I'm taking a little rest break post-lunch before I venture outside for yard work and after stopping at the dump and then the gym for a workout.

I surprised myself at the gym by being able to lift 179 lbs doing the weighted glute bridge. In fact, 179 lbs was a goal I had originally calculated I would hit in January 2027 but I've been overly cautious when it comes to adding weight. It is one of 5 key exercises I've been doing for bone health. If, like me, you are over 60 and have a slender build, then you are likely at risk for osteopenia or osteoporosis, you should really have a baseline DEXA scan of your hips and spine. When I had my last DEXA this past May, I was excited to see my spine was now stronger than it was 6 years ago, but my hips had gotten a bit worse, so that's when I did a major revamp of my exercise routine. Hence my dedication to exercise.

I'll be participating in the Walk Across the Hudson this weekend. A friend and I are driving up to Poughkeepsie, NY, where we will form a human chain across this pedestrian-only bridge on the Hudson River. It's a very scenic area with great views so I'll be achieving two things in this trip: another anti-Rump protest and to walk across this bridge.

Dido and I will be getting together soon for our annual Celebration of the Birthdays since they both fall in the same month. We usually get together in a certain northeastern small PA town that is about halfway for both of us, but this time we'll meet at Bushkill Falls State Park, PA. Just something a little different to entertain ourselves. This certainly has been the year of the waterfalls for Patient Saver.

I was awoken early this am around 12:45 am by chirping. There are a lot of alarms in this house so I wasn't sure where it was coming from. I think even my new refrigerator has an alarm that sounds if it gets too warm. This time, it was a carbon monoxide detector. Five consecutive chirps means it has reached the end of its useful life span.

I recently got new curtains for the kitchen. Previous to this, I had bamboo blinds here and throughout the house as I like the modern, clean look, but they do have certain drawbacks. They are not particularly efficient in blocking heat or cold air, and unfortunately, there is maybe a little roller mechanism, most likely plastic, that does wear out over time, so I have a number of blinds now (maybe 15 years after buying them) that no long roll up or down properly. In the case of the small window over the kitchen sink, I accidentally cut the cord when I was cutting a plant stem on the window sill because my mind was somewhere else.

I tried to go back to the company where I got these, but they appear to be out of business, and I didn't relish having to get samples elsewhere to try to match the color of the shade on the other kitchen window by the table. Plus I needed to do something about blocking heat and light coming through the new fiberglass kitchen door without drilling holes in it.

So each window required a different approach. I wound up getting the same 36" length curtain for both the small window above the sink and the window by the table. I initially thought I would use just one panel for the sink window because it's a smaller window and I didn't want it to look too scrunched up, but I think 2 panels looks fine. I like these very feminine-looking and maybe a bit old-fashioned curtains. It reminds of an old Seals & Croft song....Our House, or even Summer Breeze. 

See the curtains hangin' in the window
In the evening on a Friday night
A little light a-shinin' through the window
Lets me know everything's allright....

Because the company had a limited number of sizes, I had to use the same 36" length curtain on the larger window by the table and hang it about three-quarters of the way up the window, like a cafe curtain. It will provide privacy without blocking light.

So I'm using a small tension rod over the kitchen sink and a regular rod over the bigger window. For the door, I think I'll just stick with the UV film I put over the 4 glass panels. It doesn't look perfect but it does a pretty good job of cutting glare without making it dark. I'm thinking about applying the UV film  to the small window over the sink, too. The vintage tablecloth you see here was something my grandmother made. She was a dressmaker, so she had lots of fabrics and other sewing supplies.

The only thing is I can't remove a single screw from the metal bracket from the old bamboo shade, which is just out of the picture frame at top left. The screw may be stripped, or maybe I just don't have the muscle (despite my workouts) to unscrew it. And I would have liked to paint the window trim as it has a bunch of nail holes and other imperfections, but I feel like I have too much to do to do that right now.

So according to opensocialsecurity.com, if I want to maximize my Social Security payout, I should start collecting Social Securityy next year, even though that's well before I turn age 70. As you may know, conventional wisdom is to wait until age 70 if you wish to maximize your payments. If I go to my SS account, I can see a chart showing that the difference between claiming next year vs claiming 2 years after that is an extra $650/mth if I wait.

They have a little chart that compares their recommended strategy to another date of your choosing, so I inserted age 70, since that's the advice we all get.

The pale green spot on the bar shows their recommended date to start SS, while the blue portion of the bar would be me at age 70. The legend below the bar shows that the pale green color indicates maximum PV (present value) while the blue is between 95-98.

