Well. the family I tried to infect has moved on. I didn’t see them move, but I knew they were gone when one morning the back porch lights were off, and there wasn’t a power outage. I will miss the kids, their parents not so much.

Then a couple of strange cars appeared in the driveway, and the light in the loft went on briefly, and hasn’t been turned on since that I have noticed. I think the youngest kids slept up there, because the light always went on about dusk and off about 9:30 pm.

My new neighbor is a man – I don’t know if he is married or not. He’s the only person I’ve seen, but so far I’ve seen three different cars, a pickup and a motorcycle. With all the vehicles on the other side, I’m beginning to feel like I’m living in the middle of a huge used car lot. The porch light is often turned off, which is a good sign.

I once said that Banquet had the best frozen dinners. That was before I tried their cardboard-flavored turkey and their inedible chicken strips. The Hormel Compleat dinners are not frozen, but are better than the Banquet dinners.

Banquet still has the best frozen lasagne, not because of the taste, but because it has smaller pieces of noodle. It’s still in the meatless meat sauce that everyone with frozen lasagne uses. Hormel Compleats has a spaghetti with meat sauce which actually has a little meat in it. They must not be in the meat sauce cartel.

This brings up the question: how do they make meat sauce without meat in it?

It must be similar to the way the makers of canned roast beef hash make their product without exposure to roast beef. I think they cook up some hamburger and wrap it in a mesh bag after which they dip the bag of covered meat in a big pot of tomato sauce. When they take it out and drain it, they have a big pot of meat sauce and some hamburger to use in making tacos.

I said that our WBA team the Lynx was the only professional Minnesota team that could win the big games. They’re not winning so much now, but I enjoyed watching them shoot hoops from half court. I didn’t see their games listed on TV much, so I decided to give the Timberwolves a try. I just learned the names of the players when they went into the playoffs, playing the Memphis Grizzlies.

Typical Minnesota team, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. They led by 26 points in the third quarter, and still managed to lose the game. The last game I saw, they won by one point, and if the game had gone another 10 seconds, they would have lost that one.

The Twins have surprised me by winning a lot of games. Games with the White Sox and Tigers that were won by capitalizing on their errors. Some of these were unbelievable. It was almost as though their opponents were throwing the game on purpose.

In the last one, Sano made a stupid mistake and kept running to second base, although a runner was already there. That forced the runners to advance, and the Tigers were so confused, they threw the ball into the outfield, allowing two runs to score for a walk-off win.

For some reason, our best players are getting hit on the hands with pitched balls. I have a sneaking suspicion that some of these are planned attacks.

I still don’t watch soccer or hockey. I don’t understand what’s going on in soccer, and I think of hockey as a sort of semi-organized brawl. Before face shields, you could tell how long a person had played hockey by the number of teeth he had missing.

I am keeping myself entertained between ball games by playing solitaire on my Green Felt games. There are several games that operate correctly, but I am stuck on the game of Forty Thieves. It’s a challenging game because it cheats. If it cheats successfully. I reach the end and am at least one ace short. There must be eight aces showing between the tableau and the foundations at the end. If there aren’t, the game has hidden the missing card sometime while turning over the cards from the deck.

Actually, it always tries (and often succeeds) in hiding cards, and if you even notice, you have to press undo several times to reveal the card that is hiding.

The game will also “help” you by playing cards from the tableau to the foundations, Sometimes it is an actual help, but often is not. It may play the right cards, but take them from the wrong column. It plays the cards out very fast, so you can’t follow what it is doing.

When you win a game, it’s like beating a guy at poker when he always has an ace up his sleeve.

I just had my pacemaker battery replaced. I hate it when someone who rarely does it tries to find a vein for the IV.

One woman stuck me twice in the left arm and couldn’t find one. Most phlebotomists find that arm easier. She had to call in a guy who got it first time in the right arm. These are always painful pokes, so even the misses hurt. Otherwise, everything went well.

I just got an email trying to get me to buy Samsung products. I own a Samsung refrigerator on which the ice maker has been broken for several months. The serviceman from the gas company was here, found the broken part, and ordered a new one. It was on backorder for about six months.

I think Samsung is aware that I was badmouthing them, because they quickly threw the part on my porch. It looks a little wind burned, so it came in on a tall ship from Japan. It took the repairman about 10 minutes to install it.

I bought a Samsung color laser jet before I realized there wasn’t much I needed to print in color. The problem is, the control center for the Samsung also controlled the scanning for the Brothers black laser jet. Then I upgraded to Mac OS Monterey, which required 64 bit apps. The control center is a 32 bit app.

I checked with Samsung on getting it upgraded to 64 bit, but found that Samsung no longer supports its printers. That task has been taken over by HP.

You know how much interest HP has in doing this? Not much.