Good morning or good evening, wherever you may be, across the nation and across the world. It is just past 5:00 a.m. in "The City."

The current temperature is 35° under partly-cloudy-skies. Today's high is forecast to reach 39°, also under partly-cloudy-skies The sun will rise today @ 7:37 a.m. and set later @ 5:21 p.m.

There is a Small Craft Advisory in effect for the "Big Lake" until 4:00 p.m. today. Inexperienced mariners, small craft without instrumentation and anything smaller than a freighter should stay in port.


Yesterday was rather mundane. Since neither ourselves nor the fur-children got downstairs until nearly 1:00 p.m., neither we nor they ate breakfast, or was it lunch, until then. One of the reasons we got up so late, was that Mary had stayed up late the night/early morning before to finish a book that she was thoroughly enjoying. Once I was done letting the fur-children out, I repaired to the man-cave and did some woodworking. My original plan to do some wood-burning on our newest Christmas ornaments, but that was thwarted by the failure of my old wood-burner/soldering iron to get hot. So, I got out my trusty jig-saw and used that to work on something else.

Ultimately, that cold wood-burning tool necessitated a late-afternoon run to that big-box arts and crafts store in Norton Shores for a replacement using a 55% off coupon that I had recently downloaded. Mary assures me that they make money if, and in our case that if is huge, if we load up a cart with other items that are not on sale. However, they seemingly put the entire store on sale regularly, so...Since we didn't buy additional items, we won, they lost.


Following that stop, we traveled to the Ace™ hardware in Spring Lake and then ultimately to that big-box home center in GH for yet another tool that I "needed", followed by dinner @ Don Luis. This time, Mary took along some reusable containers for our leftovers to keep even more throw-away containers from entering the landfill. A small gesture, but we try.


Home for the evening dinner meal for the fur-children and their after-inner run, followed by some TV viewing on our part. I then retired to the media-room for some additional TV viewing and a nap. I awoke in my recliner long enough to go to bed. I awoke this morning around 4:00 a.m. and so here I am.


Today, I hope to bake some cookies and then get back to that wood-burning and some additional work on that other project in the man-cave that I have going. That's along with some painting in my studio. Mary has more reading to do and and I have to work on a crossword puzzle from yesterday's edition of the Grand Haven Tribune, a reprint of the puzzle from the L.A. Times. Ciao.