Odds and Ends and Reasons to Floss

September ended with a suggestion from the man who mows my lawn that it's probably safe to cut back from once a week to every two weeks now. Yay! Lawn care is my third-biggest monthly expense, after house note and telephone/cable/internet bundle, so reducing and eventually eliminating lawn care for the cooler months serves as my version of a Christmas Club Account.

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I try to get all four dogs to go outside at the same time, but that doesn't always happen. When Gimpy asked to go out yesterday, I called all the others to the door. Until I opened it, I hadn't noticed that a light rain was falling. Gimpy and Levi went outside anyway, but Lucy and Oliver steadfastly declined. That's what made it so funny afterwards when I towel-dried Levi, then Gimpy, while Lucy and Ollie queued up behind them for their turn with the towel. It reminded me of our last set of dogs (RIP, beautiful babies!), when Butch needed ear drops twice a day, and the others always lined up behind him, rolling their eyes and looking gloomy, while I pretended to put drops in their ears.

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Seems like it was about this time last year when Levi and Gimpy discovered a possum on the fence. It happened again the other night:

The possum sat as still as a statue while the dogs repeatedly leaped and threw themselves against the fence. They seemed to have no fear whatsoever of the ugly creature. The next night, however, a cockroach (yuck!) got into the house and strolled boldly through the living room. I might have missed it, except that both Levi and Gimpy stood very still, swiveling their heads back and forth between the nasty intruder and me, until I got up to see what they were looking at. I killed it, of course. I guess I don't blame them for not taking care of it themselves; they weren't wearing shoes.

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I've been reading, reading, reading in the daytime and at bedtime, taking a break in the evenings to watch the season's new episodes of Survivor, The Amazing Race, Grey's Anatomy and Nashville. Also burned some CDs so I'd have new tunes to listen to on weekly trips to Walmart or Life Writing Class. 

I wanted the songs in the second (bottom) CD insert to be numbered from 21-40 but couldn't figure out how to make iTunes do it that way. Meh. Teenagers may think they originated the "whatever" attitude, but I have it way more in my seventies than I did in my teens.

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If you're retired, do you sometimes get your days mixed up? I missed a dental appointment a couple of weeks ago--first time I've ever done that. I knew the appointment was on the 23rd; I just didn't realize that that particular day was the 23rd until they called to see where I was. Fortunately, they had an opening later the same day, so they didn't charge me extra for wasting their morning slot. 

Wouldn't you know that my one molar that doesn't already have a crown on it suddenly needs one? I'll dig into my savings and let them fix that tooth, then I'll look forward to seeing what dentist-income source they can find to fix the next time I go in for a cleaning. They've been pushing me for years to replace my partial with implants, but I have no intention of paying for teeth that will live longer than I do.

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That's about all that's going on around here. Book list coming up tomorrow.