Say What?

After more than 15 years, I'm going to let my domains www.kevinandtammy.net and www.grapevineartglass.net expire. I haven't done anything with either site in years and I can't justify the cost to keep them. Plus, I built the sites with Microsoft's Frontpage program which my GoDaddy host no longer supports—meaning, I can no longer use the program to update the sites if I wanted to. The one problem for me, though, is that I've got so many links from my blog directed at my kevinandtammy.net site where I've archived photos. I'm in the process of archiving those photos on my Google Photos site and I'll link to them there. It's going to be dozens of hours of work. I had a close call on my road bike a little more than a week ago on only my 2nd road ride of the year. It was Saturday mid-morning and I was coming out of St. Paul on a 4-lane divided highway when a driver proceeded through an intersection and appeared to not see me until the last second. I ...

I was walking Charlie the other day when we came across a memorial to a recently departed pup along our route. I never knew his name until seeing his memorial but he was Toby's favorite of any of the pups we'd routinely encounter. Toby would get up next to the fence and survey the yard for Snoop, and if he was out, Snoop would come by and mark a few spots along the fence while our pups would respond in kind. It was sad to learn that Snoop had died. We've been trying to get to the dog park nightly with Charlie. He enjoys his time there as do we. It's great socializing for all involved—pups and their owners. This little guy had us all laughing! He would take his tennis ball and bring it over to various people for them to throw it for him. If they didn't notice him at their feet or if they weren't fast enough, he'd bark to hurry them along. He was so funny to watch . I went out for a longish walk on Father's Day on a route I hadn't taken in maybe...

A construction company rep came by our home recently when I was out working in our yard and asked if it would be okay if he went up on our roof to look for hail damage from a storm one year ago. I told him I was fairly certain he wouldn't find anything because none of our flower gardens were damaged in the storm. He still wanted to have a look and I told him that would be fine. He found me a half-hour later and showed me some photos he took of what he said was hail damage but what looked to me like 21-year-old shingles. He wanted to file a claim on our behalf. I gave him our insurance company info and within 5 minutes the ball was rolling on a claim for a new roof. I phoned our insurance agent a few days later and told him that a new roof would be nice but the claim I filed wasn't my idea and that if their inspection showed no hail damage, I was fine with that. My insurance company sent a claim adjuster out to have a look and they actually agreed that our roof had suffered dama...