Fact: There are more card deck combinations than atoms on Earth. – Don’t blame your bad hand at the poker table on a stroke of bad luck; it’s just a matter of math, seeing as there are more ways to arrange a deck of cards than total atoms on Earth! If a card deck is appropriately shuffled, there’s a pretty high chance it comes out in an arrangement that has never existed before because a deck of 52 cards has an astronomically large number of permutations. (Put simply: It’s a 69-digit number!)
The Sun would NOT stay down this morning even though we wished it so! At 7:00 AM, we arose to the barking of Scout, The Wonder Dog, who wanted outside. We had our coffee and planned the day, starting with selecting a new washer-dryer from online Consumer Reports; the old ones are a quarter-century old ( I bought them in 1995) and just wearing out. Just like me!
Before we left, Scout came to me and was happy that I was his daddy.
I guess I am his friend!
We worked around the house until about 1:00 PM, when we did errands. I worked in the garage for about three hours, putting in eight more plugs along the front inside of the garage. My air compressor and drill press don’t have to have their wires drooping in the overheads.
Sometimes I feel I’m getting too old for this nonsense because it’s hard at my tender age of 77 to stand on the ladder with one foot on the workbench, my body squeezed between the tool cabinet in the garage door rail, and hold a power drill and a half dozen other goodies in my hands without dropping everything.
I was happy when Mary said, “let’s do errands.”
Oh my, did we do errands! The first stop was Mary’s office in Huntington Beach to collect the paperwork she needed to do the monthly financial calculations. Then we went to Home Depot first before we bought a new washer and dryer. Mary made her choices, and the rest is history; we will have new equipment on the 8th!.
Then we headed to our favorite market, Trader Joe’s, to replenish our Two Buck Chuck (BTW, it is now $2.99/bottle) supply, and we picked up a case for Jan. From there, it was off to the bank, so that Mary could make some deposits. Finally, we ended up at CVS pharmacy, where I picked up some prescriptions and some 8 x 10 photographs that I had ordered for our family wall.
The car was full of stuff, and after it was unloaded, I decided to work in the garage for another 45 minutes while Mary prepared dinner.
Mary called me for dinner, and I dropped everything and came running because I had a suspicion that she was up to wonderful things, and my suspicion played out. We had a super dinner.
Pasta, homemade miso soup, and homemade coleslaw awaited me.
Dinner was wonderful.
One of my favorite side dishes is coleslaw, but I’m not too fond of the stuff in the markets because they generally are full of mayonnaise. Mary made the coleslaw tonight from scratch and used a little bit of mayonnaise sour cream, and everything was fresh as can be; you could hear the crunch 2 miles away.
Nothing like fresh coleslaw.
We often order miso soup when dining out at a Japanese restaurant, but I have never had it homemade. I can tell you now, but I may take Mary’s homemade miso soup to the restaurant with me and show the chef how it’s supposed to be done.
At its most basic, miso is a fermented paste made by inoculating a mixture of soybeans with a mold called koji (for you science folks, that’s the common name for Aspergillus oryzae) that’s been cultivated from rice, barley, or soybeans.
The chu=icken miso soup is now my favorite!
Artichokes are packed with health benefits – one whole one delivers 25% of your daily folate needs and 10 grams of fiber! Ten grams! That’s 1/3 of your daily need. It also has more antioxidants than almost any other vegetable.
We were so full the artichokes went into the frig.
We were pretty sore from today’s work, so we headed to the swim spa for an evening in hot water. We had a glass of wine, laid back, and watched the moon. The moon looked like a Cheshire cat, and I think it was staring right at it.
After drying off and getting ready for bed, Mary asked me to take Scout out. As a dutiful husband, I did what she said, but I didn’t understand why she was upset when we returned an hour later!
“Scout, we are in the dog house now!”
Your not allowed to wear out!