THE WEISS CHRONICLES

 

In my dream I was guiding a tour of some kind.

 

Perhaps it was in Israel, maybe about history or food.

 

The group I was guiding was primarily black.

 

I finished my presentation and two of the group came up to meet me. 

The two were Louis Farrakhan and  O J Simpson (I have watched some specials on TV this month about black history but none mentioned these two -to the best of my memory).

 

In my dream I had my smart phone and gave it to someone so they could take a picture of the three of us.

 

My subconscious was playing with me.

The Gans, a.k.a., gannim, a.k.a., child care places, have had an on again, off again history this past year in Israel.

 

There were three
general lockdowns and other partial geographically limited lockdowns in which some of them were closed.

 

But, for Purim this year (actually the day before), they were open. 

 

Oz is on the right in the dinosaur confrontation in the first image.

 

The second image has Beth in her sheep costume. She said she was being 'herd immunity'.

 At the caterer today there was a lot of red cabbage to clean.  After cleaning, there was a lot to dry.  The dryer (the big grey cylinder on wheels, the pipe in the bowl sends it to the bowl) spits out the liquid stuck to the cabbage into a container.  

 

Well, as it turns out, the residue liquid from red cabbage, post washing, is blue.

Usually the caterer gets pre washed cabbage but this time a bunch of orders came in too late and fresh produce had to be bought at the grocery. 

Irwin recalled an incident that we think happened about 50 or 60 years ago.  Our father was riffing on the oddities of the English language.  He said something like this, "when blueberries are red they are still green (in this case green = unripe)".

 

With the worst of the winter past us, it was time for houseplant moving day.

 

This is when the houseplants get moved from the near constant temperature but very little natural light house to the variable temperature buy more natural light sun room.

 

The sun room is unheated but since it is next to the house it is warmed somewhat by the main house.  In the worst of the winter, the sun room will be about 10F above the outside temperature.

 

I don't foresee any long periods of sub 20F outside temperature the rest of the winter but if we do get that I'll have to bring them in again since they are vulnerable if they get below freezing for a few hours.

 

 

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I got a call on my land line.

Usually I don't answer unless I think I know the person calling. 

But in this case I did because the name (Morgan Loganwise) was interesting.

It turned out to be a phish.

They said my Amazon Prime Account was going to be charged $199 and is it really me.

I decided not to hang up and asked, "I don't have an Amazon Prime Account. Who is the person on the account and where do they live?"

They said the Amazon Prime Account belonged to Lillian L. Weiss (image is from a 1975 picture). My mother has been dead for over 20 years (Amazon was founded in the 1990s but didn't have Prime until 2007) , in fact her yarzeit was just a few weeks ago. They said she lived at 8211 Postoak, which is my address and we did forward her mail to our address at one point. They said the customer charged the account from a phone physically located in Ohio.

I told them to block that phone and close the account and then hung up.

 

That isn't snow in the first image, taken this morning.  It is sleet. 

It was enough sleet to have the plows do our street.

It was enough sleet to close most of the government.

It was enough sleet to close the Red Cross Center in Rockville where I had been scheduled to give platelets today.  I'm scheduled for a platelets donation on 3 March so I'll keep that and, because it is about a month since the previous donation, they may want to take plasma as well as platelets.

Instead of the usual MST3000 movie that I would see while donating platelets, Ann and I saw a 50 minute youtube called, "Royal Britain: An Aerial History of the Monarchy.   

We've seen a lot of youtube tours over the course of the year+ of the plague.  This was different because they show all the castles and estates and so forth from the air.

 

The second image (from Wikipedia) is of Harlech Castle in Wales.  I'm pretty sure I had never heard of it before.  It is famous mostly because for 7 years, the Lancaster forces held out in it against the York forces (1461-1468) and for 7 years (1642-1649), the forces of the Parliamentarians besieged it (in both cases, the defense ultimately surrendered). In the latter siege, the forces surrounding the castle numbered about 1000 and the forces holding the castle numbered about 50. During that time it was the last piece of land loyal to Charles I.  Coincidentally, the castle was built in 7 years beginning in 1282 under Edward I (Longshanks), one of the 'bad guys' of history.

Some people speculated that old Redskin paraphernalia would become collector items. 

 

Well this doesn't seem to be true for one item, the Redskin Sterno Cooler. 

 

Today it was on sale at about 75% discount at the Harris Teeter near our house in Park Potomac.

 

Giving Platelets again, this time at 8am Thursday 4 February last week.

Metrics 64=pulse, 140/90 BP, Hg=15.2, Covid=Negative

The new technology was a forehead  temperature reader (first image) that

doesn't require a person to hold a device.  You put your forehead about 3' from the machine in the right position.  The machine read 98.1F while in the intake, the under the tongue reading was 99.0F.

I watched the  MST version of the 1961 movie Gorgo (2nd and third images) which is a British knock off of Godzilla.  During an intermission, Mike
Nelson and the robots made a mini play called, "Waiting for Gorgo" . It is is a satire of the 1948-written play by Samuel Beckett, "Waiting for Godot".

One of my favorite comments was during the credit roll. 

One of the characters is called "First Naval Officer".

A robots says, "Does that mean there were no naval officers before this movie was shown?"

 If there were a perfect snowstorm this would be it. 

 

The snow began early Sunday and was done by about noon on Sunday.

 

There was an inch or two on the grass and trees. The streets, sidewalks and driveway were almost clear about that time.

We had two days before the snow both with high temperature of about 50F.  Consequently the concrete was warm enough to melt the snow as it fell.

 

The snow began Jan 31 before dawn.

 

We've had snow, sleet, freezing drizzle. We've also had periods with just plain cloudiness. 

 

 

After each accumulation there has been compaction. So whatever the current depth, perhaps 5" or so, the total snow has been greater.

 

The temperature has remained within a degree or two of freezing all this time, just where it is in the first image.

The second image shows the backyard. Elsewhere in the east, snow has fallen from Tennessee to Ohio to Maine with some parts of the NJ getting over 30". 

 

 

The last image is of Great Falls, VA. It is just a few miles southwest of us. The image was taken yesterday by Kevin Ambrose and posted at Capital Weather Gang.

E
 

 

For 18 months we have been working to get Oz a Social Security number.

As part of that, we had to get an original passport. George has been the point man on this for the past few months.

 

Beth mailed it to us in mid December.

It arrived today, February 1.

 

I was at a medical appointment.  The technician, a woman in her 20s or so was about to do an ultrasound (to determine the size of my prostrate, which was 72 cc).

She asked, "Can I have your birthday?"

I said, "No. Furthermore, you wouldn't want it. However you may know what it is."

This reminded me of the sayings,

"some people want to retire but not get older" 

and

"Everyone wants to go to heaven but no one wants to die".