2021 Life Logs, Day 199: Fun Sunday with Ollie
Date: Sunday, July 18, 2021
Weather: Rain Overnight, Partly Sunny Day; High Temp 80, Low 69 degrees F
Location: At Home in The Cottage, East Falmouth, MA
Jonah and Ollie spent the night last night. We got to bed late after watching a Red Sox versus Yankees game until it was ended due to rain, so we got a lazy start this morning. We didn’t eat breakfast until 10:30 and then Jonah had to get ready for Heather to pick him up to go get his second Covid vaccine. Ollie opted to stay here and we watched a YouTube video about building a creative luxury bamboo villa with primitive tools. It was an hour-long video, but it certainly kept my attention. Then we went down to the basement to play a couple of games of table shuffleboard. 
While playing, Ollie asked if he could look at his Uncle Justin’s primitive tools from West Africa. This was prompted by watching the video. I got out the box of tools Justin used to make a djembe drum and in that same box was a leather sheathed machete from Panama that went around the world on Windbird. The leather was brittle and the blade was very rusty. This prompted Ollie to ask if he could try to revive the machete which prompted me to get out all of my Dremels to see if any of them still worked. I knew I had attachments that would attack the rust and we found that two of the three Dremels worked just fine. Ollie set up a makeshift worktable using an old tire and some wood I was throwing away and he spent the next hour or more grinding away at the machete blade using me as his assistant. I have wanted to check out those Dremels for weeks and this gave me the perfect opportunity to have fun with Ollie and accomplish a goal of my own. We had left over beef burgers for lunch in the back yard. I sat at one of the tables and Ollie mostly ate his beef burger while lying in the hammock. Ollie refuses to call them hamburgers because he says there is absolutely no ham in them! Next, we played croquet and then I took him home. Ollie and I had a delightful afternoon together and Ollie seemed to really enjoy his personal time with Shadow. And when I took him home, we both enjoyed seeing the front yard improvements the rest of the Goldstones had been working on all afternoon.
I spent much of my evening on the phone catching up with family, but that did not go smoothly. Earlier in the day, Karen Baranowski had called me from New York and we kept getting cut off. She could hear me but I could not hear her. I assumed it was her connection on Long Island. But then tonight I had the same problem while talking to my sister. I called Heather for technical help and the same thing happened while talking to her. She could hear me, but I could not hear her. She texted and told me to reboot my phone. I did and all was well, but that was after a lot of frustration. So, lesson learned. When having a technical problem with a phone or a computer, the first troubleshooting activity is to reboot. Hopefully, that will solve the problem.
