Friday is hard for me. Each workday morning I have to get up earlier than I would like to. So the sleep deficit grows as the week goes on. However, I am generally able to make it through the day. The evening… not so consistently. Last night mia_mcdavid invited a friend for over for dinner and to look at her loot from Chicagoland fiber. I cooked dinner, ate it with them, and went to bed at 8 PM, not getting up until 9 AM Saturday.

mia_mcdavid and I had an outing with our severely autistic son Tom today. We had a lovely walk along the Mississippi riverside in south Minneapolis. It was a perfect Fall day. We then went to lunch at a nice local restaurant. Tom, after finishing his hamburger (with no bun because of his gluten allergy) and fries, then proceeded to eat the pickle, tomato, and lettuce garnish. We had heard that he had started to eat vegetables at his group home, but this was the first time we had actually seen it.

Afterwards we went home. I logged on to my work computer system to verify that several systems were working after some urgent Microsoft patches. As always, they were, but you have to check. I then took advantage of the good weather to climb onto the roof. The trees around us had finished shedding their leaves and it was time to clean the gutters. After taking care of that I went back inside to work on colgaffneyis newsletter.

I then decided to do some woodwork. This did not work out well: My vintage Millers Falls No. 2 drill got hopelessly jammed, and I broke several teeth on the main cast iron gear while freeing it, effectively ruinning it. I felt really sick about this: They really don’t make them like they used to. There are still eggbeater style drills being made, but I have not found a modern version that runs nearly as smoothly as this ols drill. Fortunately, Millers Falls made a lot of them in the old days , and a quick look at Ebay showed that I can get a replacement at a reasonable price. Meanwhile, I can get by my smaller Millers Falls No. 5 and my bit braces.

My mother is getting better. She will be discharged from the hospital in Colorado Springs tomorrow. She will be staying for a while in a post-hospital care facility, then, hopefully, moving to some kind of assisted living situation. There is a very nice place in the area that she had already been looking at. My brother and his family (who also live in Colorado Springs) and my sister and her husband (who live in Denver) are working on this. This is not great news, but it is about as good as it gets under the circumstances.