Ambergris

Thin beach towel or long bathrobe laid down over the nasty carpet. It washes and dries with the normal laundry. Regardless, doing a quarter of the exercises is better than doing none of them. It's not an all-or-none set. I have warm memories of visiting The City of Elizabeth City, although the name seems silly.

Hate to say it, but he was likely smoking something more expensive than Marlboros, and didn't want you to smell it. Picked up a roast chicken with sides (soup, rice, fried potatoes) which counts as fast food here and brought it home to eat. Oh, so good. Cut up the leftovers and froze them. Also picked up some not-quite-ripe plantains and creole avocados (i.e. seedling, not Haas) to ripen over the course of the week. The pottery lady from Cera was at the market selling pots, but I don't want to buy large breakable objects mere weeks before moving. Made an agreement with a guy in a truck to move my potted plants on May 22 and my other things on May 29. This leaves plenty of time to clean up. I hope this is what got agreed to. Planted sunflowers and marigolds together as a backdrop to the red, gold, and red-gold roses. Found that a few sunflowers from a prior panting are ankle-high, which is great news. Gritted my teeth a lot, as my Siamese cat-in-heat has found her voice.

Laundry is on the line. Roses are planted. Bathroom is bleached. Floor is swept (kitchen twice). Bed is changed and made. Can you tell the housekeeper is here? While she did all that, I worked on Spanish lessons and salted down some limes, mixing sweet limes from the tree with key lime type limes from the market and mixing the pink Himalayan salt with sea salt. We're about to head to the feed store in the housekeeper's kinda scary car to lay in big bags of cuy pellets, corn for both chickens and cuy, and mash for the chickens.

I did move the food to the other side of the gate, and that did appear to take care of the problem. You can get cheaper cigarettes than Marlboro. We had couch-dwellers who asked for $7 packs of cigarettes but didn't throw out the occasional $4.50 packs I handed over.

An abandoned teenaged cat was sort of adopted by neighbors on the other side of the hill, who are currently out of the country. So the cat is now ranging around looking for food and comfort. My cats don't want him here, and I am having to hear all about it. The furor has been going on for a good half hour now. I put down food my cats had refused to eat for two days. They might be refusing to eat it, but they are now refusing to let him eat it on their turf. I don't really know where their turf ends.

I would suggest adding the cost of the closet door to his rent, but I know from experience this would likely lead to a barrage of other damage.

Today was the last day of exercise sessions with the super-encouraging and astonishingly knowledgeable D. Am I ever sore--Monday, Wednesday, and again today were each a step up in intensity. Today I had to stop a couple of times because I was getting splotches in my vision. I might take another hot shower right before bed to loosen my muscles. Monday we start with R, and today I downloaded Youtube videos to test out as lighter Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday workouts, which I can build on once I move.

Reconfigure a leg-hold trap or something similar to, when it triggered, open instead of closing, knocking a large portion of snow off to the side of one step, maybe while breaking ice? Then only sweep up what's left while accomplice resets trap for next step down? Or would that be too dangerous? I thought of pouring boiling water, but that would end up being ice, right?

Wouldn't it be nice if a different angle of broom head or bent handle would take care of that? Like a scythe handle maybe?

Mmm... cranberry scones...

What he was trying is spelled S_C_A_M, not S_C_A_R_E. My last ex-husband started going through those kinds of tactics after he got to smoking "K2," which he described as artificial weed and which is apparently a lot closer to ice/meth. Prepare for things to get a lot worse in his last weeks. Cornered rats, you know.

Here and there, remember to take a phone-picture of the mess before you start cleaning. This will come in really handy when they start hounding you again about letting him stay another month (and then another, and another). You know this is going to happen.

Sounds good. One of my chicks ... young hens ... keeps getting in and out of the egg room of the hen house, rearranging that room, and settling into a laying position. The gray hen keeps following her around and mimicking her position, acting kind of like a midwife. Today's groceries: Red bananas, avocado, and salad.

A lock costs and awful lot less than the locksmith's time to work on a damaged lock or doorknob. If you think it might be compromised, you should probably assume it has been, and treat it accordingly. My preference is a deadbolt that is more than one inch long, but not all doors will allow this. Also, they are hard to find and cost more than the standard deadbolt. The kind of deadbolt that requires a key on both sides is more secure, but if you have to leave in an emergency, like a fire or your house filling with poison fumes that confuse you, or a tornado, looking for a key that your confused mind hides the location of can eat up precious quarter-seconds that you need to be using to get outside with. I normally buy the type with a twist lever on the inside and a key slot only on the outside. I ALWAYS buy a deadbolt, even if it means I have to drill above the doorknob to make a place for it. (No landlord ever referred to this as damage against my damage deposit, but I'm going back more than thirty years with this information.)

