Christmas Week, 2016

I'm sitting by the fire on a rainy Christmas Day afternoon with Toby and Charlie to keep me company. Tammy and Cindy are visiting their mom at Trinity Care Center in Farmington. We're so pleased with the level of care she's receiving there. I remember how we were hesitant to have her placed in a nursing home environment but it's turned out to be an excellent decision.

We had a nice Christmas Eve service last night at Family of Christ—our new church home. We like everything about FoC but we especially like its down-to-earth feel. It's not the megachurch we're accustomed to and that's a good thing. As an aside—we attended a Hymn Tap sing-along last Monday night at The Dubliner Pub in St Paul where some of the local faithful gathers once each month to sing hymns of praise and enjoy a drink or two with dinner. We even bumped into the pastor from FoC and chatted for a while. Like I said—down-to-earth.

Rachel left for her dad's a few hours ago but not before making some nice progress on a puzzle we started last night. I think it's far enough along that Tammy and I can put the finishing touches on it.

I spent several hours this week getting my new MacBook Pro up to speed. Rather than create a partition with VMware as I did with my last laptop for some Windows programs I still use, I decided to simply use the Boot Camp option on my Mac. The only drawback is that I can only run one operating system at a time. VMware allowed both to be running simultaneously but it was a strain on the computer's resources and it's not necessary for my purposes.

The biggest challenge for me was in resurrecting our website on my laptop. It's a large site that I built with Microsoft's Expression Web 2 and I don't keep a copy of the actual site, opting instead to allow GoDaddy to keep it backed up for me. For whatever reason, I wasn't able to simply drag and drop folders of photos where they belonged as I rebuilt the site. Instead, I had to take chunks of photos and drop them into the proper folders. It was very labor-intensive but it's done for now until the next hard-drive crash.

I sent my failing MacBook Pro to my brother Bryan in Oregon and he was able to resuscitate it with a new hard-drive. I considered that option too but I'm happy for him to have it, knowing it's in good hands and has a nice new home.

We visited Rachel at her new digs in Rochester. She and RaeNelle moved from the outskirts of the city into a home nearer to downtown—her 10th move since leaving our nest. They're happy. It was nice to spend the afternoon with her. We drove to Winona, an hour away for lunch then kicked around the city checking out the various shops.

I found the perfect shirt in a local bike shop!

I've been getting in lots of miles at Mall of America as I work to win this week's Garmin step challenge. I dug a hole for myself early on in the week but I came back strong, walking 14.5 miles on Thursday, 12 miles on Friday and 8 miles yesterday. And I did that among the crush of Christmas shoppers! I know I'm not supposed to say this (as a guy) but I love the mall. I just do.

I'm retired so what else do I have to do with my time, right? I probably shouldn't say this either (because then you'll certainly know I'm not right) but I preceded each of those walks with 2 hours on the elliptical.

With 6 hours left in the challenge, I think I can add this one to the "win" column.