The good and the bad (not sure about ugly)

First of all, the Good news:  Monday afternoon, I met Maggie, a cellist colleague, for ice cream before she moves to Boston.  She has lived there before while getting a cello performance degree but now she is moving there permanently because her boyfriend is there.  She was our principal cellist in the orchestra last year and a very fine musician.  I wish her all the best!

On Tuesday, Alice turned five years old!  We gave her the game of Candy Land.  What a timeless game!

Other good things this week:  While transcribing the headstones from the cemetery across the street for Billion Graves, I discovered some relatives!!!  After entering each transcription, Billion Graves attempts to match the information with Family Search records.  Most of the time, they are not the same.  When they do match up, I click on  "view my relationship" and lo and behold, some of them are actually distant relations. Cool, huh?

General Conference was yesterday and today and I just love those weekends.  Such peaceful, joyful days.  Here are Linus, Sally, and Steve watching.  (Linus got a mid-month bath in the morning because he was kind of stinky and sitting near him for six hours didn't sound pleasant)

Other good news is that I am harvesting gourds and pumpkins and tomatoes and zinnias like crazy.  

Steve and I are all caught up on She Hulk and Rings of Power and we watched Inception Friday night.  (my second watch, Steve's first)

Now, the Bad news - I was diagnosed with a UTI early this week.  Happily, the antibiotics have worked their magic and I feel better.  Steve pulled a muscle or twisted a joint or something on Wednesday and he was pretty miserable for a couple of days.  The heating pad at night helped greatly.  He is mostly back to normal today.  Our water heater stopped working Wednesday.  We weren't able to light the pilot light that day and I was not able to get a plumber out to look at it until Friday.  Nowadays, many plumbers won't even look at a water heater that is older than six years and new ones run upwards of $2000!  Thankfully, I found someone to come look at ours and it was just some dust and debris that had gotten up in the intake area.  Curious that it stopped working the day after the heater was serviced for the winter.  I wonder if the HVAC fellows blew that debris into the water heater?????

Oh, I have some Ugly news.  I am growing yellow cosmos on my front strip and they are just going crazy and have all summer.  As I was teaching an on-line cello lesson Tuesday afternoon, I happened to look out my front window and saw a lady stop her car across the street from our house and then she crossed and started picking some of my cosmos!  After she had a lovely bouquet, she returned to gather some of the seeds that these flowers produce so abundantly.  Huh!?  I wasn't bold enough to hollar out the window at her.  I just watched her steal my flowers.  She was in a dress so maybe she was going to give them to someone??