My brother’s kitchen has the nice new stove he’d bought a few months before I arrived. It was so new and pristine that every time I used it I felt a need to thoroughly clean it after every use, and sometimes I would spot clean it while he was away on work. It was reflex, it looked so nice and new.

So I get home and take a fresh look at the one he helped me buy that time he was here and I’m shocked, shocked, at how much grunge I let build up on mine. Okay, it wasn’t much but it was enough compared to his nice new one. So I resolved to basically give my stove a detailing.

But first, I had to order a new center grill for it since I use that a Lot and mine had grunged up, and the no stick surface worn down to the bare aluminum. It was beyond cleaning, so I decided just to order a new one and take the one I had to recycling. It’s all aluminum and that’s an excellent metal to recycle. And it was actually the second griddle I’d bought for my stove because I’d worn out the one that came with it in just a few years. I use the griddle Lots and that non stick surface just couldn’t handle it. So I did what I had before, and looked up the model number of my stove on the manufacturer’s website (GE), and once there expected to just be able to order a new griddle for that stove like I had before.

But this time the page for my stove just said my stove was no longer being made and that was all. No parts list, nothing. This surprised me because that stove isn’t all that old, but looking back it was the the floor model I bought. and I realized it had probably already been discontinued when I bought it (which maybe explained the nice discount I got for it more than the fact that it was the floor model). Annoyingly, the manufacturer’s website wouldn’t give me part numbers for stoves they weren’t making anymore. So I couldn’t just look up the part number on the griddle and see if someone somewhere had any. Maybe if I had a professional account access I could have found it.

But I kept digging and finally found a website that had a part number for the griddle. Great. Eventually I found a place that had a few left in stock. Annoyingly they weren’t listed as being for my stove, but for the model after mine that I suppose was still being made.

I looked carefully at the illustration for the part and it looked like mine, so I took a chance and bought one. It came the other day and it fit perfectly. And it was so nice and new I had to spend all day yesterday basically giving the stove a detailing.

I’ll try my best to keep the one I installed clean between uses like I did Bill’s new one. But I went back to where I bought the new griddle and bought a second one just to keep in storage. I use the griddle Lots, and my cardiologist would probably not approve, but in my defense I fry with olive oil which they say is actually good for the heart. Two should last me for however long I have to live in this house.

I’m at my drafting table wiping off the iPad Pro screen when I decide I need the lamp on to better judge how clean I’m getting it. As I reach over to the lamp switch I notice the button looks a bit odd. Then I see that there’s a wasp sitting right on top of the button. 

Okay…so I’m not pressing that button right this minute…

Two thoughts come to mind. 1) How the hell did that get in here? and 2) How the hell am I getting it out?

It seemed a bit sluggish, so I grabbed a small cup and with a paper towel knocked it into the cup and covered the cup with the towel. Then I took it outside and shook it out, thinking it would just fall to the ground, but no, it flew right off. Away from me and the house thankfully.

All I can think is I’ve had the windows open much of the daytime since I’ve been back. Weather’s nice enough for it and after three months and a tad of being shut up the house probably needed to breath. But I’ve screens on all the windows and storm doors. I guess they find little gaps to crawl through but I don’t see any.

I suppose it’s that time of year for all the bugs to be looking for winter digs. No…not here you don’t…

I should post some about my three month stay in California, now that I’m back home and I don’t have to worry about anyone reading my blog and knowing my house is unoccupied… 

Begun, the packing for the return to Baltimore has.

I need to post some stuff here about my first visit to Disneyland at the end of last month, but that will probably have to wait until I get back to Baltimore. I really didn’t have anything to say here because the Disneyland visit gave me brain overload, there was so much they packed into what are two much smaller that Disney World by comparison parks.

Still trying to decide my route back. I’m taking the usual route to Barstow, but there I can either take I-15 north and go back the way I came, or take I-40 west and hit Arizona and New Mexico. That avoids the extreme elevation changes but then I have to detour around Texas by way of I-25 north to I-70. I-15 to I-70 is the more direct shot and a couple cans of Boost oxygen got me through the mountains but (and I’ll need to explain this in future posts) I’m concerned about the work they did on my car in San Luis Obispo, and there’s a pretty desolate stretch of Interstate in Utah I’d have to drive through.

Right now I’m sorting through some stuff to send back via UPS. My brother will get the boxes I’m packing now off to UPS when I let him know I made it home, so they don’t arrive before I do and get stolen off my porch. Which we don’t have a big problem with in my neighborhood, but there is stuff in there I don’t want to lose. 

Currently 56 degrees and sunny here in Oceano. I took a short camera walk around the neighborhood and you do get a bit heated in the direct sunlight, but not to the point that it gets uncomfortable. I’m back in my brother’s house now, working on a software project for him, and the next episode of A Coming Out Story.

This must be how my friends who live in warmer climates feel about teasing those of us who live where it freezes and snows. Oh, cold is it where you live? Yes, yes, I know just how you feel…I had to put a light jacket on just the other day! And here I am where it’s a bit chilly, but just a bit, and it seems like the rest of the country is baking, and I’m basking in the cool ocean breezes here.

