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Barbara Fritchman Thompson Diary

Week of 25 March 2002

Latest Update: Tuesday, 14 May 2002 18:03

Monday, 25 March 2002

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Monday again. I hope everyone had a good weekend. We spent Sunday in the typical Thompson fashion watching the race and reading. I didn't even fall asleep during this one. Too much action on a short track to risk taking a nap. I have started working the Sunday crossword puzzle while I watch the race. Between that and catching up on some magazines on my side table I had plenty to keep me busy during the afternoon.

Last night just before dinner I took off my glasses to clean them and they broke apart in two pieces. The weld that holds the two sides together broke. I normally keep an old pair around for such accidents but I could not find them. Fortunately I have a pair of magnified half reading glasses I use when we do astronomy. While the distant stuff is a bit blurry I can't read squat up close without glasses. I use the reading glasses during astronomy sessions to see maps and stuff since I don't need my glasses for viewing through binoculars and the scopes.

Bob tried to super glue the two pieces back together but it wouldn't hold since there really wasn't much of a surface for gluing. After that failed the reading glasses didn't help much for long term reading I did the next best thing and taped the two pieces together. They are not exactly joined so I still get a bit of a skewed magnification but it worked to allow me to finish reading the Donna Andrews mystery before time for bed. After we walked the dogs I just went to bed around 10 rather than strain my eyes any longer.

This morning I am off to Baptist Hospital eye center to get a new pair of frames. I called my dad and told him I would have lunch with him while I am up there. He eats first around 11 and then mom goes at 12. I will stick around and visit with her while she eats than head on back home. I want to put out my grass seed today. I had planned to spend the whole day in the yard moving more mulch until the glasses fiasco. While I am out I need to make a couple of other stops.

As promised, here are the pictures from Frances' kitchen shower on Sunday. She has worked a second job at the Old Town Country Club for about ten years now. All the ladies who Frances waits on at the club came to the shower graciously hosted by Mrs. Bahnson at her home shown here in the first picture. The next picture is Frances opening one of her many gifts. 

       The food table. The center piece is a basket filled with various useful kitchen items arranged with fresh cut flowers. 

  Some of the ladies who attended. Mom is sitting in the far back in the blue pant suit. And looking over some of her gifts as we are packing them up.  

I was chief scribe writing down the gifts and who gave them to her as well as photographer. 

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Tuesday, 26 March 2002

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I drove over to the glass repair guy. What a deal He welded the glasses back together for $15. He does nothing but frame repair and charges really inexpensive prices. I was back home before noon to change my cloths, grab a bite to eat, and get started in the yard.

After I put out my grass seed I moved some more mulch. Bob calls my mulch pile Mount Witherow. At this point it has not withered very much but I am making progress. It was a beautiful day with temperatures in the seventies and a few wispy clouds. Around 2:30 I stopped for the day rather than tiring myself completely out  to come in and do some work at my desk. 

I fixed Shepherd's Pie for dinner and then spent the evening relaxing and reading and of course playing with the dogs.

This morning I am off to SciWorks for a little while. This afternoon I am taking the dogs out to visit a lady who is going to do some fostering for CBCR. She just lives west of Winston in Advance, about fifteen minutes from here. Should be a fun afternoon for guys if it doesn't rain. They forecast is for showers and thunderstorms so our outdoor activities may be hampered a bit.

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Wednesday, 27 March 2002

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We hung around inside for about half an hour. The kennel building is about as long as a standard ranch house with office, bathroom, various sized kennels for dogs and cats plus a training room and a grooming section. Pretty nice operation she has set up. Once the rain stopped we went back outside to look around some more of their 7 acres of land which includes ducks and a nice large pond.

Another down pour was getting started again so I went ahead and loaded up the dogs to head back home. It was looking like we would get more of these bands of showers as the afternoon progressed.

Just as I got home and settled in at my computer we did get a pretty good thunder storm and downpour here. I fixed dinner around 5  but we waited until the severe thunderstorm warning was over at 6 to take the dogs out.

After dinner I worked a bit more on the book pages before settling in to read and watch NYPD followed by bedtime.

I am off this morning to play golf for the first time in many, many weeks. It is to be warm and sunny today and tomorrow. 

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Thursday, 28 March 2002

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I visited with them for about an hour or so than came on home. By the time I gave the dogs some attention and quickly checked my mail it was after two o'clock before I got started on the lawn. The major problem with mowing the grass this time of year is the grass is very sappy. It took me well over an hour to mow rather the normal 45 minutes because I had to stop every time I emptied the back to clean out the clogged grass from underneath the mower deck. After I finished mowing I edged the sidewalks and curbs and swept all that stuff up. It was not after 4. I came in to take my shower, check my mail, and catch up on web pages.

We had leftovers for dinner, shepherd's pie from Monday, and pork loin from Tuesday. Than Bob and I made preparations for going up to Bullington to do some observing. Our friend Bonnie was meeting us up there, too.

Although it was a full moon we did get to see some great stuff. First of all, we saw the comet Ikeya-Zhang, which was awesome. It was down low in the sky making it hard to see naked eye due to the haze. But with binoculars you could see the full head of the comet and a good part of the tail.

