Day 8 of Hanging Around The House

Well, it's day 8 of our self quarantine.  It's dreary and dark and starting to snow again.  Doesn't he look sad?

Actually it's only day 6 for Steve. He spent last Thursday helping his dad with a particularly important situation that needed person-to-person contact. But from then on, he's been home with me and no contact anywhere else.

He is working on a few projects, as well as helping with some of the things that I am doing.  He is finding a lot of little things to take care of around here. Yesterday, though, we had kind of a sluggish "lay around day" and didn't get a lot accomplished.

Why????

It's because of the TV!

Since we are self quarantined, we splurged and upgraded to a thing called "Spectrum Stream TV" for $24.99 a month.  We already have Spectrum Internet for $45 a month.  So this will be added to the monthly bill.

We have only had broadcast antenna tv to watch since moving here with limited stations. But we do have a Smart TV so we can get online for free things to watch.  That is limited too, but we don't watch that much tv anyhow.  There is really nothing on the major prime time tv networks that interests us.  Mostly just the old shows on MeTV like Andy Griffith and Hogans Heros etc and PBS shows. We are located 40+ miles from the nearest tv towers, so our antenna isn't always the best, and goes out during rain and snow and ice.

This Spectrum Stream TV app lets us watch unlocked episodes now of all the stuff on History and HGTV and about 25 other stations as well as all of our local stations. So when the broadcast TV antenna acts goofy in bad weather, we will still get all of our local stations. It doesn't have as many stations as the regular (more expensive) Spectrum cable, but it's good enough for what we only want to watch.

We can watch live tv, or on demand shows too now. We sat around yesterday and watched a bunch of shows of Steve's favorite American Pickers, as well as a bunch of HGTV shows and caught up on one of our other home fixing favorites, Home Town with Ben and Erin of Laurel Mississippi.

Sadly, we don't get DIY. Because then we would catch up on all of the episodes of Rehab Addict with Nicole Curtis of Detroit. I love her shows the most!

So that is why we didn't get a lot of other things done....

The sun was out yesterday and even though it was only about 40 degrees it was very pleasant. We spent some time sitting out on the front porch in the sunshine, just soaking in the vitamin D. We took the dogs for a walk up and down the road for about half of mile, practicing our "social distancing" by just waving at people as they drove by.

We did take the dogs out in the backyard for a while too. The snow is melting and it's reduced itself to a crystal like sparkly sugar snow that kind of rustles andf tinkles out of the way when you walk on it. It's really actually pretty and sparkles in the sun.

I made this slow-motion video of the dogs running around and I think it's really cool. They sure had fun, and slept well last night.  I think we wore them out.

Steve helped me reconfigure the pull cord on the bird feeder. We added a pulley up on the branch and a cord with two loops on it. The one loop is for the really high position and the other loop is for when I lower it down to an adequate height to fill it.

I screwed a hook into the tree to hang the loops on. Look at the big holes in the bark from the damage caused by the deer hooves... from balancing against the tree to get their heads up near the bird feeder! Now it will be too high and there's no way they can reach it.

While I was filling the bird feeder, a huge flock of red-winged blackbirds were angrily chirping at me from up in the tallest pine tree. They wanted me to get out of the way so they could get back down to the seeds that they were gobbling up. We are filling all of the bird feeders everyday, and a suet block at least every other day for the woodpeckers. Spring is finally here.

Felt good to be out in the fresh air and sunshine. Even though there's things we could be doing in the house, it's nice to do those on a day that you can't get outside.  We appreciate the sunshine, even if it is still cool.

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We did do one silly thing inside of the house which might show that we are getting kind of bored. We rearranged our bedroom!  It meant crawling under the king sized bed and hand screwing up the three center support legs.  Then we could rotate the entire bed 180 degrees without dismantling it.  Yes, the doggies thought that was fun!

Since Steve has redone the electrical wiring he was able to relocate the wall switch for the ceiling light from a really inconvenient spot in the middle of a wall section, to a better place that makes more sense by the door.

Now the wall switch has been moved, I decided I wanted the headboard of the bed put against that wall where the original switch had been. I have a devious plan in mind... When we get around to replacing the windows all around the house, I would like to install two NEW windows on the East wall opposite the foot of the bed.

The new windows would be overlooking the beautiful backyard! We could have the sun streaming in the morning right into the bedroom. We had that in Chilton and I really enjoyed starting out the day that way. I even have this crazy fantasy about an electronically remote controlled window blind that I can just hit the button and have the blind go up to reveal the day.  This would be so nice while we have our little bit of coffee before we get up and get moving!!

We already have a powered windshield shade in our motorhome and is just one of the most delightful things to press that button and open up the window to expose the day.

Kind of a crazy little thrill, but hey, I think it would be kind of nice???