A Few Quick Notes 602

-Though cloudy, today wasn't a particularly cool day.  Since our sudden and unexpectedly resilient snowfall of a few days ago I expect full-blown winter to arrive with each dawn.  When I leave the house and discover winter hasn't yet arrived I'm both pleased and disappointed.

-The arrival of winter would be even more welcome if our fireplace was fully functional.  At the moment the chimney is in need of a serious cleaning.  Until we have it cleaned we won't be able to determine if it's safe to use, and if not how much work might be required to make it so.  While I'd really like to have a fully functional fireplace this is likely something that will have to wait until at least next year.

-We went on a somewhat lengthy shopping trip this afternoon.  As usual, once we're out on our weekend shopping trips we keep remembering additional items that we've been meaning to buy.  Also, at least this normally happens, we tend to forget a handful of items necessitating future trips.  Fortunately, the items that we forgot today weren't so important that we'll have to head out today or even tomorrow.

-My 'smart' phone, or at least its operating system, has been behaving somewhat erratically for the past few weeks.  It seems that the major update has really negatively impacted the operational capacity of the phone - despite the fact that this was presumably exactly the opposite of what the developers intended with the new update.  Anyway, it's definitely been a frustrating way to waste a few hours.

-Now that we're a few weeks into fall the sun has started setting not long after I return home from work.  While this is to be expected, the transition has been happening a little more quickly than I expected.  It won't be long before my walks to and from work will occur mostly in the dark.

-A few days ago I combined a few ingredients and made some pea soup.  I'm continually amazed at how simple, yet tasty, pea soup can be.  Maybe even more impressive, is that the stuff seems to keep getting better in the following days.

-Turns out homeownership is definitely time-consuming.  This weekend I had the pleasure of spending a fair bit of time installing a single board above one of our basement windows.  Not only will this board be used to hang a blind, it will also improve our house's security as it will also prevent one of our windows from easily being pushed in from the outside.  While I'm not pleased at how long this project took, I am pleased with the results.