I have a thermostat at home I can check and set remotely. Right now it’s telling me it’s 106 outside my house in Baltimore. Wow…

The southern hemisphere is really going to get it bad when their summer hits I think.

Downside to those cool ocean breezes is they come with beach sand and it dusts your car and you don’t dare just wipe it off because it’s hard little sand particles that will scratch your paint. You have to hose the car down and then make sure you dry it off so the hard water here doesn’t leave water stains which are nearly impossible to remove.

…being that it’s the last of April. Drizzly, chilly, miserable. Must be springtime in Maryland. A perfect day for staying inside and catching up on my filing. I have this really bad habit of just dumping mail that isn’t urgent into a box and leaving it there, sometimes for months. It can really pile up because I keep resisting the calls to just “go paperless”.

I practically already have. I have a list of bills I just routinely pay online and that is when I check over the transactions and make sure everything is okay. I have credit monitoring that alerts me instantly if someone tries to open an account in my name. My banks and cards tell me about every transaction made in real time. So the paper bills tend to get put off for filing later. Occasionally I get nagged to just switch to “paperless” billing (we used to call it email back in the day…) but I am old and like my paper bills for some reason I can’t even now explain. Maybe it’s that filing things makes me feel like I’m adulting.

The Social Security and medical statements I look at immediately, and also the retirement account statements. But then they also go into the box for filing later. So do all the other odds and ends including the junk, because I can’t always just toss the junk mail away. Some of it needs shredding.

Which is why my shredder gets a lot of work when I get around to sorting and filing everything in the box. This is when I notice how persistent some junk mailers are. No my house is not for sale, I don’t care how many times you ask. No I am not switching energy providers. No I am not buying a car warranty. No I do not want your Medicare supplemental coverage. No I am not going to your retirement planning seminar and I don’t care how free the food is. It’s impressive how many of these same exact mailers come, one after the other, over and over and over. What…did you think I missed the first one?

I can be stubborn. And especially when it comes to something like this. A few years ago at the Marketplace Co-op in Disney Springs I saw a display selling customized protective cases for your smartphone. You could get one with all sorts of Disney artwork on it, and you could buy it with your name printed on it. They had a machine that printed them up to order right there. In the display was one of their Disney Pride examples.

You have to appreciate how Disney’s marketing to gay folk makes a kid that came of age when I did feel. Sure it’s commercial, but I was there the month after the Pulse shootings and I saw how shocked everyone down there was. All that down low wink, wink unspoken acceptance of their LGBT guests changed almost overnight. It’s a small world after all.

So the moment I laid eyes on that smartphone case I had to have one.

It’s been on my iPhone Xs for years, but suddenly last December its plastic frame started breaking apart. I was in California and my brother did his best to glue it back together for me. When I got it home the frame simply started breaking apart in other places. I’ve had this experience before with other things made of this hard plastic, and I knew it would only get worse.

Many years ago I bought what was then a very expensive Minolta dImage 7hi. At the time the first affordable digital cameras were coming out and that Minolta had excellent specs. It was a great little camera, I took it with me on a bunch of road trips. But it was made of this same sort of hard plastic that just starts falling apart all of a sudden.

So there was no fixing that smartphone case and I started looking for a replacement. Disney sells a bunch of Pride merchandise including smartphone covers, but the iPhone Xs is so out of date now I couldn’t find another one. I tried looking for something like it from a third party but ran into the same problem.

Apparently the Xs is already vintage. It’s even hard to find generic cases for it, but I figured I’d try one of those and simply move the custom printed back panel to a new case. It took a lot of searching but I finally found a case that had a transparent back cover that I thought would do the trick. But…no. When the case came I discovered that it was so tightly fitted to the phone I couldn’t put the Disney Pride insert into it and close the case around the phone again. It was too thick. And…being made of that same hard plastic, it was also beginning to come apart at the edges.

So I went though the usual period of being distraught and then getting all stubborn. Okay, thinks I…maybe I can scan in the artwork and print it out on a piece of photo inkjet paper.

A little scanning and GIMP-ing and printing, a little X-Acto work (all those years spent as an architectural model maker still come in handy…) I had my new Pride insert. It fit…barely. And what I ended up with was artwork that was actually more vibrant than the plastic insert I got at the Marketplace Co-op.

I ever get a new iPhone I can probably copy the artwork to a new sheet of photo paper and put it into whatever generic transparent case I can find for it. I’m set. Yes, there are other newer designs out there for the new iPhones, but I like this one.

Yes, yes…I know. It’s been a while since I’ve updated A Coming Out Story. But I’m back at it…stay tuned…

Without true love we just exist…

Another grey drizzly rainy day here in Oceano. Normally I’d complain that I’m not getting my fair allocation of California sunshine and blue sky, but they really Really need the rain out here. So this is good.

Rain, rain, rain here in sunny Oceano California. But nobody is complaining because it is sorely needed here. Today we’re getting a good soaking rain. Forecast is for more later throughout the week.

