One thing that I really like about being around smart people is the clever phrases and names they come up with to describe things.

I came home from work the other day to find Barb had brought an old wood cabinet home. She took the knobs off and painted them. To avoid irregularities in the paint she strung them on a wooden skewer. She then suspended the ends of the skewers on two plastic containers while the paint dried.

She called it a “knob kabob”:

I’m safe on this one:

According to the study, older adults over the age of 55 who consumed more than 50 grams of chili per day displayed nearly double the risk of developing poor cognition and a decline in overall memory. Interestingly, slimmer adults indulging in a spicy diet exhibited even more significant memory loss.

It wasn’t until I was well into middle age before I finally figured out that some people interpreted the eating of things like chili and black peppers as having a taste. To me (and both of my brothers) there is no taste associated with many peppers. There is only “hot” and pain. It had long been a source of great perplexion to me, “Why do people deliberately cause themselves pain for no apparently benefit?” I will feel the pain in my mouth and throat from food that has pepper concentrations that no one (other than my brothers and I) can even detect. In fact the concentration can be one tenth below the detection level of “normal” people and I still feel the “heat”.

Hence, for all my life, I have avoided spicy hot foods.

I’ll remember this when people who told me, “It’s not at all spicy!” and called me a “wimp” are drooling idiots. Don’t expect me to have much sympathy. I knew that stuff was bad for you decades ago.

Here is something you don’t see every day:

A couple of passenger jets at the dock.

Adding to the uniqueness, the picture was taken from inside a restaurant.

Last Thursday evening Barb, some friends, and family members went to the courthouse to watch as Barb and I signed some papers.

This was our point of view:

This was their point of view:

Photo by Mark.

Photo by Jaime.

Check out the judge’s boots! It was because of the Snowpocalypse.

The next two pictures were after we had finished.

Photo by Jane.

Photo by the judge.

Then most of us went back to our house for dinner and cake.

I would have been certain “it would work out” had we gotten married after the first couple of months we were together. After several months the topic of marriage would occasionally come up and Barb didn’t see the point and then after a year or three she was quite clear that she did not want to get married. It wasn’t my preference but I wasn’t going to make a big deal about it and it almost never came up between us.

Then last June she proposed to me (the proposal blog post has been in draft form for months and I just now published it). There were some tax and other issues to resolve and we finally sort of settled on Valentines Day by the November/December timeframe. Valentines Day saves some hassle because you have one less card and/or gift to worry about during the year and you are less likely to forget about it. A bonus is that it is the 65^th anniversary of when my parents got married.

The temperatures weren’t anything like what recently happened back east but Seattle had it’s own extraordinary weather over the last couple of weeks. Here in Bellevue we had snow over 16 inches deep. The weather historians said it was the most snow since the winter of 1968-1969. With all the hills around here there were lots of cars which didn’t make it home and were abandoned on the side of the street. Some of them were badly crumpled.

We were without mail service for about 10 days. No Amazon deliveries for a simlar timeframe. No garbage or recycling pickup for three weeks. Our power stayed on except for a few outages that lasted no more than 30 seconds. Others, within a quarter mile of us, were without power for a couple days.

I worked from home for about six days as no one else on my team could make it in to work. I could have made it with my car. I could even walk to and from work if I really wanted to. But I didn’t see a point to it. Just stay put and don’t risk getting smacked by someone who didn’t have the proper tires on their vehicle.

Barb’s brother had a surgery scheduled for last Friday in downtown Seattle. His wife had little or no experience driving in the snow so Barb and I volunteered to bring them home after another snowfall. He lives on a hill close to the hill Barb and I live on. The street we live on had not been plowed and had several inches of snow on it. With no idea what his street conditions were like I took off the all season tires which would have been adequate for our street and getting into Seattle and replaced them with studded mud and snow tires. We had no problems traversing the snow and made the trip to and from downtown Seattle without any unexpected adventures.

What was odd to Barb and I was the run on groceries. The shelves of bread, milk, meat and fresh produce were almost completely bare. We got a few things before the snow came but not really much more than usual. I did fill the gas cans for the generator and topped off the tank in my car but we would have been just fine without the extra supplies.

The only issue we had was the snow damaged a gutter as it slid off the roof over the deck.

The Seattle Times reported heart warming stories of people helping others. Daughter Jaime, also in Bellevue, spent many hours shoveling snow in her condo parking lot to help clear a path to the street. She also helped numerous people get out of their car ports with cars poorly equipped for the adventure.

Below the break are pictures of the snow around our place.

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Barb and I went to a Halloween party last night: