Sequoia Mountain Dogwood

A while back, I had to cash out some frequent flyer miles. They were expiring. There weren’t enough of them for airline tickets, but the airline was offering magazine and newspaper subscriptions as an alternative. I elected a one year subscription to the Wall Street Journal. It started appearing on the first of November. Anne asked me if this meant that I was going to become a Republican. The WSJ is a Murdoch publication now. I retorted that her parents got the Journal and they are certainly not Republicans. I don’t know if this mollified her or not. It certainly quieted her. I didn’t tell her that the other alternatives were the likes of Self magazine.

Sunday morning, I stumbled out the front door to retrieve the paper. Again there were two plastic wrapped tubes on our dewy lawn. The WSJ doesn’t have a Sunday edition so in its place was the Sunday New York Times. I don’t recall the Sunday Times as being part of the deal, so maybe it is just a promotional copy. There was no offer for the Times, when I signed up for the Journal. Otherwise I would have gladly chosen it instead. Time will tell. A Sunday morning with the Times is an invitation to lounge about, especially on the Sunday morning after the expiration of daylight savings. I took full advantage of this obvious slacker opportunity.

The rest of Sunday was a quiet day too. Anne and I ‘cooperated’ and were able to adjust our new dual flow toilet. So now both levers, numbers one and two, both work, sort of. Anne went online and found the manufacturer’s instructional video that taught us how to adjust this new toilet system. This was much more valuable than the poorly written instructions that came with the system. It is still not working entirely right, but it is working much better now than before. We’ll continue to hone our toilet’s flushing correctness using Newton’s method that is, through a series of successive approximations.

After the potty patrol duty, I mowed the lawn. My main motivation originated with the signs that the city had erected on Friday, announcing leaf collection this week. When I mowed, I also bagged, basically mulching and vacuuming the leaves. The grass was pretty long in the tooth, so mowing just to cut the lawn would have been more than enough. By bagging, I got a lot if not most of the leaves. This method was not as effective as raking, but on the other hand, I was able to use the ground up leaves as flower bed mulch. This seems so much more ecologetic. The end effect was not as neat and clean as if I had raked it, but on the third-hand, our front yard is so torn up now that morning’s original cover of leaves looked better than the end result. I hope that the neighbors are happy.