Meanwhile, SSA gives me this:

I'd like to reconcile these two sources of info. Opensocialsecurity does reference the fact that they adjust "for the fact that a dollar received in the future is worth less than a dollar received today (because the sooner you receive a dollar the sooner you can invest it,"  and this is something I don't think SSA concverns itself with.

Of course, that's a big IF that assumes you will invest youre entire Social Security check and no doubt assumes a certain degree of growth.

This morning, rather early, I headed over to the Toyota dealership to get a few important things done before my upcoming New York Finger Lakes trip: an oil change, a recall fix for an audible sound when you back up (mine was so faint I wasn't even aware there was supposed to be a sound) and most important of all, for months I had lost the sound on my GPS. Turns out the sound worked but was muted, and the tech showed me how to go into Google Maps to fix it should this be a problem again. Best of all, all this was free since I'm in my 2nd year of the Toyota Cares program. I'll have to start paying for stuff at the start of 2027. 

The woman I am meeting for the Finger Lakes trip accidentally dialed my number today and we wound up talking for over an hour about our trip and travel in general. She expressed an interest in going to Longwood Gardens and Philly in PA and Saratoga Springs, NY (not for the horse races). I wouldn't mind returning to the White Mountains in New Hampshire or any number of places. I've lived in the Northeast all my life but there are many, many places I have yet to fully explore. We both dislike flying (she was married to an airline pilot who would tell her how unsafe the airline industry was), but that still leaves open Pennyslvania, New York state, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and even Maine, all of which are drivable by car.

And then there are these cool railway bicycles that I'm seeing pop up more and more in recreational areas. I would love to try them. They are said to be easy to pedal and have an electric assist motor, much like an ebike.

The big excitement of yesterday was when a woman I knew (online only) from one of my native plants groups asked me for some Joe Pye Weed and in exchange was offering me a rare native Chinquapin oak seedling. The cool thing about it is that it often grows more like a multi-stemmed shrub or a small tree, topping out at only about 20 feet high. It's the only oak that does that. And it starts producing acorns in 3 to 5 years so you don't have to wait 20 years like you would for other oaks. I'm still reading Doug Tallamy's book, The Nature of Oaks, and if you read that, you know that oak trees are the Holy Grail among plants, attracting more moths, butterflies and widlife in general than any other plant on earth. For many homeowners, a humongus oak is not something they can grow on their property, and if they're of a certain age, they may never see it produce acorns. 

Anyway, we connected the night before last and agreed I would come over yesterday morning. That night, I dug up most of a peony bed with probably 8 plants. Peonies are pretty and make a great cut flower, but they do nothing for pollinators. The only insect I've ever seen on them is ants. I dug up the Joe Pye Weed in the am and put it in a bucket. and drove about 35 minutes to meet this woman. We chit-chatted for a while with her husband (she's also reading the same Tallamy book) and then I went home, decided to plant the oak immediately as it was wilting, but knew I had to then get in the car and run down to Lowes for the hardware cloth (to deter voles/mice) and mulch. I had ordered that stuff the night before on Tractor Supply website, but they cancelled the mulch part of the order when they ran out of inventory. It didn't make sense to make 2 trips to 2 stores to get what I needed, so I just didn't pick up at Tractor Supply and they will refund the charge after tonight. So from about 9 am to 2 pm yesterday, I was solely focused on getting this little oak (about 2.5 feet high, single stem) safely in the ground. It needs at least an inch of water a week for the year, so I'll have to pay attention to that.

The outer fence is to deter deer and the inner fence, which is sunk in the ground several inches, is for mice and voles. There is also a fence over the top. I'm not sure what I'll do once the oak gets taller than the outer fencing. I may have to invest in taller fencing.

Oh, and I picked my 37th cucumber today. 

I took advantage of a nice promo offer DSW was having today. One was advertised, the other was only advertised in the store. I went in with a $5 birthday discount coupon I got in the mail (you can sign up for this discount  on their website) just to browse, but then I saw lots of signs saying that if you bought a regularly priced pair of sneakers, you'd get a 6-pack of socks for free.

So that's what I did. They are crew socks, in case you're wondering, and you get your choice of black or white.

While I was there, I picked up a few things at Trader Joe's, since they're right in the same shopping plaza, then on the way home I filled up the gas tank at BJs and used another $5 birthday coupon at Kohl's and got a flannel shirt. I'm really looking forward to the cooler weather.

Tonight I'm attending a fundraiser hosted by our Senator Chris Murphy, who is an outspoken critic of Rumpie. It's about a half-mile from my house, so easy to get to. I like that he fundraises for many tight races throughout the country, not just those in my state, and so he funnels money to them as needed.

