Thanksgiving Zoom was quite nice! Glad I joined it.
I was just watching my child's school Zoom. The teacher told her to do something and I thought "Fat chance, my daughter's not going to do that. I hope the teacher doesn't expect me to try and get my daughter to do it because no way will she listen to me". Then you know what happened? My daughter did what she was told! She wasn't happy, but she did it. Today I realize that her teachers on Zoom have more influence on my own daughter than I do sitting right behind her.

Edit: Goodnews! My kat is gaining weight! The vet said she was too skinny. Now she's gone from eating one can of cat food a day to eating two cans.

A cup of hot chocky!

What I'm about to say comes as no surprise to those that know about how I'm a paint snob, but I'm farting hearts for Behr paint today.

After mumbling and grumbling about painting the kitchen ceiling all summer, it finally got done, this afternoon.  I was inspired by Mary over at White Cottage Company after watching her paint her basement ceiling. She used a sprayer, I used a roller.  I'll be buying a sprayer sooner rather than later because it would have made the process a lot easier.  My ceilings are covered in the dreaded popcorn crap that I along with many other people hate. I digress.

Any paint that can cover over 30 years of collective grime that collects on a ceiling over a stove in a single coat, deserves all the props.  I didn't buy anything fancy; it's just a 5 gallon bucket of flat, white Behr ceiling paint.  It doesn't even have primer in it.

I have a color swatch for possible wall color coming.  It is called Repose Gray by Sherwin Williams. I don't think it is going to be that much different than what I have now, it has a slight beige hue to it.  If I don't like it, I'm just going to keep using the color that is already on the walls.  Don't fix something if it isn't broken.  If I do end up liking it, I'll have the color matched with Behr paint; Sherwin Williams paint is meh at best.  Color swatch for the possible new color can been seen here.  The swatch on Sherwin Williams site isn't correct.

Reminiscing on crushes in my past.

I remembered crushing on Lee Unkrich pretty hard. He works at Pixar, he was the editor of the original Toy Story, co-director of Toy Story 2 and Finding Nemo, made his directorial debut with Toy Story 3 and his favorite primate joke, DEATH BY MONKEYS, with those Barrel of Monkey toys. Currently, since Monsters University he is a producer.

In his directorial stint as co-director and director in full, he had packed a number of references to The Shining by Stephen King, none more so than in Finding Nemo once you get past the point Bruce the Great White Shark regains his bloodlust after Dory gets clocked with the diver's goggles.

If by some odd circumstances I cross paths with him, I would make it worthwhile and yes, if I took his family name upon marriage (again, circumstances) it would mean tacking on a few extra letters.

(at this point in time, I must point out my family, in spite of our name, does not have a significant net worth in spite of New Jersey being home to more millionaires per capita than any other state. )

Addendum: It started snowing where I am. All the more reason to get cuddled up at the Hermitage and watch movies either on disc or streaming, both decent options in viewing pleasure.

Financial institution: Pick a password that's at least 8 characters
Pharmacy website: Pick an password that's at least 8 characters, has three symbols, three numbers, three upper case, three lower case, three Kanji and two Hiragana. Provide your phone number and we will pretend to send a text to you with a confirmation pin.

I'm in the home stretch for having my office done. I'm waiting for walls to finish drying so I can do ceiling touch-ups.  Once that is done and I move everything back where it belongs, the room will be done.  Everything is so clean; it's fantastic.

Found a total of 7€ today. Seems like I'm having pizza tonight.

Getting my bangs trimmed and my split ends trimmed.

Common myth that special shampoos can fix split ends. The truth is they need to be trimmed off.

They also shampooed my hair as part of the deal.

Normally, I am the loudmouth chatterbox when at the salon, but the stylist wasn't in the mood to talk. She was a bit louder than me and complained about her work schedule. It was unbearable. Normally, people getting hair cuts tell about how they are doing, and whatever plans for the week, simple stuff.

I was extremely quiet.

But otherwise, today was triumphant and otherwise accomplished the errands.

My wife makes vows, promises and plans that she has no intention of keeping. My role in life is too often to make good her faithless promises to our child. I'm sure wife means well when the promises were made, they just don't mean enough for her to keep them. This has been my life for 30 years now.

I had sushi last night and I invented a Hawaiian-Southeast Asian fusion so my mother could join us. It was a musubi-maki wrapped in rice paper (my mom has an aversion to raw fish and raw meat and also nori.) It was essentially SPAM wrapped in rice, then wrapped in a rice paper wrapper.

I was watching YouTube videos about Amtrak, the US passenger rail system. Compared to air travel, it looks pretty comfy! Wide seats, lots of leg room, no TSA agent grabbing my crotch (I used to fly alot, and I'm pretty sure they were doing it because I'm cute, especially on their naked cam) and treating you like a criminal. You can even get a private room! I'm retired, I can spend the extra time traveling.
I found a place I had to work at on a business trip along the Amtrak route. Checked out the houses there. They're cheap! Apparently the town is collapsing or something. How cheap? Less than what I paid for my Truck. So, rather than buying a camper trailer, I could buy a whole house! Then commute along Amtrak in style for cheap. Downside: Amtrak won't let you take dogs on more than a 7 hour trip.

