An old biddy...

It was so cold today, with chills constantly reverberating across my body, that I broke out the electric blanket Eric and Celia sent me last year to keep warm when my own body fails to do so.

Amos wants to know why I ever put it away in the first place.  He believes he needs to be kept warm all 12 months of the year.  Needless to day, Amos' has been in seventh heaven all day!

I made my batch of stew.  I was happy to see that I remembered how to properly braise the beef.  Surprisingly, even the smell of cooking beef did not draw Amos away from his blanket.

I seriously thought about licking this ... somehow.

But I restrained myself.  The hunk of beef I chose was slightly larger than usual, so I used a bit more potatoes and a bit more carrots and ended up with 11 servings instead of 8.  Abundant provision!

I had one extra red potato, so I decided to cook it up for myself.  I sliced it as thinly as possible, drizzled the tiniest bit of olive oil on the pan, cooked it, added salt and McCormack's Peppercorn Medley®, and then topped it off with a spoonful of the rosemary butter I made once the potato pieces were all cooked.  Culinary happiness abounded.

This evening, I was asked to edit a resume for someone.  This time, it was in the medical professional field.  I have never tackled one of those before, but mostly resume editing is about the following:

• visual presentation to aid the reader (whom you know is skimming)
• strong, active verbs
• concise bullets
• standardized formatting
• clean of errors
• single page if possible (if not work history on front page)

There is this rhythm to editing resumes, almost a peaceful one.  You do not really have to think so much as improve the craft what is already there.  Plus, standardizing formatting becomes a spiral affair, where one decision can loop back and affect a decision that came before of aft it.  I find almost as much pleasure in the end product of an edited resume as I do in a mown, edged, and blown yard.  The resume is for a friend of someone I know ... or ... someone who doesn't know me at all.  That really does not matter to me, I savored the opportunity to help and to teach through modeling.

Tonight, I hope to get through doing an editing pass on two of Mary's manuscripts.  I do have to try to get to bed somewhat early for me (go ahead and laugh), because Firewood Man is coming at noon tomorrow to start on my homeowner laundry list.  I believe the first two tasks will be filling the hole in the basement wall and to put the railing on the airing porch.  With my entire being, I want Tim to restore the roof from pitched back to flat and put out the deck that should be there, but my life has to become strictly defined by needs, not wants since I am starting the very, very, very expensive form of erythromycin.

Next on the list are renting a 40-foot ladder so that he can caulk all the corners of all my gutters on both roofs and put a cover on the chimney so that I no longer have rain falling in my house during the more ferocious of storms that blow through here.  After that, he is renting an aerator for the lawn.  He has one for his business, but it is too large to go through the gates to the back yard.  He will also be power-washing the front porch and the back steps so that I can put down fresh sealer on them.  I had hoped to get through the winter before doing so, but the back steps are looking rather worn.  And we have to figure out a solution for the oceans of water that come into my yard from my neighbor's neglected gutters.  Whilst this is probably a want instead of a need, Tim is also FINALLY going to put in a frame for the door to the basement utility closet (it is currently hung only on the faux wall made from one-inch tongue-and-grove wood) so that I can FINALLY close the door.  Whilst I appreciate all the things I can store in my utility closet, I don't like looking at them all the time when I am down there.

Then ... there are the lattice walls of the back porch. A GINORMOUS task, comported to all the others.  There are other small things that I cannot do, but I am not remembering them at the moment.  In any case, Tim is hoping to take a big whack at my To-Do list this week.  I am hoping he succeeds.

Tim keeps teasing me about wanting to batten down the hatches before winter.  He teases me because the farmers out where he lives are all convinced that we are going to have another wild one. I am hoping they are wrong.

Oh, wait, one more task is to put together the firewood rack for the back porch and then fill it up with wood!  The base of the rack is wood, so that it can be custom fit to the width of my back porch.  I will be staining and sealing the wood so that it looks pretty against the back porch.

Anyway, the point it, I've had a long list waiting for him to get through all of his mowing this summer.  He's done with his independent contractor work and has just his own clients.  Apparently, a lot of his lawn and firewood clients have long lists, too.  But I get to be the one whose list is tackled this week.

Firewood Man painted the entire basement of his church without anyone really knowing that he did the work.  Such a kind young man he is.  I don't mind it, really, when he calls me one of his old biddies.

Mostly.