2020 Life Logs, Day 45: Happy Valentine’s Day
Date: Friday, February 14, 2020
Weather: Mostly Sunny and COLD; High 28 degrees, Low 11 degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
Here’s hoping everyone had a Happy Valentine’s Day. I had a date tonight with two delightful young men named Jonah and Oliver, and we had a lovely evening together. Their bedroom is going to be painted over the weekend–ceiling, walls, and trim–so they are staying here for a couple of nights. I will take them home to play during the day so I can help with the packing and painting, but it is just easier to have them stay with me at night. Heather and Jed won’t be moving until the end of March, but they have to get their current home ready to put on the market. Since this will be a working weekend, we all took time tonight to play and celebrate Valentine’s Day. Heather and Jed went out to dinner and Jonah, Ollie, and I had our favorite dinner of calamari followed by artichokes. Then we watched The Wizard of Oz. Jonah had seen the original movie, but Ollie had not. Jonah watched the first half and then read for a bit, but Ollie, Shadow, and I were in for the long haul. All of us attended a local production of this story last year, but Ollie really enjoyed seeing the movie and making comparisons with the play. The reason Sam isn’t with us this weekend is that he camping and skiing/snowboarding with his Scout troop. They are skiing/snowboarding in New Hampshire tomorrow and the overnight temperature there is forecast to be -4 degrees F. Yikes! The Scouts will be in a building with a woodstove, but if no one gets up to stoke the fire, they will be without heat. He is using the good to -40 sleeping bag that belonged to Mark before I met him. Mark lived in Laramie, Wyoming in the late 1960’s and enjoyed winter camping using that bag. It was a good one, but it is more than 50 years old and has lost a few feathers over the years. Sure hope it keeps him warm enough tonight.
I had planned to spend the day at Heather and Jed’s doing prep work for the weekend painting, but Jed texted early this morning that he was going to be home sick in bed today. He has a terrible cold and needed the rest, so I let him know that I would not come over until the afternoon so he could sleep peacefully. Shadow and I went over after lunch and Jed was feeling much better, but headed back to bed after we discussed the best use of my time. I made some headway, but there’s tons of work to be done. Shadow and I have another “people” training class tomorrow morning, so I will drop the boys off around 10 am, go to my class, and then come back to help out in the afternoon. Either tomorrow or Sunday, Heather and Jed will arrange for the rental of storage unit, and we will start moving things into that which will make the painting much easier. But they still have to live in the house for another month, so deciding what has to stay and what can go is challenging.
We actually had snow flurries here this morning and the temperature dropped so that it felt like winter. Tomorrow will be cold as well, but then things warm up a bit starting on Sunday. Whether or not we are going to get any extended period of winter weather this year is still to be determined.
