Laundry and Shopping

Not much happening today, so we did our laundry. But on the way we stopped at the Apple Valley Post Office to pick up our General Delivery mail. After standing in line for a while, we finally reached the counter, where a friendly employee told us that our mail had arrived on Saturday and wished us a good day.

Next we stopped at Best Buy to return a "green" surge protector. It came without any instructions, so we didn't realize that the "master controlled" outlets would not be live unless something was plugged into the master outlet and drawing at least 10 watts. This may be a great arrangement when you have a pc plugged into the master and its peripherals plugged into the "master controlled" outlets. It saves energy by shutting down the peripherals when the pc goes to sleep.

However, this setup didn't work for our charging station, where we want to be able to plug in our toothbrushes and battery recharger and shaver and tablet, etc. We actually need something way less high tech--not even a surge protector, since we have a whole house electrical management system--but we do need something with space for transformers.

The Footprints laundromat on Bear Valley Rd. was crowded, several machines were out of order, and the prices were high. We never know what we'll find when we go to an unfamiliar laundromat. The clothes ended up clean anyhow, so that job is done for the week.

This evening we were supposed to pick up Cathy to go to the DMV to take a test for her learner's permit. Cathy ended up not going to school and spending the day with her nana, so Rebecca decided to come home early and drive her.

I wanted to try out the new slow cooker, and I had defrosted some boneless chicken breasts, so I went online and found a recipe for chicken cacciatore made with spaghetti sauce. I had some leftover in the fridge, so that sounded perfect. I put some rice in the microwave, so when we got home Ken made the salad and I fixed the yellow squash and onions, and dinner was on the table. The slow cooker worked very well.

It was twilight when we started our walk tonight. We saw a dark shape moving ahead of us, about the size of a large dog, but not moving like a dog. Both of us immediately remembered that the gate attendant we spoke with yesterday had mentioned a very large bobcat in the park, so we approached with some trepidation. Then a white face turned towards us and we realized it was the calf. Mom was lying down in a depression so we hadn't seen her.

We decided to walk through the horse area to see how far we could get without running into a closed gate. We were able to walk quite far, but we turned back before getting to the "riparian forest" mentioned on the map. We decided to save that for a daylight hike.

While I was finishing the dishes this evening, the sink gurgled. The grey tank was at 100%. It seems that having a 70 gallon grey tank just invites longer showers. It took us only five days to fill it.