language don't seem to comprehend what we are telling them a good deal of the time. hahaha

So the office staff worker called the warehouse to see if there are any fridges in stock that are in working order. She finally got a response around 4:30pm and the response is there is a fridge and the tech will try to get it to us sometime tomorrow.  In the meantime we had to purchase another ten dollars worth of ice ($31 and counting...) after dinner tonight to get our food through safely until tomorrow until hopefully at least noon. The office staff worker begins her shift at 10:30am and will call to let us know, if she can find out that is, when the tech and the fridge will be arriving.

Unfortunately my husband has an eye appointment at 11am and will be leaving at 10:30am to be there on time. So, he will have to leave me to deal with this call, or with the tech should he arrive before or without said call. Tomorrow will mark my third day in a row of having to stay home all day waiting for assistance with the fridge.  Sigh.....I was really looking forward to going to his appointment with my husband so I could look longingly at all the expensive eye glass frames while he is in with the doctor and start thinking about what kind of frame I want to purchase after my own annual eye examination later this fall.  After accidentally sitting on my present very delicate frames that I've had only one year, they were so bent and took so much work for the frame techs to straighten out, it is unlikely I will be able to put new lenses into them safely ever again.  At present one of the original lenses is remaining in place "just kinda barely", so....guess it will be an expensive experience since I only get coverage for frames once every two years and then only if my prescription changes, which I suspect it may this time. Whatever....eyes are so important, so they are worth spending money on.

Tonight we had a wonderful time.  We met a now retired former colleague of my husband's and she treated us to a meal at DarBar.  Yum, yum! I decided to have a simpler meal tonight so ordered off the appetizer list: a chana curry with fried bread....basically a fluffy puffed up pillow of thin bread dough that was able to be dipped into their home made tamarind sauce...to die for....and then one of the best green salads I have ever had there, plus a helping of raita.  Gosh, it was a full meal even without eating both rounds of fried bread.  It was unexpectedly delicious...not a great fan of chana as a rule...and I was not expecting that amount of food from the Appetizer list. WOW!  I will order that again.

The conversation was wonderful and contrary to the last time we saw our friend, her face is smoothed of all the "worry wrinkles" from her last position in her career, she has lost weight; she looked so happy after her first year of retirement. She was cheerful and talkative.  Gosh, it was a wonderful time together.  We all look forward to getting together once again.  ( have been trying to think about what else it was that was different about her this time and it just struck me that this is the first time I have seen her without her clergy collar. She was completely clad in "civilian dress" and I can't believe how different she looks.  Incredible.)

Although it is well before 11pm I am more tired than usual tonight so am going to get to bed right away.  I think the stress over the mix up with the fridge has gotten to me, plus being stuck inside for 3 days in a row has precluded going for any long walks, so I am craving exercise.  Maybe tomorrow after the ruddy fridge arrives?  Stay tuned to the never ending saga of refrigeration!  

The End Of The Journey

The Cloisters:

Everyone who goes sightseeing in NYC needs to take the time necessary to travel to the northern end of Manhattan Island and take in this amazing collection of medieval art.  Incredible site and incredible collection. Sorry I don't have the photos I was expecting but at least you can see something of the hilly grounds and amazing building cobbled together by John D. Rockefeller to resemble an ancient monastery, which it never was.  It is now managed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Worth every hour needed to get there and every penny spent on admission.

  

The cliffs across the Hudson River

Medieval wall tapestry

Enlarge on your screen (Shift +) to read the descriptive panel

The last photo sums up the serenity I experienced throughout the trip from the time of landing at La Guardia to the moment we flew back out again:

Aaaaaaahhhhh...now THIS is a relaxing trip!

 And now it is back to regular life as we know it, waiting for the first possible snowfall and freezing rain on Thanksgiving Sunday and/or Monday! Fortunately it isn't supposed to stick around for more than a few hours....oh Lord, let that be......can I get an "Amen!"??

And That's That For Our Trip South!

 The Morgan Collection:

 

Floors.....

....and Ceilings

More from the giant collection of books

Library decor

Another shot from the library collection

The seal of King Nebuchadnezzar Reign 605 to 562 BC

The collection of royal seals and Mesopotamian jewellery certainly does give credence to the idea that J.P.Morgan was indeed a robber baron.  It is an incredible collection, that's for sure.

