Paul & Sue's Daily Diary

“When life gives you melons, you might be dyslexic.”

Mount Vernon Christmas Jigsaw Puzzle be done! It almost did us in! The very top and very bottom were blood-pressure raisers! I declared several times that we had missing parts but alas, I was proven wrong again…everything fit…after almost two weeks of trying!

Did You Know? Jigsaw puzzles were originally created by painting a picture on a flat, rectangular piece of wood, and then cutting that picture into small pieces with a jigsaw, hence the name. John Spilsbury, a London cartographer and engraver, is credited with commercializing jigsaw puzzles around 1760.

Puzzle pieces can have “loops” and “sockets”, “knobs” and “holes”, “tabs” and “slots”, “keys” and “locks”, or any of several other alternative designations. Speaking as a fully-qualified jigsaw puzzle solver, I can say that the standard word is an outie.

After finishing it off, I headed for the market to get a few odds and ends…the necessities of life…berries, ice cream, tookie dough, etc. We fixed lunch at home…while Sue had left-overs from the Yucatan Grille, I whooped up a batch of bacon, eggs, and ham which gave me an excellent excuse to use the new grill cleaning kit! The grill is now in great condition.

We cleaned up and headed to see “money-bags”, our financial advisor. Marshall has been watching our money for almost twenty years and he steered us through the downturns with little problems! Good news, we are up 11% this year already…thank you Mr. Trump! We are doing OK so we do not have to practice eating baloney sandwiches yet! Marshall is the owner of Sagent Wealth Management and we are really happy within everything he is doing for us!

We drove along the beach from our home to Laguna Beach but took the freeway home. The sky was so clear we could see snow on the mountains 50 miles away!

Tonight is another full moon so I got the old camera out and set up the tripod and got a shot…not great but little wiggle.

Random Memories: For some reason, while taking the picture I thought of my Mom and Dad and I laying on our backs in the back yard in Culver City in late 1957 listening to the AM radio announcing when Sputnik was going to pass overhead.  We watched for the new fangled “satellite” for almost a month just amazing that this thing was up in the sky and we could see it and it was man made.  I heard it on my ham radio system…very exciting!

The satellite had a one-watt, 3.5 kg (7.7 lb) radio transmitting unit inside, developed by Vyacheslav I. Lappo from NII-885, the Moscow Electronics Research Institute, that worked on two frequencies, 20.005 and 40.002 MHz. Signals on the first frequency were transmitted in 0.3 sec pulses (under normal temperature and pressure conditions on-board), with pauses of the same duration filled by pulses on the second frequency.

We lived in exciting times…looking back I cannot imaging what Mom and Dad must have thought as then whey were my age, they didn’t even have electric in their homes.  I remember watching Buster Crabb doing Flash Gordon so I knew satellite were possible.

Did You Know? Sputnik 1 was the first artificial Earth satellite.[5] The Soviet Union launched it into an elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957, orbiting for three weeks before its batteries died, then silently for two more months before falling back into the atmosphere. It was a 58 cm (23 in) diameter polished metal sphere, with four external radio antennas to broadcast radio pulses. Its radio signal was easily detectable even by radio amateurs, and the 65° inclination and duration of its orbit made its flight path cover virtually the entire inhabited Earth. This surprise success precipitated the American Sputnik crisis and triggered the Space Race, a part of the Cold War. The launch was the beginning of a new era of political, military, technological, and scientific developments.

We stopped by Old Ranch and talked to the special events director to see if we could get a deal on hosting the Topper’s Dance Club…looks like it is doable! We plan to talk to Craig, the president, tomorrow and get him to come and make arrangements should he deem it appropriate! Thank you Old Ranch for assisting us!

Arriving home, we called our grandson in New Hampshire and when he appeared on the video screen of the Echo Show, he was in shorts! Say what? New Hampshire and shorts! Well, it turned out he and Sarah are celebrating their anniversary and are in Barbados. When we called at 6:00 PM it was 83 degrees there…. far from the 22 degrees it was at his home. They will be there for a week!

We watched TV and crashed about 11:15 AM. Tomorrow we are off to a funeral in Whittier. Sad but we do want to pay our respects!