Yes, I packed a sweater. One of my pet peeves listening to people back east talking about my beloved California is they seem to think it’s all either LA or San Francisco. I awoke to 36 degrees this morning in sunny California! Oh…did you think it never gets cold here? It’s Sunny California after all! But yes, and this isn’t even north California in the mountains.

Admittedly it never gets much colder than this here in Oceano. But picture a bunch of houses built here before the first energy crisis. No insulation? Check. Thin single pane glass windows? Check. Exterior walls my mom used to say were chicken wire and paper mache? Check!

I told my brother what my mom said about the homes here once and he reminded me that the houses here have to be built to sometimes take a shake. Which I’m sure mine made of concrete block and brick veneer would probably not. And of course mine back in Charm City isn’t any better insulation wise, being built in 1953, and we dip down into the single digits every now and then. But at least mine has double pane windows now and insulated exterior doors now.

Back home I budget for the utilities first, no kidding. I will not endure a cold house or an overly warm one in the summer. So I’ve asked Bill to let me know how much extra I’m costing him in utilities for these visits and I’ll send it to him, since he’s still a working stiff and usually isn’t home most workdays.

Henry, my brother’s cat, being a Maine Coon, could of course not care less.

Oh my goodness it’s almost summertime out there this afternoon! I’m gathering up my Halloween do-dads and I’m just wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt and I could swear it’s early May out there. And No Mosquitoes! This is perfect weather for working outdoors.

This would have been the perfect day for the neighborhood goblins to come out trick or treating. But alas…

Post Halloween day chores:

Finish bringing in all the decorations.

Put electric cables away.

Remove the batteries from the battery operated things, run the voltmeter on them and put the ones that still meet spec in the Used But Still Good container.

Pack up all the Halloween stuff into their storage containers.

Figure out what to do with the extra two bags of candy I couldn’t give out because rain kept a lot of trick or treaters away…

You would think Blue Jays are closely related to Mockingbirds the way they mimic other birds, but they’re a different branch of the things with wings family tree. Corvidae versus Mimidae. They’re more closely related to crows, which makes what just happened outside my den window amusing.

I’m busy working on some pages for my Woodward website; I want to get our art and literary journal, The Inquiry, up. I have all the pages for the 1972 issue scanned already, I just need a web page with the links. So I’m busy hand rolling some html, when I hear a hawk calling right outside my open windows. But no…it’s a blue jay, doing a killer imitation of a hawk.

Fascinated, I watch when I should have been grabbing for my cell phone to record this. What, I wonder, is it hoping to accomplish by scaring the heck out of all the smaller birds in the area. There is, or was, a blue jay nest somewhere nearby…I know this because I could hear the noisy fledglings some weeks ago. Maybe it wants to clear the area around the cat food dishes my neighbor has put out so it can grab a snack. It’s very odd, but a bunch of birds will eat dry cat food just as easily as bird seed. Blackbirds, starlings…I try to tell them they’re cat food too but they don’t listen.

When I finally think to grab my iPhone and get some video of this blue jay mimicking a hawk, at the same time a bunch of crows start complaining there’s a hawk somewhere around here. Caw Caw Caw Caw!!!! Crows and hawks do Not get along, and I don’t think they like blue jays much either, and I’m not sure the crows are actually being fooled. But immediately the jay stops mimicking a hawk goes into alert mode over crows nearby. Jay Jay Jay Jay!!! And it flies off.

As I’m typing this, I can still hear the crows bellyaching about it, but a bit further away. Life in the city…

I’ve taken to putting out a bowl of ice next to the water bowl on the porch when it gets this hot. The calico won’t have anything to do with the ice, but when it’s halfway melted she’ll drink from that bowl first, then finish up with the regular water bowl. I’ve no idea what that thought process is.

There’s plenty of shade on my porch, under the trees and she rotates lounging spots. I keep inviting her inside but she won’t have it. So she stays out in the heat. I make sure she has plenty of water. It’s the best I can do.

I got the birdbath going again this morning. At some point I need to adjust its footing and make it level again. Right now I just have some wedges in place. I bought a twirling thing some years ago that keeps the water in it moving, supposedly to discourage mosquito egg laying. Customers usually come pretty quickly in this sort of heat. Mostly they drink, but every now and then I see someone taking a bath in it. The twirler takes up a bunch of space in the middle and I think that keeps most of the bathers out. But at least they get a drink.

I’ll put some water dishes out back, I just have to remember to take them back inside at night and run them through the dishwasher to rid any mosquito larva out of them.

I have a mosquito kill fogger I run every couple days to spray under the deck, a space that I can’t keep standing water out of. It discharges a very dense fog of mosquito kill and it’s very effective, but I have to warn my neighbors when I’m about to use it to keep their pets indoors for a while. They don’t seem to mind I think because it does very effectively keep the mosquitos away. But I can’t use it out front by the outdoor faucet because there are cats out and about there. There is a “natural” mosquito repellant spray I Can use however because it’s pet friendly. It definitely stinks of some spicy plant and after I use it the two street cats that hang out here turn up their noses and avoid the area. I can verify that it keeps the mosquitoes away too, but only for a couple days.