Saturday 3-11-23 Visiting Louise & Alice & New Soup Bowls

 

Have a happy Saturday

We started the day out by going to Round Rock to visit Louise and Alice. We hadn't seen them since Christmas. We usually go to see Louise every month or two to make sure she' doing ok fixing a few things around her house. 

On the way to Louise's we stopped by Jack 'n' Jill Donuts and bought breakfast. We arrived at Louise's around 9:00. The light switch in the kitchen was not working correctly with Alexa, Larry replaced the switch with a new one. Many of her other switches and plugs also would no longer work with Alexa. Larry discovered that those devices had disappeared from the Alexa settings. He reprogrammed everything and it is all back to working again. While none of these home automation types of things are critical they certainly are convenient. 

We use Alexa for so many things and when something doesn't work we miss it. We use Alexa to open and close our blinds, turn our TV on and off, turn the lights and ceiling fans on and off, change the thermostat, when we leave the house we can have Alexa turn off all our lights and ceiling fans simply by telling her we are leaving. When we get home we can tell her were home and she will turn the lights on that we normally use. Of course we also use her for timers and alarms and to ask questions. There is not a day that goes by that we don't ask her something, sometimes its the weather, or something about a person, or to convert something from metric to English, someone says something cost so many peso's she will convert that for us, many people we dance with are from other countries and will tell us their temperature in Celsius, Alexa can covert that to Fahrenheit in seconds. Oh, I did not know how to spell Fahrenheit so I simply asked Alexa and she spelled it out for me. She has become part of our daily lives. 

Spring is wildflower time in Texas and this spring they are coming out early. There are Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrushes lining the highways. We have some in our area but just a few miles south they are really abundant. Many years they don't appear until April. Lovely to see.

Louise decided to buy some finger food for lunch instead of a pizza. We had TGI Friday cream cheese stuffed jalapenos and mozzarella sticks. They were good. 

We had a super visit with Louise and Alice.

Our soup bowls have been cracked for a long time. I didn't want to get rid of them because they were the perfect size. While shopping yesterday we looked at Walmart and HEB for replacements but couldn't find any. When we got home Larry went on Amazon and found some that would work so he ordered them. While I was napping today they arrived. They are ceramic with ceramic lids. They're a little larger than the old ones but they will work. The lids don't really fit correctly but they will also work. I tried one out for cooking leftover pork for dinner. It worked out great. It is very difficult to find these types of bowls with ceramic or glass lids, most have plastic lids that you can't use in the microwave.

Soup Bowls

 

The bowl and lid

 

How the lid fits bowl

I played the Daily Challenges of Solitaire and Mahjong. The event today was Event: Pyramid Mini of 10 games. It took me 40 minutes and 10 seconds, which put me in 13th place in my group. I played some Angry Birds.

In the evening we watched the next Marvel movie, which was Doctor Strange. It was a very good movie. Afterwards we watched an episode of Poirot. Then I watched The Call of the Wild on Disney. It was a 2020 movie starring Harrison Ford. It was a based on the novel The Call of the Wild. It was a good movie about a domestic dog that finds his calling. Then I watched a couple of episodes of The Frankenstein Chronicles. I ended up doing 28,000 steps, which put me in 4th place in my group.

Tomorrow Larry will need to install next weeks pinball challenge game for me. He downloaded it before he went to bed. It's a version of Tron that was done in 2020. We did a different Tron game a few weeks back. I played Batman and got a new high score of 212,491,880.

New high score