But the town is in a massive fallout zone
I admit it, I'm a product of the cold war. I watched the Cuban missile crisis on TV as a kid in 1962. I remember the air raid sirens going off on accident and the whole town freaking out. I had two older brothers who were both in the Army at the time who told me what they were doing during the Cuban missile crisis, and it was pretty scary how close we really were to nuclear war. Seconds away, really. As a Cub Scout, I dug a fallout shelter in the back yard. This little town i went to on the business trip has a whole bunch of ICBM missile complexes 400 miles upwind of the town. One bomb would be 10 Rads/hr, but there's dozens of missile complexes! The town, btw, grew because of the B-52 nuclear bomber missile base which was where I worked at during the business trip. It was mostly bars and restaurants back then, but when I was there, it was mostly tractor dealers.
And from being a physicist, I know how horrible it is to die of radiation poisoning.
Oh come on, what are the odds?
Not really a threat. I'm just phobic because of my past.

Take into account I live in New Jersey, where you can fit Delaware and Rhode Island inside the state lines with wiggle room and that any fallout from nuclear bomb tests in New Mexico had a good chance of reaching us. Literally raining deadly garbage!

This revelation came to me in high school, from my insane, brow-beating history teacher.

Either way, I finally finished in that I opened all 5 dolls that came in extremely hard to open packaging.

The good thing about this Covid lock-down is that I'm locked up with my daughter's science class. When I was in 6th grade, we did science of electricity, magnitism, made motors, studied the phase changes of water, and worked with the mechanics and mathematics of levers and pullies. By the time i was her age, we were doing chemistry experiments, distilling wood and learning the scientific method.
She's working on solar energy, global warming and the like. My goodness, do you know how advanced that is? She must have mastered equilibrium chemistry, transmission of electromagnetic radiation, and many other upper division physics and chemistry concepts.

My plants; they're fabulous and are gaining in numbers.

About a month ago I clipped back my Silver Satin Pothos as it was getting too leggy for my liking.  I propagated it, stuck the cuttings in a 4-in pot and have it sitting on the file cabinet next to my desk under a plant light as my office only gets early morning sun.  The plant has doubled in size since starting it. It is constantly unfurling new leaves, some of which are now bigger than the palm of my hand.

Around the same time I decided to take a risk and order plants from Amazon; I'll never do that again.  I ordered a Black Raven ZZ Plant and a Fiddle Leaf Fig Bambino.   I never buy plants for the fish tank during the winter unless A) they have a really short time frame for shipping and B) They are packed properly AKA with a cold bag to keep them from freezing.  Why I thought it would be a good idea to order regular plants with no option for cold packing and it would turn out well is beyond me and was really stupid.

The fiddle leaf fig is down to 2 leaves, one of which is turning brown and showing remnants of cold damage. Fiddle leaf figs are divas in the plant world to begin with; having them freeze for over a week in a box doesn't help.  I'm doing everything I can for it, but I don't know. I've read that they can recover, but it takes a long time.  The Black Raven ZZ plant was cut up and I'm trying to propagate it. That too wasn't packed properly and all of it's leaves suffered from cold damage.  Since the leaves were so small, I couldn't use the leaf propagation method and I had zero luck with the stem method.  So, I'm trying the bulb method which can take up to 70 days before showing any signs of life.

ZZ plants have bulbs or tubers which hold water and other nutrients for the plant in times of drought. When these plants die, people typically just throw them out thinking that it is dead when in fact, as long as the bulb or tubers where the roots sprout from are healthy, the plant can re-grow.  I'm only a month in with this experiment, so who knows if I'll get anything out of the 4 pots of bulbs I managed to salvage.  They get the same amount of light as all the other plants in the house and I only water them when the soil is dry to prevent rot.

In contrast to my Amazon experience, I found a reputable person online that sells plants. As a trial order, I got a Philodendron Brasil from her a few weeks ago.  The plant is gorgeous and was packed properly. I've lost a grand total of two leaves and it arrived with zero leaf damage from cold.  I was so impressed, I have two more coming tomorrow. I've never had a Monstera deliciosa so I ordered one of those and a Philodendron Heart Leaf. I seem to have a thing for vine-y plants, so I'm going with it.  They're easy to grow and once you start with one plant, you end up with lots of plants from clipping them back.  Some people allow their Philodendrons and Pothos grow in long strands around a room.  That look doesn't work for me, it reminds me of alien tentacles or something.

The tiny spruce we go got from Home Depot that was our Christmas tree has doubled in size. It really should go into a bigger pot, but it is just going to have to chill in the pot it is in until the spring when it can be hardened off and put in it's new planter outside.  I haven't decided what kind of planter I want other than it is going to be concrete.  Wooden planters are cheaper, but the also rot over time.

I'm just filling my life with green....


EDIT: Upon inspecting the Fiddle Leaf Fig before shutting it's light off, I spotted two tiny, new, green nubs.  They were not there a couple of days ago so I must be doing something right. It is getting 10-plus hours of light ( it gets some indirect sun, the rest is from a plant light) and I have it sitting next to a humidifier as Fiddle Leaf Figs don't like dry air.  I might have something that resembles a plant rather than a pot with a couple of 'twigs' and a couple of leaves sticking out of it by this summer.