I did not get all of the debris pulled out of the woods last night with the Kobelco sx35sr-3 excavator.  I was just learning how to use it so I wasn’t very efficient, and even if I had been experienced I could not have moved everything before it got dark.  I was up early this morning to get some more stuff moved before the landscapers showed up and needed it, but they beat me to the punch.

Steve showed up briefly to get the two-man crew on task and then left.  They worked on preparing and setting the next course of steps in front.  By the time they had one set it had started misting and progressed quickly to a light, steady rain.  They tried taking the excavator around back to do some trenching but the rain intensified and the ground was already very soft.  They almost got it stuck so I waved them off and made them take it back around to the front of the house.  They left shortly thereafter.  The afternoon weather was dry, cool, and breezy–very pleasant working conditions–but no one returned to resume the work.  The forecast for the rest of the week is for drier, cooler conditions, but it will take days for the ground behind the house to dry out enough that they can work efficiently and safely.

We still have a lot of unopened boxes from our move last year and Linda decided yesterday to start opening them and trying to deal with the contents.  She is always eager to get rid of things while I tend to be reluctant to part with stuff, but I am slowly coming around accepting that we have a lot of stuff we do not need, will never use, has no value, and that we have no place to store.

Her target was five boxes today.  I thought that was optimistic, but she dealt with five yesterday and five more today.  One of the boxes today had a collection of stemware with all the pieces individually wrapped in newspapers from circa 1995.  The newspaper was from our previous community, so we are the ones who packed them and obviously had them for some time before that.  We think we got them from my parents but no longer remember when or why.  Some of them may have belonged to my mother’s parents.

The discovery of the stemware led to them being washed and set out to dry followed by a re-thinking of what is stored/displayed in the kitchen/dining area.  That, in turn, led to a reconsideration of our everyday dinnerware.  We bought our Mikasa Studio Nova dinnerware a long time ago, perhaps more than 30 years, and it has served us well.  I still like the pattern; a simple round white plate with a colorful geometric edging that reminds me of the work of the Russian artist Kandinsky.  We have broken or chipped enough pieces over the years that we no longer have a complete service for more than four people, and many of the remaining pieces have developed stress lines and will eventually break.

Mikasa no longer manufactures the Studio Nova pattern and we have been looking for a replacement for the last couple of months.  We found one we liked at Bed, Bath, and Beyond but held off buying it while we continued to look.  We get 20% off coupons from BB&B regularly and when the rain let up Linda decided to go to the store in Brighton and buy the Noritaki set we liked, but came back empty handed.  It turned out that what we thought was a set of four pieces for four place settings (16 pieces) for $40 was just one place setting of four pieces.  We wanted to get 12 place settings plus service pieces, so this was not going to be our new dinnerware.

We spent some time looking at products online and found that the price of Mikasa products was similar to the Noritaki.  This changed our view of the price of Corelle dinnerware which we had also looked at and liked but mistakenly ruled out as too expensive.  We live about 11 miles from an outlet mall that has a Corning store (I know, I know, we live in a rural paradise) so we drove over there to see what they had in stock.  They had a 40% off sale on all open stock items (if you bought 12 or more pieces) and 20% off on boxed sets.

We looked at square designs and modern patterns, but decided to go with their plain Winter Frost White round product.  This is one of their longest running and broadest product lines with all items available as open stock.  They had boxed sets of five pieces for six place settings (30 pieces total) so we bought two of them to have a service for 12, and filled in an extra set of 12 medium plates, some serving bowls, and a couple of serving platters.  The simple white dinnerware makes any food look good and easy to see.  Our walls and appliances are white and our dining room table is a darker oak so the plates will both match and contrast nicely with our decor.

When we got home we opened everything and put it in the dishwasher.  While it ran Linda boxed up all of the old Mikasa pieces that were still serviceable.  She will donate them to the local Salvation Army store tomorrow.

My focus for today was purchasing and installing an add-in that allows Microsoft Outlook to import multiple vCards from a single file.  It’s really galling that I have to spend money to get Outlook to do something that it obviously should be able to do as a standard, built-in function, but there it is.  I researched plug-ins for this a few weeks ago so I revisited what I had previously found.  I finally selected the vCard Wizard (vCard4Outlook) along with Duplicate Killer, both from 4TEAM Corp.  By purchasing them together I got Duplicate Killer for 50% off.  As soon as the purchase was completed I received the downloaded links for both programs and downloaded them but did not install them right away.

Why all the bother?  My old Palm Tungsten T3 PDA can output my contacts in vCard format, but it puts them all in one file.  There are manual ways to import this data to Outlook, but it would take days instead of minutes.  I may be retired but I do not have the patience for that and have better things to do with my time; even a nap would qualify.  The problem with the manual (free) approach is that it requires you to review each contact and decide what to do with it.  I have over 1,000 contacts in my Palm and there was no way I was going to review them one-by-one.

Dr. Michael Greger (NutritionFacts.org) recently did a nice video on the research findings about the health benefits of eating yams.  Linda picked up a nice big yam at Whole Foods on Saturday and baked it for dinner this evening, topping it with black beans cooked with tomatoes and onions, and finished off with vegan sour cream.  Yes, the “sour cream” is added fat calories, but we do not use it very often.

After dinner I copied over the Outlook mailbox (.pst) files from my old Dell laptop (Win XP / Outlook 2007) to my new ASUS laptop via one of the NAS units in preparation for moving to the use of Outlook on the new laptop tomorrow morning.  I spent a while after that selecting and processing images for blog posts going back to July 1st.  I have been keeping up with writing these posts, but not with posting them.