Pushing forward

Good Monday morning, folks, hope you had a great weekend!

I have to say that we certainly did, although there were a few things leading into the weekend that were a little, well, different.

First, the good.  We celebrated the tenth birthday of our younger grandson this weekend with a sleepover, his first trip to White Castle and then a family dinner at a local hibachi restaurant.  He and his immediate family (my son and his wife, plus his two sisters) went to Cincinnati for a Reds game.

This was only our second dining-out experience since restrictions began to be lifted, the first being the night of our son's official law school graduation a couple of weeks before.  The place we went was taking all of the right precautions, and all diners were required to wear masks upon entry.

The chef who prepared our dinner mentioned that he came to this country (and to Lexington) in 1998 and formerly cooked at another now departed hibachi restaurant.  He was a fun and pleasant fellow and very attuned to what would make his guests happiest.

For instance, our youngest granddaughter was a little startled by the big-fire spectacle that's standard at these places, so he quickly extinguished the fire and reassured her with a fist bump, which she enthusiastically returned.  He also noted that he was a little short of rice when he fried and served our table, so asked a waitress to bring him more, and he fried and distributed that, too.  Really good experience.

Our White Castle visit was good, but in a different way.  In full disclosure, my son really dislikes White Castle, so in kidding with our grandson I said that we were going to White Castle instead of the hibachi place, which drew some interesting reactions.  Our middle granddaughter, who'll be twelve in October, said she'd never been but would like to go.  Grandson said the same, so I said I'd take them there for lunch on Saturday.

We didn't know they have not yet opened to indoor dining, but were allowing people in to order carryout, so opted for that and ate in the car.  Those kids LOVED the food!  Wasn't sure what their reaction would be, particularly the grandson, since he doesn't care much for onions.  So there you go, gotta try some things sometimes.

I had the opportunity to play golf with three good friends yesterday.  We scheduled this several weeks out as one of the guys has an in at a local private club.  It was uncomfortably hot, presumably because it's only recently gotten that warm, and they host a PGA tournament there in July and are apparently already preparing for it with overgrown rough and fiendish pin placements.  No one scored well but we had fun!

The potential damper of the weekend was time spent with a man who came to give an estimate for a certain brand of gutters that we've seen advertised on television.  Now that the next door neighbor's messy locust tree is gone I don't worry too much about clogged gutters, but my wife still does.  So I contacted this company for an estimate.

A man who actually used to sell cars and work as a sales manager in the car business was their representative and I felt the discomfort of an old fashioned car deal almost instantly.  It took him more than two hours to measure and take video to show me, as their approach to selling their overkill product is to instill fear in the potential buyer, implying that if they don't buy this super-duper product, well, there will be problems.

He was pretty insistent that he present to me and my wife, so I set him up in our garage, which he didn't really like, and my wife excused herself about about thirty minutes (we had the three local grandkids here, so that was necessary).  The price he originally quoted was astronomical, to say the least, and he then got the sales manager on the phone, as he is required to do, and magically the price came down significantly, to around half of the original total, IF I WOULD AGREE TO BUY THAT DAY!  I told him no without even thinking about it.

These are gutters and downspouts, for heaven's sake.

I liked the guy who came to do the estimate and proposal, but I somehow suspect he's simply working out a non-compete in the car business and will go back to that sometime soon.

Instead, we're moving ahead with replacing the rest of the windows in the house (all of the downstairs windows this time).  Their rep was just here measuring and writing up a proposal, but said they're 15 to 20 weeks out for installation.  I suppose that the stimulus money that so many of us received is being put to good use in a lot of cases!

We're also consider another improvement that won't be cheap, but is necessary.  We had a good experience with replacing our fence a few weeks ago, so we're getting there with making our house work a little better for us.

So that's what's happening here.  Hope things are going well where you are!