It ebbs and flows, like all things. Don't despair.

With my housekeeper doing most of the actual work, transplanting out into the garden and generally moving plants around. Also getting three chicken carcasses broken down, repacked, and frozen, moving yesterday's broth from the fridge (defatted) into the freezer, and putting a new pot of broth on to cook until tomorrow evening.

I have another batch of chicken-foot broth in the slow cooker now. Chicken feet come in the giblet bag here. This has feet, neck, liver, back, a store bought carrot, some carrot greens, plantain (the green weed), onions of various kinds, a knob of ginger, a little vinegar, salt and whole pepper, and recycled bones from yesterday's broth.

It's great for onions that are going to be caramelized and then dried

I guess they can throw stones.

Depending on where you want to go? You can rent a small three-bedroom house in a pretty good (but not close-in) neighborhood for $1500 a month or less in Tallahassee. If you want a one-bedroom apartment or cottage, your options expand a lot. The south side of Tallahassee is not the "good" side of town, but the northwest is the "cop" side, where police officers tend to live. It's much cheaper than the east side and safer than the south side. Here's a Zillow search for the zip code 32303, the northwest pie slice, with a filter having the maximum rent at $1600. https://www.zillow.com/tallahassee-fl-32303/rentals/?searchQueryState={"pagination"%3A{}%2C"mapBounds"%3A{"north"%3A30.630298851197193%2C"south"%3A30.407888461533087%2C"east"%3A-84.1900540571289%2C"west"%3A-84.47501194287109}%2C"regionSelection"%3A[{"regionId"%3A71914%2C"regionType"%3A7}]%2C"isMapVisible"%3Atrue%2C"filterState"%3A{"fsba"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"fsbo"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"nc"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"cmsn"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"auc"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"fore"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"fr"%3A{"value"%3Atrue}%2C"mf"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"land"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"manu"%3A{"value"%3Afalse}%2C"mp"%3A{"max"%3A1600}%2C"price"%3A{"max"%3A321219}}%2C"isListVisible"%3Atrue%2C"mapZoom"%3A12} You can see there are a number of options, most of them pretty nice-looking. You can adjust the rent upward or downward if you like, or otherwise fiddle with those options. Zillow lets you do this with any geographic area in the US.

The ones in Loja paid for themselves long ago and are going strong, generating roughly a quarter of the electricity used in the region. Bear in mind, the area has a strong tradition of metal tinkerers and fixit people, so maintenance is different here. Electric needs are different too, between the lack of need for (much) heating or air conditioning and the huge windows and skylights everywhere.

I had my teeth deep cleaned a week ago. Not fun, but not as bad as getting a filling without anesthesia. Some kinds don't work on me, so I know. Today in town, I got a small bag of a new kind of cat food to see if the cats would eat it before investing in a big bag. Investing, yeah. The small one, roughly five pounds, was thirty bucks. Cat food that is not utter garbage costs more than human food here. I would get the cheaper ground meat the butcher sells for pets, but my old cat won't eat raw ground meat. (The little cat eats raw meat very well.) Also, I'm afraid I'd eat it by mistake, and I don't know what made the butcher set it aside as "for pets." I was supposed to have a PM video chat with a friend last night, and I forgot. Ugh.

Only thing about the silicone is the white coating they grow after a while. It seems harmless, but unsightly. I like it, and left a deep drawer full of various kinds back in Florida. I suggest keeping a baking sheet under it to control the flopping. The baking sheet usually stays clean, and when it doesn't, it saves you a harder clean-up. I never used any kind of release spray on mine.

I have spent a good chunk of today watching this channel:

Dentist visit checked off the list. Antidepressants were out of stock/sold out at the first four pharmacies, but the fifth pharmacy had two bottles. I bought both. The woman behind the counter asked what she was supposed to tell the next person who came in wanting them. I said, "I'm sorry. We ordered too few this week, but we will try to do better next week." She laughed. Found and bought a replacement emergency whistle for my purse, since calling 9-1-1 doesn't do anything here. You're supposed to phone the neighbors, but which one first? If you don't luck out on the nearest one who's home with the first telephone call, you might be sorely out of luck. A whistle works better. Bought a second one for PM, who has been looking for one for quite a while. These are referee whistles. Mine is up to 120 decibels and hers is up to 115 decibels. The store that was supposed to have the resistance bands didn't have them but had latex "scarves" that didn't look useless and cost less than five bucks each, so I got one of each of the two available stiffnesses. Then I hit a few other sporting goods stores and finally found what looks like only one step down from what my exercise guy uses. Got that too, and plan to show it to him tomorrow for instructions. (Catch a hint of how I managed to luck into the referee whistles?) The trip to the fruit tree nurseries got rained out.