Still Waiting On The Fridgeman!!

 No sign of our refrigerator fellow yet so we will give management until noon, then call if we have not yet heard anything.  Our cost for ice blocks to retain sufficient cold in the refrigerator compartment has climbed over $20 as of last night and I don't want to think about how much power we will be paying for to continue running the camp freezer unit.  I know they are busy and the department is badly understaffed, but I am not interested in losing any more food than we did when we had to throw out some smaller freezer items on the weekend before the freezer unit was up and running and my husband is definitely not interested in spending any more money on ice blocks.  So....we shall see how it goes today.  

My walking partner and I were unable to spend time walking and visiting today as she is not well, but she was able to stop in long enough to pick up a book she lent to us recently and have a brief chat before she was overcome with a coughing fit and fled so that she wouldn't spread her illness to  us. Bless her heart.

I had a nice chat with an Island friend, so that was fun interlude in a busy day.

Got a bit of a sad surprise this morning: I told a friend on the weekend that I would drop by the Diabetes Canada office here in Regina and pick up some information she needs after finding out her rather high blood sugar count showing up in recent medical tests.  Surprise surprise (NOT!), this branch was permanently closed fairly recently.  After some online checking and a phone call to their central phone number all I can get my hands on here is whatever info is on the national website. While most of what I need for my friend is there, it is scattered all over the site instead of being neatly compacted into one small booklet like I was given when I was first diagnosed.  My friend is quite capable of accessing the website on her own and I sent her a list of what to look for, so hopefully she can get some more assistance from her GP about whatever may be available in her own city for written information that is more concisely organized than having to cobble it together from the many pages on the website. 

I will do one more short post with a handful of photos from The Morgan and The Cloisters and that will be it for photos.  We are appalled by the number of photos that didn't turn out well enough to post. For some reason my husband's camera has ceased to adjust the light conditions for taking photos.  Oh well.  WE know what the photos are of and our memory retention is good for now so, it will be fine. 

We are having another cool but sunny autumn day today.  I love seeing that blue sky with only a few scattered clouds.  Looks like the possibility of flurries and a bit of short lived freezing rain toward the end of the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend but then it should be clear, if cooler, again.

 

 

A Couple Of Photos From the Metropolitan Museum

Upon looking more closely at our sad collection of photos and what few decent ones I have been able to post here, I think I will wrap up with photos from only two or three more places we visited.

Today I will post a few from my evening with my son at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  We concentrated only on the Japanese ceramics and the musical instruments exhibition and most of the photos were pretty blah.  Anyway, here goes:

 

From the Ancient

To the Modern

And Everything In Between:

 

"Blow, Gabriel Blow!"

What the heck??!! Fascinating instruments!

A quick visit with two of my son's favourite paintings!

Note the perspective and also prayer shawl in the middle section.

The panel photos are too blurred to share, so if you are interested in the artists and histories of these two paintings, just move the image into Google and make your discoveries.

Have a great day everyone!

PS the maintenance man was just here to check the fridge, took some photos and did some freon tests and is now on the way to locate the person responsible for finding us and delivering a replacement fridge either today or tomorrow.  YAY....hopefully we won't have to spend a second fortune on ice packs in the meantime.  

A Perfect Day All Around In My Opinion!

 We had a most lovely day today. It was a perfect autumn day....clear but not cold, no wind to speak of, sunshine and perfect driving conditions to be out of town.  Our friend preached very well this morning at the church we attended, another old friend who now lives south of the border was there visiting unexpectedly, we had a most wonderful afternoon over a bbq'd meal with dear friends and we got away from their place just in time to make it to have dinner with friends back here in our fair city this evening.  Gone for the whole day; a wonderful church service, surrounded by loving friends for the whole day; perfect weather for the whole day....it doesn't get much better than that for us. It was a day to be grateful for, fer shur!!

