1. It wasn't a big deal. I tried for four days to pay a bill online, one that I pay this way every month. No luck. Four days of a repeated error message. Okay. Be patient. Try another route. I printed out the bill, wrote a check, included a letter of explanation, and mailed it in. After nearly two weeks the check hadn't cleared, so I called the company today and found out that because things at the collections department have been slowed down by the realities of the pandemic, it's likely no one had tended to my payment yet. I said to the agent, "I understand". Internet service has been spotty at home lately, but after a few attempts, I was able to stop payment on the check. I was ready to call in a payment, but decided to give paying online one more try. It worked! The bill is paid. The check is canceled. I started this week with three pieces of home business to take care of. I like to take care of these things like this by doing one a day. One down. Two to go.
2. I thawed the last two quarts of ham stock I made back in August. While it thawed, I chopped up onion and celery and sauteed the pieces in the Dutch oven and, when soft, added in a couple or three cloves of chopped garlic cloves. I poured the thawed stock over these aromatics and added three yams chopped, a handful or so of mushrooms, some chopped cabbage, and a couple of cups of dried lentils. I brought this soup/stew to a slight boil, turned down the heat, and let it slow cook for over an hour until the lentil were soft.
I was cooking on a wing and prayer, hoping this combination would work well together.
It did.
The lentils and mushrooms gave the soup/stew an earthy quality. The ham stock made it subtly, mildly salty. The yams sweetened the soup. Debbie and I both enjoyed it a lot and, after dinner, I put almost two quarts of leftover soup/stew in the icebox for future enjoyment.
3. Tonight Debbie and I watched Episode 3 of the Season 3 of Foyle's War. To date, this was the most complex episode of this show I've seen. When it ended, Debbie exclaimed, "Whew! That was like The Wire! Only different." Yes, it was. It was like The Wire in the way it so deftly treated a variety of human experiences: the physical and mental costs of war, adultery, grace and understanding, leniency, domestic battery, the bearing and revealing of secrets and lies, revenge, love between father and son, and others. These matters between and within characters all arose in the course of Foyle and Milner's investigations of sabotage at a newly formed burn hospital treating RAF pilots and of a murder. It was unlike The Wire in tone, how characters talk to each other, what they are involved in and, of course, in setting. Hastings, England in 1941 is vastly different than Baltimore in the 1990s!
Upon its completion, even though it was getting a little bit late, Debbie and I wanted to continue our party.
Some poking around I'd done earlier in the day revealed that Ken Burns' documentary project examining the history of country music was available on the tv's PBS app.
Dan had told me he enjoyed Ken Burns' Country Music a lot and I'd read other praise of it elsewhere on social media.
We got about an hour or so into the first episode and I loved both its exploration of the origins of country music in the USA and the short interviews with country musicians of the 20th and 21st century like Dolly Parton, Kathy Mattea, Kris Kristofferson, Merle Haggard, and others. Not only did I enjoy learning about how musical traditions that traveled from Europe and Africa combined to create country music, I also enjoyed learning about how early phonograph records and the early growth of radio helped boost country music's popularity.
It's possible you might need to look up a vocabulary word in the limerick Stu wrote for today. (I know I did!):
So here is a question to ponder.
If weather be dark when you wander.
Is "gloomy the word,
Or should "dreary" be heard?
And your answer should not cause to maunder.
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