Already finished shoveling. Not nearly as bad as I feared. Like 3 inches of snow with an inch or two of crust on top. I chopped the crust into squares with the blade of my snow shovel so I wasn’t lifting a big slab every time and it went pretty quick. Each shovelful was still pretty heavy though.

Got a few hours of snow followed by a whole day of sleet. I can see all my neighbors hacking at it using regular steel shovels so it must be like 3 inches of solid ice on the ground. I would love to wait until it melts but we are not supposed to see temperatures above freezing for at least a week. 🥶

Just looked outside to see a fine dusting of snow. IT’S STARTING. The timing is poor, there probably won’t be enough to shovel before I go to sleep and a whole lot when I wake up. 😕 I was hoping to shovel a couple of inches every couple of hours to keep the strenuousity of the event to a minimum.

@ktumulty.bsky.social I just read your Jan. 15 chat in which the subject of Trump‘s profane gesture at the Ford plant came up. You replied with a photo of Nelson Rockefeller in 1976. I thought you might enjoy seeing this (slightly) more recent and local example I once clipped from the Post.

It’s just a snowstorm, but the constant drum beat of people predicting power outages got me to run out and fill up the gas can for my generator. I can’t plug in my furnace, but I have a little tiny space heater that will be better than nothing if disaster strikes. My food I could just put outside.

The calm before the winter storm... It is actually still sunny out right now. I raked and bagged a few leaves from my driveway and my fingers went numb in 10 minutes even though it is still a balmy 20° out. It will likely be single digits by the time I have to start shoveling snow. 🌨️ ❄️ ☃️ 🥶

I am really not thrilled at the prospect of having a foot or more of snow this weekend, but I guess things could be worse.

Last I heard, the predictions for the whopper storm include somewhere between zero and 21 inches of snow. So I’ve got that going for me, or not. ☃️

Judging by the things I’m finding, it *might* have been a little while since I cleaned off the top of my desk.

Someone on Reddit said they use a “spike stick” to store receipts on and I added a comment explaining it is called a spindle and how “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate” became a catchphrase in the 70s. I got 250 upvotes, so maybe I need to carve out a niche as “old guy who explains ancient things.”😅

AI photos are getting harder and harder to detect, but if you look at this one very carefully, you’ll notice that the coffee mug is actually sitting on the floor.

The worst part of the jacked-up price of olive oil the past couple of years is that it hardly ever goes on sale anymore. I’m lucky to find it a dollar off. My market used to semi-regularly have them a couple dollars off and buy 2 get 1 free at the same time. Maybe I need to plant an olive tree.

Every day when I wake up, I slip off the sweatpants I wore to bed and slip on a pair of other pants to wear around the house. I just realized that today I forgot to take off the sweatpants first and put the house pants on right over top of them. 😳

Yesterday I figured out how to disassemble the plastic typewriter parts from the metal chassis so I could clean them separately. It is like new now. I did not remove the key caps but somehow managed to lose the E anyway. Searched for an hour last night. About to tear the house apart if necessary.

My tiny brushes and swabs have all arrived, so I can start working on fixing up my new typewriters. This first one looks and works pretty good even before cleaning it up or replacing the ribbon which has to be decades old by now.

Made my toast sideways. 2026 is going to be INSANE.

I don’t even know what this is, I just ran into it on Reddit, but it is bloody hilarious. Interview of a government spokesman about a ship whose front fell off: youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM

I finished eating all of last week’s food a couple of days ago and my rash never came back, so I guess it was not a food allergy after all. Just one of those normal situations where your entire body suddenly breaks out in red splotches for no reason and then goes away 24 hours later. 🤷‍♂️

I was promised a blissful 2026 and I like my odds as long as I keep finding gems like this to keep the mood light. 😄

I tried to make vegetable soup this week but I never did it before so the food left the soup category right away, shot right on past stew and became just a bunch of vegetables and noodles in tomato sauce. I probably could have added a few cups of liquid to turn it back into soup but why bother.

It seems a little weird to honor victims who perished in a deadly fire by lighting a million candles in their memory.

The rashes I’ve been having seem to fade 95% away after 20 hours or so. It has to be a reaction to something I’m eating. The last couple of nights I only ate two things I don’t usually have. I guess I will eat one tonight and one tomorrow to see which one it is. Which means one more day of rash. 🫤

I’m proud of my frugal habits, but I miss the days when it wasn’t possible to save this much money on groceries in a year. At least not without noticing it.

Oh yeah! Everything‘s coming up Milhouse!