Early this morning my husband went over to the gasoline station near us and purchased 3 large bags of ice to put into our failing refrigerator to protect specifically the milk, eggs and mayonnaise.  After we had been out of town for 9 hours we stopped back in quickly before going out for dinner to check on the condition of the ice blocks.  Although the leaking freon gas has caused the freezer compartment to fail completely, the fan in the fridge is still running and recycling whatever freon is left in the system, so the ice blocks have not melted much yet and should last us until whatever time tomorrow the maintenance people arrive with some kind of replacement fridge.  In the meantime the camping freezer is doing its job well, so it appears all our meat has been saved!  Thank you Jesus, for that little freezer!  

My dear walking partner has come down with a bad cold, so we have cancelled our meeting together in the morning and perhaps if it happens that we have people moving refrigerators in and out of the kitchen it is just as well.  Please send up a quick prayer for my walking partner.  Thanks!  She is always cheery even when she doesn't feel well, but her description of her cold makes me suspect she actually feels rather rotten.   

Tomorrow after my husband's regular online meeting with some of his retired cronies we are going to have to get in touch with our tv service provider and change a few of our tv packages.  Changes are occurring to the line up tomorrow and if we don't make the changes we will lose two of the channels we watch the most.  We are hoping that in the process of making the changes to the available packages we will be able to drop a few channels that we never watch and save ourselves a few dollars.  I feel badly for the tv providers because streaming is taking over and that leaves the cable providers scrambling.  If streaming services were more reliable we would probably follow along with what is currently happening in new tv technology, but for now we will do our best to pick up a few shows we actually like through the tv packages.

It is going to take me a little while to fall asleep tonight as I am still rather jazzed over our wonderful day of friendship and worship and special meals, but I hope to sleep well when I eventually reach that blessed state of unconsciousness! 

Is It Possible To Be Completely Annoyed And Completely Grateful At The Same Time About The Same Situation?

That is how I feel tonight: I was hoping, after sending a maintenance request into management about our refrigerator starting to pack it in, that the thing would last until Monday when all the crew are back at work, but nope, the refrigeration system gave a little whine and a squeal and died late this afternoon. Everything in there began to thaw quickly. Sigh… So, I am annoyed! 

I am also grateful: back on the spring my husband purchased a  camping refrigerator/freezer. I didn’t begrudge him because although I suspected he would rarely use the unit and he spent several hundred dollars on it, he rarely purchases treats for himself. Wow….did that little unit ever save our bacon tonight; and our sausages and our chicken and our 10 pound turkey and our beef! (and our bread and bagged veggies and fruit packs and cheeses and herbs) 

We have cold packs and the salvageable ice cubes packed around the milk and eggs in the dead refrigerator and we can only hope the fridge items survive until Monday, since we are gone all day tomorrow and won’t be able to check on them. Guess the good thing about that is that once breakfast is over we won’t be opening the fridge door and letting the cold escape for the rest of the day. 

These things are indeed sent to try us! 

Okay, Here We Go With A Few More Photos

Rather than deluge this blog with post after post of photos that aren't, to be honest, the greatest ever I will post a few every couple of days for the next week...or something like that.

Here are a few from the New York Public Library Main Branch:

 

Winnie The Pooh Figures

Everything in the building seems to be carved from marble slabs.

Charles Dickens' writing desk

The Gutenberg Bible

Part of a wall with no write up to title or describe it, but it is lovely.

An incredibly gorgeous ceiling!

An exhibit of political and anti discrimination posters from the past nearly 100 years.

Last Of The Trip Photos Are On The Way

For those of you who have been asking to see some of the museum and gallery photos, my husband and son were finally able to set up the Drop Box files and our son should have his photos posted there sometime this weekend. Here’s hoping anyway.  I will see how photos from the Frick, NY Public Library, the Morgan, The Metropolitan Museum and the Cloisters turned out and there may be another one or two from Dea Beacon and Bard College art exhibitions. There should be at least two or three from each place, but I will see what our son sends to pad out our own photos. 

Thanks for your patience those of you asking.

