Hey, nobody has to listen to me complain about the weather this week! Finally! Oh it’s still rainy, cold, and generally horrible out, make no mistake. I just really don’t feel like bringing it up. I’ve accepted it as a fact of life that I am never going to enjoy nice weather again. Instead of the weather, I think I’ll whine about my house for a bit. The constant repairs here are wearing thin. OK, they done WORN thin. Tired of it. We have a few “cosmetic” updates we’d like to do inside, stuff we would actually enjoy and make it feel a little more comfortable. Instead, all we do is get broken things fixed. New HVAC. New gutters. New paint. New this, new that. This time around, the bill-of-the-month was a new water softener. Ohhhh, how exciting is that! You are correct, it’s not. But, the water here stinks. Bad. It’s been an issue since we moved it, and it wasn’t getting anything but worse. After trying several DIY fixes, we finally gave up and called the water people. Predictably, this visit ended up with “Your water filter system isn’t working, it’s old, you need a new one, blah blah blah.” Same as always. I have come to believe that those who think well water is cheaper than city, have never been on a well. Yeah the water is free. All the junk required to actually use it, not so much. The good news I guess, the water doesn’t stink any more, at least for now, thanks to the fancy sulphur-removal system they also installed. How people lived here for the last 20 years without one, I do not know. Blech. And the bad news? (There’s always bad news.) The bill. They installed all this gear down in the well house at the bottom of the drive, where I park my Jeep. I mention that because they were roughly the same price. Now every time I go down there, I look at the Jeep, then at the water tanks. I dunno, I get a lot more enjoyment out of the Jeep for the same money. But, now we get to check that box off, sit back, and wait for the next thing to break.

While we watched our savings account get drained once again, we figured we might as well do a few fun things too. Saturday we went to fancy birthday party down the hill. (I guess that’s redundant… If an event is “down the hill,” it goes without saying it’s also “fancy.”) It was over at a friend’s house, and he put on quite the opulent dinner. Made me a little stressed just watching him put it all together. He pulled it off flawlessly; I am quite sure I would not have. It was really quite the meal. I couldn’t help but compare it to the rather upscale dinner we went to with them a few weeks ago; this was WAY better. I couldn’t quite pronounce all the dishes, but they sure were good. It probably would have been polite to ask whose birthday we were celebrating, but I was too busy eating.

Sunday was filled with food, basketball games, and nerdiness, not necessarily in that order. To get the nerdiness out of the way, I woke up at some unholy hour of the morning and decided it was time to switch my adblocker from Pi-Hole to AdGuard. As is usually the case with me, there was absolutely no compelling reason behind this idea. I’ve used Pi-Hole for several years, and it works great. Just felt like wasting a few hours I guess, and to that end I was very successful. The ol’ home network is now blissfully ad-free. Just like it was before I threw away several hours of my Sunday, but… errrrr… faster? Nope. Cheaper? Nope, both free. Easier? Eh, arguably. Whatever. It was sorta an interesting little project. After getting to a medium-good stopping point on that, it was breakfast time. Corned beef hash has been on the list for a while now, so I got busy on that. I went with Alton Brown’s recipe, can’t ever go wrong with him. (Minus making the corned beef part… Already had that covered.) Came out delish! I’ve been on a run of food-fails lately, so it was encouraging to get a success in the books, even if it was just hash. We spent the rest of the afternoon watching the basketball tournament, which we both enjoy. Most of the games were pretty exciting, if not quite the results we wanted. For dinner it was back to Food Network browsing, and we decided on chicken piccata. Came out half-decent also; Two successes in one day! (Three if you count the AdGuard project!)

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