I don’t know what is going on with this mystery affliction I have developed. Last night my whole body turned red and splotchy, as though I had stripped naked and rolled around in poison ivy. But not quite as itchy, thankfully. This morning most of that has faded but now my hands have flared up.

I was at the window taking pictures of the Baltimore fireworks and saw a neighborhood fox running through the street. Poor doggy. 🦊💥🙁 Make it through the night and you should be good for another six months, little one.

I took a nap and woke up with my head itching and rashes and red splotches appearing all over my body. What the heck is going on? I hope this is a 2025 thing and not a 2026 thing.

A friend who lives 10 miles away from me sent a Christmas card that was postmarked on the 17th but didn’t arrive until the 24th. I thought that might be the post office’s low point until I got two more Christmas cards today.

I’ve become convinced that streaming services are just automatic email companies that happen to also play videos.

Apparently this is ten years old, but I don’t remember seeing it before. That doesn’t mean I didn’t though. Anyway, enjoy this Star Trek Christmas song: youtu.be/sZt6eU5REN8

Today I learned that when “Fahrenheit 451” first came out, they published 200 copies of the book bound in asbestos covers. www.reddit.com/r/rarebooks/...

Once I have gained some knowledge at restoring typewriters, I will put the skills to work on this Royal which I have had for decades but only used as a decoration. My great-grandparents purchased it new in 1938. I also have an LC Smith from around 1910 which I believe was their previous typewriter.

Santa brought me a new hobby yesterday thanks to an ad in the free section of craigslist for manual typewriters. There were no photos so I feared picking up a bunch of junk but they turned out to be pretty decent. Now I can learn how to clean and restore them. Then I need to find something to type.

I had to mail a small padded envelope of stuff to an address in my own county and the post office charged me $12.85. 😳 How is eBay even still a thing at these prices? To drive it there myself would have cost about the same in gas though, it was a no-win situation for me.

I’ve gotten too lazy to even make peanut butter crackers anymore. I just eat some crackers then eat some peanut butter. It works.

It feels like I just posted one of these, but here is another specific example of why Google can’t be trusted anymore. I was looking up an episode of “WKRP in Cincinnati” and the Google summary says it was S4,E10. As every other link below this correctly noted, it was episode 9, not 10. Simple fact.

It really is a magical time of year. For everybody.

I bought some HDMI switches last week so I can play records on the turntable without having to turn my television off. The TV is my support animal. I don’t like giving it a time out. But all the vinyl and turntable posts I see on Reddit made me feel guilty for leaving mine just sitting there unused.

My popcorn air popper didn’t even last two years before its plastic fan cracked. Contacted the company who told me “We don’t sell replacement parts.” So my $30 appliance is no good because of a 99¢ fan. I plan to try using epoxy on it but I have low hopes of success.

It’s frustrating that my microwave and toaster from the 1980s still work fine, but kitchen appliances I bought the last few years are dying on me. My kitchen scale display is barely readable. Which is also frustrating because otherwise it works fine but I will have to throw it out.

Prepare to fire the photon potatoes, Mr. Chekov.

The pumpkin pie I made last night for Thanksgiving was begging me to eat it a day early, so I had to distract myself by baking a birthday cake.

As long as I am sharing things from Instagram… There’s a lady who films herself playing drums along to TV theme songs. Every time one of her videos pops up in my feed I take the opportunity to go back to her page and watch the time she did “Laverne and Shirley”. www.instagram.com/reel/DOG5USy...

I don’t know if you can post things from Instagram successfully here on Bluesky, but this one is worth the try. If “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” had been written by Arlo Guthrie: www.instagram.com/reel/DRdzh-W...

I accepted an invitation to my cousin’s Thanksgiving dinner and now I only have four days to decide what to wear.

As with so many things, AI is just completely wrong on this once again. Not that I was relying on them. I had just assumed it was still available on HBO because the movie had been there forever. I don’t know when they removed it, but it can’t have been that long ago.

I have really been wanting to watch the movie “Doctor Sleep” for a second time. It is the sequel to “The Shining” which I haven’t seen in 30 years. So this time I spent 2½ hours watching “The Shining” first, only to find out that “Doctor Sleep” is no longer carried on any of my streaming services. 😠

Whether you baste it or not, I am pretty sure it is done by now, you can probably take it out of the oven.

While “algorithm” seems to be a dirty word these days, I can’t complain too much about one that recommends Snoopy, Star Trek, and Paul McCartney. A dash of Grace Slick and weird architecture only sweetens the deal.

In this SNL sketch from last night about the making of a Scandinavian movie, Jane Wickline’s only role was to introduce the scenes. But she nailed her delivery so well I had to make a clip of it for my phone so I can play it over and over and crack up every single time. 🎬🤣