My husband is attending special Synod meetings today where some changes will be made to a few of the canons and other orders of business will be dealt with. I am going to visit my hospitalized friend. Sadly it appears she will be unable to ever return home. Her various medical conditions are no longer able to be managed sufficiently by her very elderly husband. To be at home would require a full time live in nurse with the prohibitive cost attached. Sigh…..old age can be so difficult….😞. My prayer for my friend is that there will be a space available in a local facility so that she will not be forced to move to a different town or city, making it difficult to impossible for her husband to visit her. The forced separation of older married couples with need for full time care, due to insufficient numbers of care homes, has been happening for a couple of decades in Alberta and now Saskatchewan and is the most heart breaking situation I have ever witnessed. There are few affordable facilities where a still relatively healthy spouse can move in together with a partner who requires full time care. Often if both members of a married couple require care there is no room in one facility for both of them to be together, nor are all care facilities able to handle all forms of required senior care. Separation seems the final cruelty forced upon senior people who are already burdened down by age and illness. I have to confess that the possibility of being separated from my husband for the last years of our lives is one of the few true fears I struggle with. Working in elder care for so many years I saw first hand the emotional toll these separations took on my clients when one spouse was sent to an out of town facility and the other spouse was unable to travel to visit. I am getting teary 🥲 just thinking about it….

Tomorrow we are out of town, lots of company and other commitments next week that we are looking forward to, then out of town for Thanksgiving Sunday, so there are many happy events to look forward to. How grateful I am to be so busy before the winter activity reductions are enforced once again by ice, snow and cold.

I Was Wrong About The Mosquitoes, Shoot…..

 My husband just informed me that contrary to what I wrote in an earlier post the mosquitoes are not only not yet gone, they are swarming and biting as badly as ever! While they are less abundant here at our place, the friend’s back yard he took our deck plants to for composting today is still inundated with the little monsters, who were biting right through his thick knit turtle neck tee shirt. He had to put his jacket back on and pull its hood up over his head and forehead so he could complete his tasks. Blecch! Apparently there were also a few wasps drifting lazily about. Glad we haven’t seen any more at our suite! Hallelujah! 

Getting Ruthless With The Wardrobe!!

Today we delivered a huge bundle of my clothes to the Salvation Army thrift store.  As I was unpacking my winter clothes last week and repacking the summer wardrobe I decided it was time to go through all the items with an open mind as to how often I wear each one, if I truly liked it or not, if it was a piece of clothing I enjoyed wearing over the past year or was deliberately ignoring it in favour of other items, keeping the ignored item because of some weird internal self imposed obligation to keep it when rationally I knew I would likely avoid wearing it at all costs.  The amount of clothing I dragged to the thrift store today nearly filled a giant backyard leaf collection bag!!  Wow, it felt good to rid my closet space of items that have been less than satisfactory for one reason or another for the past year or two. There are so many other people who could enjoy having them.  They are great, in most cases still pristine, condition. Most of them look new or nearly so. What a waste to keep them hanging unattended and unworn here in my home.  As the bag left the back of our car to be put into the collection unit at the store it felt like a small weight was lifting off my head.  Hallelujah!  So grateful it was this easy to part with my nice, but relatively unworn clothes that have been collecting for the past three years or so.  Purses, belts and jewellery accompanied the clothing. When the day comes that we finally get to move out of here I will be far more prepared in terms of having less personal "stuff" and that feels amazing! I am not certain I want to Do The Drastic that some friends have done by keeping only two weeks worth of clothing and getting rid of absolutely everything else, but I don't need to have a couple of months of outfits hanging up in this tiny room taking up space! That's just bad stewardship on my part.

Speaking of clothing, we were at a mall today where my husband was seeking to purchase some items at a fabric store that will repair a couple of small glitches in two of the coats he received last weekend.  He found exactly what he was looking for and it won't take long to make the repairs. Both jackets will be like new once those are done.  While he was in the fabric store.....a venue I avoid like the plague because of the guilt I feel for being so Sewing Ability Challenged.....I looked at the few stores remaining in the big old hunk of mall and found a nice little clothing store.  There hanging on a rack was the perfect black dress I have been looking for since the winter clothes first showed up in town as we were preparing to leave on our holiday. It is lightly patterned with leaves in fall orange and white, but the black background takes up most of the dress.  It is long enough to wear as a dress but I can also put skinny pants/leggings under it for the winter and wear it with my patent leather winter boots.  SO HAPPY!  I have given up on getting new shoes.  The only shoes I can get narrow enough for my quadruple A feet here in town are not actually here in town. They have to be ordered in from the USA and with the tariffs on materials etc., one hundred or more dollars has been added to the cost of each pair.  The pair of shoes I purchased on an out of country order three years ago at $170CAD including sales taxes are now now nearly $300CAD, plus then I have to add on the Canadian sales taxes.  I have a pair of sandals that are created to handle wearing pantyhose in them if necessary without looking odd to be wearing in October and those are going to have to do. Getting my dress today on sale just solidified my decision to leave the shoes until either the present issues of getting shoes imported from the U.S. are solved or they are obviously not going to be solved and I will know I have to fork forth on a big price for any kind of decent footwear.  Local shoe shops had already stopped bringing inventory in my sizes some years ago simply because there is so little call for shoes that narrow, so special ordering has been the done thing....until now.

