Miscellaneous Monday

Usually I have my grandkids on Monday, but the schedule has changed for this week and I have today to myself. Well, what I really mean is that I have the day to do laundry, clean house, cook dinner... but it is a change. I thought I'd take time to just ponder the minutiae of life.

When we were in San Diego a few weeks ago I wore my tennis shoes two days in a row while we toured Sea World and San Diego Zoo. My tennis shoes were at least 10 years old. They had been bothering me for a few years and I did pause for a moment to think about the possible damage I would suffer from wearing them for that long. But they were all I had, so I wore them. Boy, am I paying the price. By the end of the 2nd day my left big toe had a huge blister under the toe nail. For the next week it would break open on its own and drench my shoe with whatever liquid is inside of a blister.

When I went for a pedicure a couple of weeks after the injury I got to see the damage when my nail polish was removed. The entire nail bed was black/blue/yellow - completely bruised. Yuck. Oh well, it didn't hurt anymore and at least the blister was gone. I thought I was on the road to recovery.

Until Saturday when I went in for another pedicure. The nail looks the same, but now it has detached from the nail bed 1/3 of the way down from the top. Super yuck. I was praying the whole time that my nail would not come off. It didn't, but it feels really unstable now. I'm so afraid I'm going to lose the nail. The nail tech said, "oh well, if it comes off we'll just apply an acrylic nail". Great. I wonder how much THAT costs?!

In other news, over on my Christmas blog I only have two posts left for Christmas in July. When I decided that I wanted to post each day for the month, I only half thought I would actually do it. To my surprise, I stuck with it and I will have posted for the 31 days of Christmas in July. It was fun, but I'm not sure I will do it again any time soon. It took a lot of time and effort. I have started receiving comments from someone in Brazil who writes in Portuguese. This is a language I'm not familiar with. At all. I wanted to be sure that I didn't have inappropriate comments showing on my blog so I tried to figure out how to figure out what the comments said. Thank goodness MS Word has a translate feature. I copy the comment onto a Word doc, hit the translate key, and get a translation.

We have a Village Inn a couple of miles from our house. We have developed the habit of going there for breakfast about once a week for the past several years. It has the friendliest staff I've ever encountered at a restaurant. The turnover is low, making it easy for the regular diners and wait staff to get to know each other. Two ladies in particular are favorites of ours; Gina and Cassie. They have been our servers for four years now and we know them and they know us. They ask about our family, we ask about theirs. They both had babies in the past year so it's been fun to watch them grow through baby pictures. Gina has asked for prayer support a time or two. I'm not sure if it's allowed or not, but this year at Christmas I want to give them each a token of our appreciation. I'm trying to think what I should do: cash or gift card?

Well, here we are at the end of July. August starts in a few days. Dan and I both have birthdays in August and the free/discount birthday offers have already started pouring it. This is when it pays to have signed up for emails and rewards! Have a great day...