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."

I'm going to depart from my usual format to mention that we stopped off at our favorite Watering Hole, the World Famous Tip a Few Tavern, pictured below, to have some adult beverages on the way home from the bank.

Warm inside, but snowy outside.

A side note, there is sad news about our local branch of Chase Bank™. it is closing soon, leaving behind only an ATM and a memory. Apparently, and this is pure speculation, the real estate is too valuable in downtown GH. There are already condos on part of the site so...

But I digress. We arrived early enough @ Tip to still get a table on a Friday night and watch something on Fox Sports™ that only someone from Chicago could appreciate, a women's PBA Bowling Tournament. The women were great, but they were later supplanted by the "Real" bowlers, the men. I don't really believe that, or do I? : - ). I've included a YouTube™ clip of the movie Kingpin, starring Bill Murray and Woody Harrelson, to illustrate how well the "Real" bowlers, the men, comport themselves on the lanes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AClQyr2koxc

We have a current temperature in the Tri-Cities area of 31 degrees. Nope, I have yet to solve my degrees issue. We are anticipating a high today of 32 degrees and we are still on track to reach the 40s by Tuesday. We'll see the sun rise today @ 7:55 a.m. and set nearly 12 hours later @ 7:52 p.m.

Otherwise, we tried a new tofu recipe, well I sent it to Mary and she did the cooking. This one used slices of tofu battered and breaded and baked in the oven. There was also a recipe for maple/dill dip that Mary made that complemented the tofu perfectly. A real keeper!

I also took time after we dropped the fur-children off at the groomers to bake my annual loaf of Irish soda bread. It took a bit longer to reach to reach the desired internal temperature of 190 degrees than expected, but it turned out great. That loaf is on its way to my Irish Jam Session this afternoon.

Also worthy of mention, is that we made a stop at The Home Depot™, our local big-box home center, and picked up a section of fencing for the back-forty. That fencing is intended to block the access of the fur-children to the muddy areas of the vast gardens of the Palatial Estate (PE). That's as much for our sanity and the protection of our furniture and carpeting as it is for their cleanliness.

Today, Mary has a session on taking pictures with her Macro Lens @ The Camera Store starting @ 1:30 p.m. and running until 3:30 p.m. So, she will be dropping me early at the library and playing roadie to my one-man band and then she will be off to Muskegon.

I'll be jamming and doing some extra playing until she gets back for me around 4:00 p.m. That's okay, as I like to relax in an unstructured setting after a long session.

By the by, the fur-children look much better and they have forgiven us for the ignominy of having them dunked, prodded, clipped and otherwise annoyed. We also spot -cleaned the carpet where necessary while they were out.

John will be here today to get started on the next repainting of the manse. Ciao.