My husband cleared all the glass recycling out of the basement today, so that was a big deal and has left him with more sorting space for going through his old camping and climbing gear.  Most of that will be leaving us and only the most basic camping equipment will stay....a proper two man tent, a few camp pots and utensils, a camp stove and kettle, a sleeping bag and mat.  The rest is all going very soon.

So, a good day all around! Now I will iron a few items from this week's laundry and we have leftovers to eat for dinner later so we don't have to worry about cooking tonight.  YAY!

It is chilly today, but the sun broke through the clouds late this afternoon, making the last part of the day much nicer than the first part.  Despite the chill I was able to wear only a winter cardigan over my blouse and wear open toed sandals on my feet, which I will do as often as possible on any "not going for a walk today" days, until the ice and snow arrive or the temperature during the daytime hours dips below +10C.  More nice, dry weather is forecast over the coming week!  YAY! 

My Dear, Dear GP

Yesterday I received a call from my medical clinic that my GP wanted to see me about my x-ray results from x-rays of my hip that I had over two weeks ago.  Since the x-rays had already been sent to and received by my orthopaedic surgeon the day after they were taken, I wondered if my GP wanted to talk to me about the ever worsening arthritis in my sacroiliac joints. Did she see something worse in those x-rays than what I understood from reading the tech's interpretation of the x-ray in my online health account??  I wasn't worried particularly, but I was certainly curious.  hahahaha....Oooooh, my dear muddled GP.  Not surprisingly, at least to me, she wanted to see me to tell me that the worsening arthritis has reached the point where surgery on my other hip is likely necessary and she would forward the x-rays to my surgeon.  I giggled to myself...par for the course, this.  Before I could tell her that the surgeon already had them and I was awaiting a call for a pre-surgical consult, she suddenly said, "Oh....he already has them. They were forwarded automatically to him for some reason. Oh....the reason is that I had arranged for that to happen on your requisition form. Oh......".  She shook her head, looked very confused, asked me if there was anything else she could do for me, so I asked her what initial steps I should take to help slow down the arthritis at the base of my spine.....I knew already, but didn't want her to feel she had wasted her own appointment time on a very busy day in the clinic.  She told me the expected answers, I thanked her for calling me to come in, which made her look all the more confused, I said farewell and chuckled all the way home....6 blocks sans cane, I'll have you know.  hahahahaha SO CUTE IS THIS WOMAN!!!  She always figures things out eventually, but sometimes it takes time. hahaha.  Gotta love her.

In other health related news, it looks as though my husband's new statin is starting to give him headaches each morning, very similar to the ones he had with the last family of statins that he was finally taken off of a couple of months ago. Sigh....if that turns out to be the case after a bit more experimenting over the next two weeks, well, here we will go again!  Yikes!

This morning there was frost on the windshield of the car that required scraping, the temperature was +2C with a windchill of -7C. BRRRRRR...my first coat wearing expedition of the fall season...coat as in light parka! I got to the bank and picked up groceries before picking up my coffee buddy at 9:15am, we opted to go for coffee instead of sitting in the cold out in the park and we paid over seven dollars each for approximately 2/3 of a full cup of coffee in our "stay inside" mugs so next time I will ask for a take out cup, fielded several phone calls and enjoyed a quick drop in visit from a great friend immediately prior to lunch, did the doctor thang, got some chores done at home and took my husband out to DarBar for supper....HIS suggestion so I was certainly not going to refuse, then ended the day with two hours in a row of tv programmes.  It has been a good day.