Odds and Ends

It's 4 AM and I have made my first cup of tea and it's halfway gone. I'm also wondering whether or not I should light a fire in the wood stove. A fire for the day, or should I wait till a little bit later? I have the very last of our wood in the garage and I want to burn it before the end of this wintry period. I could start the fire about noon and that small supply might last till the next morning. OK, that's the plan.

I just heard the scratching at the window here in the study; it had to be Boo the Cat and so I went down the hall to the kitchen to let her in. She came racing in and immediately went to the small rug in front of the wood stove, where she flopped down onto her side so that I could pet her and rub her belly. A very needy cat and she won't let me go till her ears and chin have been stroked sufficiently. Now I have my second cup of tea and Boo the Cat is now pondering the important things of life, such as; where should she sleep this morning? For the next 8 hours. The couch or the chair? My guess? The couch, where we have some blankets for her. Gad! What am I saying? When did I become a slave to my cat?

It's time for that third cup of tea. I think it's a good thing that I have given up coffee. I am sure that with all of the other medications I'm taking these days, the caffeine could be a problem.

Now, from the on-line charts…coffee used to give me somewhere in the range of 115-175 mgs of caffeine per cup while imported tea is only 60 mgs. American tea is 40 mgs? OK, now I'm curious; I thought American tea companies used imported tea leaves. Are there any tea plantations in America? Picking tea leaves has to be the most labor intensive occupations around and I can't think of a suitable place on the North American continent to grow tea trees. I could be wrong.

There is a cash register sitting on the table in the family room and it's my task to program the darn thing. I was the purchasing agent on this for the our local thrift store; run for the support of the Glenn County Seniors. But…I haven't used a cash register since I was 18 and working as a clerk in a liquor store. And that machine was imposing! It was at least 2'+ high (I couldn't see over the top of it) and had 3 or 4 drawers plus an amazing array of keys to push. Pushing the keys would cause black on white numbers to pop up in a window that spanned the top of the register; displaying the cost of the booze I was selling. This register I'm contemplating now, made by Sharp, is quite small and makes very little noise. And it can be programmed by linking it to my computer with a USB cable, It also has a space for an SD flash memory card which can be used to transfer the data to QuickBooks accounting software. Some other good news is the fact that Sharp has all of the instruction manuals on-line and I just downloaded the correct manual in pdf format. I won't have to struggle to read the tiny print in the actual manual that came in the box.