Poking along...

Not much has been going on around here. I did buy some more soil for starting my window boxes, but it is chilly and overcast today, so I may put it off for now. Same thing for cleaning the lower balcony. At one point this winter, I noticed that something that appeared to be ashes was blowing onto our balcony and assumed it was coming from one of our neighbors' chimneys, somehow. It turns out that ashes from OUR fireplace had gotten dumped into a bucket on the balcony instead of carried down to the garbage at some point and then when the wind picked up, they were blown all around. D'oh!

I probably also need to look into some advice on caring for my poinsettia. It is getting bigger, and the "flower" parts are coming out, but I don't know why now instead of at the holidays when I was covering them. Also, the edges of the leaves are turning brown, but just the green leaves.

Both the pink and the white Thanksgiving cacti are in bloom at the moment, adding to my general enjoyment at sharing an office with my plants.

I spent part of Friday and Saturday wrestling with a sewing project but seem to have things under control now. John is a movie junkie, so once I had things sorted, I sewed while watching a movie he streamed from our German Netflix-type movie provider. Right now, he is watching No Country for Old Men, but I just can't get interested in it, especially since a lot of what I'd heard about it was the violence/gore. I can handle those things if the story interests me enough, but this one just doesn't.

John rode his bike clear across town yesterday in search of a tennis court. For most of the courts he has found, you have to be a member of a club, and John doesn't often have someone to play with or time to play, so the idea of plunking down anywhere from 200 to 400 Euros per year for the opportunity to even get on the court doesn't sit well with him. He found out about one place online that has hourly rates and no membership requirements, so he headed over there to have a look at it (and en route to return the opera video he insisted I check out for him).

I had my annual exam, and everything seems ok, but the GYN wanted to check both the placement of my IUD and a fibrous spot in my breast with the sonogram machine, so I ended up feeling rather sticky and gross from all the gel in play. And that is all I will go into there.

We just "sprang forward" today, and it is shocking to find that it is already pushing 4 p.m. Getting Hannah off to school in the morning is going to suuuuck, I can already tell.

I think the time change has affected my brain. I'm pretty sure that there has been slightly more than that going on, but I can't seem to recall at the moment. Oh, well.

--Nee in Germany likes to blame factors outside her control for her mental decline