Bill Roper's Journal

Clif has arrived for the weekend. He'll be attending the Nebula Awards which are near our house. We spent this evening equipment geeking.

While Clif is at the awards convention, we'll be shuffling children around. And I'm going to a baseball game. Scheduling is like that. :)

I finally managed to get all of the data entry done for our APBA league and fired off the test run for the first half of the season. This is later than I had hoped for, but there has been a *lot* of paperwork.

Having gotten my Medicare number, I can make my scheduled visit to the doctor tomorrow. Gretchen is still waiting for her prescription card so that she can refill her Ozempic.

The parts to fix my big recliner chair have arrived and I've scheduled a tech visit for a week from Thursday to get the beast back in working order.

We need to schedule a time for Julie to take her written test for her learner's permit for driver's ed. Gretchen will see how she can manage this tomorrow. This is around training for the kids' summer jobs, Julie's driver's ed classes, and Gretchen visit to get her replacement crown this week.

Whee!

I am sure that this is something that a lot of you already knew. But *we* didn't know it, so maybe this will be of use to some of you.

I like beef stroganoff. Given the price of beef lately, we've had some hamburger stroganoff instead, which can be tasty, but which just isn't the same.

Gretchen agreed that I could go ahead and pick up some sirloin steak when I went to Sam's Club for use in stroganoff. Yay! And I discovered that sirloin steak was $12 per pound. Boo! And then I saw the top sirloin steaks for $8 per pound and said, "Well, that ought to work. Probably."

When I got home, Gretchen explained that one of the problems that she has with any recipe that requires strips of cooked beef is that the beef tends to come out dry and tough. I, however, am Internet Boy with superior Google-fu, so I figured I'd go run an Internet search and see what I found.

There were two tricks here. First, make sure that you cut your strips of meat across the grain. The grain on the top sirloin steaks was very apparent, so that was easy to manage.

Second, you want to use about 3/4 teaspoon per pound of baking soda, plus a few tablespoons of water, which you add to the cut meat, massage it in, and then let it sit for 15-30 minutes before rinsing it well to remove the baking soda, and then patting it dry before it hits the skillet. Once the meat is nicely browned, you remove it to a separate bowl while making the stroganoff sauce and then throw it back in.

Gretchen cut the meat. I handled the baking soda steps and gave it back to her rinsed. Gretchen finished the job.

The meat was lovely, tender, and tasty.

I had never heard of this baking soda trick before. Half of the rinsed meat went into the freezer for later use, so we'll see how it does after freezing.

But this was a good thing to learn. :)

Yay! I finally have my Medicare number which means that I can go to my scheduled doctor's appointment next Tuesday. (I could *go* to the appointment without it, but getting it *paid* for would be another question altogether.)

This afternoon, I will get to work on those appeals...

The check for my 401k rollover arrived today, so I ran it out to my financial advisor's office so it could be deposited into my rollover IRA. Having that done is a great relief, because doing this via check rather than via EFT seems, well, dumb. But done it is.

We also discussed locating some more money, because I am going to hemorrhage cash this month for a variety of reasons. That's being done.

Tomorrow, I have to run Julie to the bank to open a checking account so that she has a place to direct deposit the paycheck from her summer job. Today, Julie aced her pre-exam to get her learner's permit, which means that actual practice driving is going to start soon.

And then I have to fill out an appeal to file with Social Security / Medicare so that my Medicare premiums are based on what I am making while retired instead of based on what I was making when I was actually employed.

I miss coding. It was *much* more relaxing.

Julie suggested that we could watch a movie for my birthday since we had watched one for hers. This seemed like a fine idea, but yesterday got away from us, so we planned this for tonight.

The problem is that a great many of the movies that I might want to watch were not available on streaming or would cost an annoying amount to rent. (Not that much, just annoying.) But I bought the Indiana Jones box set a while back on DVD, so we could watch "Raiders of the Lost Ark".

At least, we could watch it if the disk was in the case. It was not. Nor did it turn up on cursory searches of places where it should have been. I am annoyed.

Gretchen suggested "1776" and the copy that we had of that was available -- which is good, because we would have had to subscribe to Starz to get it otherwise. The kids liked it a lot.

And, of course, so did Gretchen and I.

The first coat of red paint has gone up in K's room. It's very red. There's still more work to be done though. I have been promised that I can relax tomorrow (it being my birthday) as long as I am willing to come supervise some of the work. Much like my father, I am excellent at supervisory work of this nature, so I am fine with that. :)

Tonight, I went down to Tobias Music for a Taylor Tone Show. It was a lot of fun and I learned a few new things, which is a good outcome.

I didn't buy any more guitars which is *also* a good outcome. :)

I want carrot cake for my birthday, which means that we need some unsulfited coconut. The easiest place to find that is Trader Joe's, so I headed there after lunch. They've moved all of the bulk items of that sort to a different aisle, but I eventually got a pointer and tracked them down.

The slot where the unsulfited shredded coconut goes was absolutely empty. Drat. There were coconut strips nearby, but they would not work nearly as well. I poked around and then noticed something *behind* the coconut strips. This turned out to be the single remaining bag of the coconut that I was looking for. Having won the scavenger hunt, I picked up a few more items for the household and headed home.

At 2 PM, I had the video appointment with the La-Z-Boy tech to inspect my broken recliner chair. They are sending parts and will send a tech to repair it. This will cost about $250 total, but that is still better than replacing the chair, even if it is 13 years old. Looking at the website, matching the original leather recliner would cost around $2100. Eek!

Then I called Home Depot and managed to get the order for the new storm door set up. This had gotten dropped on the ground in the general confusion of getting K back from college, but is now paid for. Now someone just has to install it.

Meanwhile, K is ready to begin painting her room. Whee!

Cubs pitcher Shoto Imanaga tonight had a terrible outing in what has been, so far, a pretty good season for him. He ended up giving up eight runs which was plenty for a 9-3 Brewers victory tonight in my third game of the season.

Why is this only my third game of the season, given that I am no longer employed and theoretically have more time -- *and* when the Cubs have played a lot of very good baseball? Well, it turns out that I've been busier in unemployment trying to sort everything out than you'd expect.

And the remote parking situation is execrable. The new parking is 15 to 20 minutes farther away from home than the old lot, which adds a lot to the transit time for getting to the park. It is completely unfriendly to anyone who has difficulty with stairs, because the elevators are *still* shut off. Supposedly they work and just need to be inspected by the city before they can be used. This was the same thing I was told a month ago at my previous game. Someone *has* done an excellent job of cleaning up the various flyers that complained about the broken elevators though. It's good to have priorities.

It took an hour after the final pitch to get back to the garage and out to the street in my car. I have had times in the past with the old parking lot when I was able to be *at home* an hour after the final pitch. Mind you, that was a case of *everything* timing out right, but it was *possible*.

This is the situation when the night games are starting at 6:40 PM. When they move to 7:05 PM shortly, traffic is going to be even worse.

Clearly, this is not going to be fixed this year. Maybe next year.

Maybe someday, they will inspect the elevators.

The heat is on outside. I helped K to clean out the furnace filters today and we got them reinstalled this evening. That's good, because it was just too hot outside today for us to sleep tonight and I've turned on the air conditioning for the first time this season.

I got a few things done today (including a second run at the same repair on the pinball machine, following instructions from the support line this time). I would like to get more things done, but there are a lot of little obstacles in the way.