Among other things going on last night in the sky was the alignment of four planets in a straight line from low on the horizon to overhead in the sky: Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter. I bagged some objects for my viewing sheets including M 41, M46, and M47. I did some lunar stuff but I still need to get myself up to par on the moon and where things are positioned according to my moon map. The moon is one of the hardest objects of the night sky you can try to explore. I am going to have to do some study in that area before I set out to do my next lunar observing.

It was colder up there last night than we expected in both temperatures and wind. The wind was out of the NNW at about 8 to 10 mph's across that open field. It kept blowing around charts and log pages and was pretty cold. The temperatures, low 40's did not bother me, but that wind was something. We finally packed it in around 9:30 and came on home. We sat up and played with the dogs until time for bed around eleven.

This morning I am off to the grocery store then back home to.....yep you guessed it, move mulch. I want to get a lot of it moved today if possible. Bob and I are going to the library and dinner tonight so I don't have to worry about being too tired to cook dinner and can instead spend most of the day in the yard.

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Friday, 29 March 2002

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By the time I took my shower and checked my mail it was time to leave for the library and dinner. I spent the evening resting on the couch reading. I started a mystery that we bought at last year's Cape Fear Crime Festival by a new North Carolina author, Tim Myers. Innkeeping With Murder is set in the mountains of the Blue Ridge in NC at the Hattaras West Inn and Lighthouse run by Alex Winston. If you wish to learn how a lighthouse replica of the Hattaras Light ends up in the mountains you will have to read the book. Tim writes what are called Cozy Mysteries, one of my favorite in the genre. For his first novel, I think he did a pretty good job. I see on the Barnes & Noble web site he has a new book coming out in June. 

Alex inherits the Inn, which he grew up,  from his father. The Inn is not doing as well as it did in earlier days and now Alex is faced with the murder of a long time visitor to the Inn that taught Alex everything he knows about lighthouses. The small town sheriff needs to solve the murder case to help his campaign for reelection but so far seems rather incompetent to do so. And of course, everyone staying at the Inn is a suspect including the murder victims son. It is a fast, pleasing read. I am over half way finished at this point.

I am working at home today. I need to, among other things, clean up my office/desk, brush the dogs, and get some work done on the poison pages. 

This afternoon I will load my car with CBCR merchandise for an early start to Charlotte tomorrow. We always have a table at the flyball event down there and usually host the Saturday night dinner as additional fund raiser. This year we are just doing the table so I am only going down for the day. I need to leave pretty early to get down there and set up by a reasonable hour. I am not sure what time I will get back. It all depends on how late the flyball teams are running and how sales are going.

There will not be a post for Saturday since I am gone all day. Be back on Sunday with my regularly scheduled programming.

Have a nice weekend and Happy Easter for those of you who celebrate this holiday.

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Saturday, 30 March 2002

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Sunday, 31 March 2002

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I had a very successful day yesterday at the flyball tournament. I was selling stuff for CBCR as fast as I could put it on on the table. Once the early shoppers finished and headed back over to do their team flyball runs I finished getting my little booth area organized. I took my water, tea, and snack for lunch plus a book to read during slow times. The building is a long, metal shed type structure, home of the Piedmont Kennel Club. The only time I needed to leave the table was to duck into the ladies room. 

Of course, I had a lot of visits from a wide variety of dogs. Some were rescue, so not. I really enjoy talking with the people at these events. Halving been in rescue and doing flyball, agility, and sheep herding events for three years now I am starting to know a lot of the people who compete in these things. I never go to one that I do not meet a dog that was placed by us at one time or another. 

Around 3 pm most of the traffic at the table had come to a full stop so I started packing things up. I left around 3:45 from Charlotte. I called Bob as I was getting on to I-40 from I-77 to let him know I would be in Winston in about 45 minutes and would stop and pick up Chinese on the way home.

Last night I read, caught up mail, and played with the dogs. 

It is house cleaning day today. There is not race on Easter Sunday. After lunch I need to go down and unload the car and bring up the money box to see exactly how much we made. 

I am reading an old Elisabeth Oglivie book from the library, Devil in Tartan. You will find Elisabeth's Bennett's Island series on my favorite author's page. I decided to give some of her other books a try to see how I liked them. She wrote a wide variety of books over the years, she is now in her 90's, from romance to mystery. The one I am reading now is set in Nova Scotia and deals with a young woman, Noel, who is tracing the Scottish ancestry of her step mother in a fictional town of Brierbank. She has her step brother, Robbie who is 14, with her because his mother wanted him to meet his Nova Scotia relatives. Robbie's father started the genealogy project before he died. Robbie and Noel's parents live in Fremont, MN but Robbie has never met his Nova Scotia kin, the Kendrums who trace their ancestry back to Angus Kendrum who fought at the battle of Culloden in 1746.

Ogilvie uses her own Scottish ancestors as characters for the book. Noel and Robbie are renting a house from one of the Kendrum clan that is lived in by one of the cousins. Of course, their are lots of family feuds, a few ghosts, some Gaelic legends, and much more in the book. I am really enjoying it. Elisabeth wrote this novel in 1980. 

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