Working hard for egg nog

I had a hankering for some Dean's Egg Nog, the brand I've loved since childhood, and I knew they stocked it at the local Dollar General store.

But when I headed for the car, I thrust my hand into my left front pants pocked and discovered my keys weren't there. A quick review told me they were almost certainly locked in the shed, where I had stashed some items that were taking up space in the kitchen.

But the only key to the padlock on the shed doors is on my keyring and almost all of the tools I need to break into the shed were, likewise, locked inside the shed.

I finally decided the only solution was to take the hinges off of one of the doors, but of course, my impact driver reamed out the grooves on a couple of the 14-year-old hinge screws. I finally was able to back it out with channel locks and, voila, there were my keys on the Craftsman multi-drawer tool chest.

With Maria's help, I screwed the hinges back into place and, hoping that Dollar General still had some Dean's Egg Nog, I headed downtown.

My luck was in and I scored the last two quarts in the cooler.

Makes me happy

It makes me happy to have my collection of cowboy china on display again. We packed it away in the summer of 2017 when we prepared to move home to Indiana after a decade in Arkansas.

It remained in boxes and the china cabinet stayed in our storage unit until this week.

Maria repainted the interior of the cabinet and I installed three puck lights to illuminate the top shelf. I'm missing a bunch of saucers, but I'm confident they're in a box somewhere in the house.

I first encountered Wallace china with the cattle brands around the rim in restaurants in Wyoming when my parents took me to Yellowstone National Park in the summer of 1956 and got serious about collecting the genre when I found some on Ebay.

Maria was on vacation this week and we spent the last seven days on projects to bring our house back to full functionality after renters abused it for nine years. The upstairs was a mess - they let their dogs use the carpet for a toilet and the carpet was full of fleas.

We set up our king size bed in the dining room and put the dining room table in the living room while we struggled to set things right. With Austin's help, we moved the bed upstairs to a properly appointed bedroom last Sunday. Maria undertook the Herculean task of pulling the carpet staples out of two stairways on Monday and we moved the dining room table to the dining room and unfurled a new rug in the living room. Later in the week, I hitched up the trailer and we brought the china cabinet and a dresser home from storage and retrieved the buffet as well, along with the table linens I inherited from my mother.