I'm embarrassed to report that I no longer have a perfect credit score of 850, due to a late payment to Bank of America. Yup, that's right, first time that's happened in decades. How did that happen? I usually pay any incoming emailed credit cards within a day or two of receiving them, just because I have a lot of credit cards and I don't want to miss them. Well, that's just what happened. I called BOA and they agreed to credit me the $29 late fee, although that was after I told them I wanted to cancel the card so this didn't happen again. I really have a surplus of cards anyway. Initially, I hadn't thought I had gotten the bill at all, but later I found it buried in with a bunch of other emails. 

So I need to be more careful. I know many people put their cards on auto pay, but I like retaining the control over how and when the card is paid, and I always review every purchase that's listed.  This is one reason why I've been trying to cut back on the number of news subscriptions I have or other things that land in my in-box, because I don't want so many emails that stuff gets overlooked.

And since I've been retired, there have been a number of times when I've felt the need to pay a card online but delay it to a later date instead of same day. I've done this because I've had home improvements or other big bills like car/home insurance that month, and so my usual monthly income isn't quite enough to cover things if I paid the credit cards all at once. I could of course make additional distributions from my brokerage account as needed, but i have already calculated what annual income to shoot for to pay less state and federal taxes, so veering from that would make it harder to meet my self-imposed annual income limits. 

Unfortunately, while the late payment fee was reversed, they could not undo the reporting of this to the credit reporting bureaus, so there will be a zing to my credit score, which bothers me just as much as the fee. Oh well.

I don't know if I mentioned it here, but I've planned a 5-day trip to the Finger Lakes region of New York this fall. I am meeting a friend who lives near Lake Erie there; I've known here since I was renting a room in her house on the Cape in my 20s, but I haven't seen her for probably 30 years, so it should be exciting. 

I hadn't thought to ask her to join me, but she sent me flowers for my birthday and I called to thank her, mentioning this trip I was thinking about doing. She immediately said she'd be up for joining me since it was roughly midway between us. And that's how that came about!

The focus of the trip will be waterfalls, as there are many spectacular ones in the area, but we'll also be spending time at the Corning Glass Musuem. There will also be time to take a scenic drive around Lake Seneca and hit the many farm stands, or if we like, doing a narrated boat cruise on the lake. And of course many good meals, I hope!

I think I got the waterfall bug when I visited that new state park in Vermont and saw a beautiful one in the town I used to live in. 

We're in another heat wave here and I haven't ventured out much, so much so that today I was really getting stir crazy. So I got my first cone of the season. Mint chocolate chip, in case you were wondering.

It was not my first choice place to go, just over the hill at a working dairy farm less than a mile away. This one was in town, but it lacks the lines of the other place, which has received all kinds of awards and likely attracts folks from out of town because I drove by there and there was the usual long line, even during a thunderstorm.

I'm preparing myself for sticker shock as my 2-year electric contract was expiring this month and I had a really great, low price per kilowatt on it. Prices are quite a bit higher across the board now, so I will most definitely be paying a lot more for electricity. All due to Mr. Rump.

My car, homeowners and umbrella insurance were up for renewal, as I think I'd mentioned earlier. My agent was not able to do any better on the umbrella and homeowners, but they were able to shave $300 off the car policy simply by creating a new policy with the same insurer (Progressive) with identical coverage. When asked, they explained that insurers will recalculate the numbers for rate increases every year but when they change, they don't inform existsing policyholders (!), so what it comes down to is if I hadn't been working with an agent, I'd have NO IDEA I could save $300 by getting a new policy! Talk about consumer-unfriendly.

I paid the umbrella ($305) and car ($805) already and will delay paying the home ($1300) until a few days before it expires later this month so when the credit card bill does become due, it will be next month and I'll have been able to spread these bigger bills out a little without having to take out an extra withdrawal from my settlement fund.

I was in a quandry about what to do about blocking strong afternoon sun coming through my new back kitchen door. It's fiberglass, so magnets won't stick and poking any kind of holes in it would void the warranty, so a friend suggested UV film, which I decided to try. 

I knew it would be tricky trimming the film once it was on the windows, and so this is by no means a perfect job, but I don't think I want to expend any more life energy trying to redo some of the 4 window films as I do have film left over on the roll. As long as you don't study it, you probably wouldn't notice it and it's nice not having bulky curtains or a shade on the windows, I think, so I can still enjoy the view. The sunlight does still come through, but the windows are noticeable darker than before.

In this photo I had done just 1 of the 4 window panes, the bottom left. I think you can see how it's darker than the others.

Now that I had that ice cream, I'm craving lo mein. Sugar, sodium, what next?