Friday
The day started out with us taking Cali back to the Vet as she still wasn't doing well. We started her back on Cetrine in the afternoon and she was better on Sat, Sun and Mon (good appetite, but no poop on Sun/Mon) By Tuesday, she was back to not doing so well. Fortunately, eventually, she did get back to feeling well.
I Spent a good part of the day dealing with insurance - homeowner, umbrella, automobile, etc. In general, I'm not really happy with our current independent insurance agency. I guess I just got spoiled by our agent of twenty years in North Carolina, Jerry Teague. The existing agency just doesn't provide a good level of service. Forget being proactive, they don't even do a good job of following up on what we ask them to do. As an example, when our address street number changed due to 911 changes in the county, we notified the agency of the change. Apparently, they never properly processed the notification, since the new bills still had the old address on them. Another issue was the lack of credit for wind mitigation last year - even after we sent them the report, then called to follow up to make sure they received it and acted on it. It was only luck that we figured it out after getting a new quote from another company (Olympus) and overhearing another agent's comment about St. John's being cheaper than Olympus. Had that not happened, we would have ended up overpaying over $800 for our homeowners insurance.
We had dinner at Pepper's on-island. Jeanie had fish taco's - I didn't like the sauce. I had seafood fajitas - they were delicious, although I would have preferred more peppers and onions. The serving was enough for four people and included a fillet of fish, shrimp, scallops and fake crab in addition to the tortillas, guacamole, source cream, cheese, lettuce and pico-de-gallo.
Saturday
I gave blood to The Blood Alliance at a Fernandina Pirates Club blood drive at Murray's Grille. While I do appreciate the fact that The Blood Alliance is quite convenient due to their frequent blood drives close to home, I do miss the way the American Red Cross made a point of recognizing each gallon milestone. It turned out that this was my 9th donation, yet I would not have known had I not bothered to look it up on their web site. While collecting gallon pins was never the primary motivation for donating, it was a nice gesture on the part of the ARC. On the other hand, the BA has a Donor Awards program that appears to be quite cool. You get points for each donation that you can then use to select various BA logo items from an online catalog. The primary motivation is still to help others, and the secondary motivation is that I believe there are health benefits to draining a pint every few months, but getting a little pat on the back is nice too.
Speaking of the Pirates Club, why is it that pirates are so celebrated in our culture? Think about it... pirates were murdering thieves who raped and pillaged. No one would think of celebrating the current crop of Somali pirates. Why so then the pirates of yore, who in many ways were much worse than those of today?
In the afternoon, we watched a bunch of "Rescue Me" episodes. I found them to be funnier and not as mean as last year. Jeanie baked banana nut bread and muffins which were yummy. One of my coworkers with whom I had spent the better part of last year working with on my last deal called to tell me about his first flying lesson. I was really excited to hear how excited he was, and I hope that he continues on through obtaining his certificate. We ate the fajita leftovers for lunch. For dinner, we had a real oven baked potato (not wrapped in foil) for dinner. Baking the potato in an oven (as opposed to a microwave) without foil results in such a nice fluffy potato, with just the right amount of bite to the skin.
Sunday
I did the usual morning coffee thing at the airport. I then returned home, picked up Jeanie, and headed back on-island so we could have Calzone at Tony's. We spent the bulk of the afternoon driving around and looked at houses and neighborhoods. On the way home, we went to Lowes to get three pyramid shaped trellises for the back yard.
Monday
We spent most of the day working in the flower bed in the back yard. The primary focus was getting the trellises installed and pulling some of the dollar weed out of the primary bed. The reason we installed three trellises is that we have three Carolina Jasmine bushes that we had severely cut back because they had gotten out of control. Each jasmine will now have a trellis that it can climb on, but that will allow us to keep the bushes under control. As an aside, the fig and grapefruit trees we planted at the end of March are doing really well. A few weeks earlier, I had noticed that the leaves were yellowing and buds were browning. I had thought that the problem was either poor soil, improper PH or a lack of iron, but it now appears that the problem must have been insufficient water since the only thing that has changed in the last few weeks is that it has rained every day.
In the late afternoon, we watched WALL-E which we both thought was really cute.
After dinner, I burned the new live ColdPlay CD for Jeanie. The CD is available as a free download (zip file with MP3's) as "a thank you to our fans" at this link. I also created the new Aviation / Flying page on Witsdom.
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Posted by David at May 26, 2009 08:01 PM | Categorized under: A day in the life, Commentary, Flying, My blog