Do skunks celebrate Valentine’s Day? Sure, they’re very scent-imental!

Holy moley… the sky has opened up and H2O is coming down in buckets. My divining rod goes into retirement this very day…all I have to do it point in any direction and there is water! No more walking around the yard with the Y-shaped twig humming to myself…gonna miss those days…so will the neighbors.

I sit here, peering into the back yard and everything is sopping wet with rain dropping like someone is using a fire hose! This reminds me of how is was in the 1950’s when we had several weeks of rain every year. Maybe the Good Lord has decided to show us what the 1950’s was like? Back to “normal”.

More importantly however is that it is VALENTINES DAY. Cards, chocolate, dinner, celebration of love…that’s what I am talking about!

Random Memories:  Here’s the truth… I met and fell in love with Sue in 1974 while working in the Avionics Development Laboratory onn the Space Shuttle Program for Rockwell International but alas, both of us were married so nothing happened…we didn’t even talk! 

Ratchet forward to 1984… ten years later and we met again while at Rockwell…we were both searching for a life and it was again love at first sight…again!  It was obviously meant to be!  We joined hands in 1988 and love has never stopped, only increased in amazing ways!

So…today we stay in as it is coming down cats and dogs! The cement pond is almost to an overflow condition. Mid-morning I did a walk-about to see if anything needed to be fixed as we are going to have two days of rain. All was OK although the lime tree seemed to be dropping some of its fruit.

The remainder of the morning I sat in the office doing paperwork and watching the cats and dogs doing their thing! The rain was hard at times but not for a long duration. We did not plan to go anywhere so we didn’t care.

Daughter Michele came over and dropped off some home made cookies and we talked for an hour. We all have the gift-of-gab! I gave her a demo of Alexa but she was worried about it “listening in” to conversations. I think I may have convinced her…Greg “called in” while she was here and we talked for a while.

Did You Know? Alexa’s attention span, the buffer for how long Alexa stores what has been said, is only a few seconds, just long enough for the wake words (Alexa, Computer, Echo, or Amazon) that users can set. Nothing is saved on the device itself. It’s like recording on a tiny loop of analog tape: Every few seconds, the tape is rewritten.

Every Echo is loaded with four separate algorithms, each trained to listen for one of the four wake words. Once you set a wake word, that specific algorithm is activated, meaning your Echo can truly only understand one word. Only when the ring of lights around the top of an Alexa device is illuminated is the device recording and sending the audio to Amazon’s servers.

If you’re still paranoid, you can also check to see what Alexa has heard by opening the Alexa app, which contains a complete history of every utterance the associated device has ever stored.

We were planning to go to the Phoenix Club Valentine’s Day dinner-dance but alas, Sue was not up to it so we cancelled at the last minute. We will miss the gang but we must do what we must do! I was bummed out but on the bright side…we are staying warm inside.

It has rained and been cold all day and I saw this picture posted on Facebook…we were there two weeks ago! The Grapevine dressed in white…amazing. I am glad we are not driving it today!

So, we stayed home tonight and watching TV… Oh well…we tried! We did “tookies” and crashed… tomorrow looks like more rain but not the entire day. If it rains more I am going to make apple strudel again!

Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club; you’re not out of it until the computer says you’re out of it. – Erma Bombeck

Sue returned home today after a severe UTI resulting in bacterial sepsis and toxic-metabolic encephalopathy. Toxic-metabolic encephalopathy is a result of infections, toxins, or organ failure. When the electrolytes, hormones, or other chemicals in the body are off their normal balance, they can impact the brain’s function. This can also include the presence of an infection in the body or presence of toxic chemicals. The encephalopathy usually resolves when the underlying chemical imbalance is restored or offending infection/toxin removed.

We were supposed to go to Old Ranch for the monthly dinner dance but we stayed home, getting Sue back into the swing of things! The gang had a great time…we got the report!

Our security camera alerted us that at 9:30 PM we had a visitor to our mailbox…we know who you are.. and Sue got a GET WELL card signed by everyone at the dance… great to grate friends.