—Well, not really weird, I suppose. Just “ultra normal”.
We got pretty well packed last night, and left The Squire’s middle sister’s home in time for church at St. Andrew’s at 10:30. Not a soul in sight at 10:15. Finally, the rector wandered out and apologized profusely for what was obviously not his fault. The city was doing some major repair work following several major snow storms in a row, and on Thursday had notified the church that they would be without power from 7:30 until noon. The church had sent out a shot-gun email to the parishioners that services would be at 12:30, but hadn’t put anything on the website. As it turned out, the power had just come on at 10:00. Bless him, Fr. Tim offered to do a Mass just for the two of us. A sort of private interview with God, and Rite I, to boot.
I don’t eat breakfast before communion, so I was famished, and since there was no coffee hour, we found a nice little Chinese restaurant and had dinner before we headed over to Newport.
We knew that our friends had to leave at 3:00 to go to a Lady Vols game, but we have been here often enough that this is practically a second home. They headed off to their game and we went to visit The Squire’s youngest sister. She smokes non-stop and visiting with her is more of a chore than a pleasure, but we girded up our mental loins and headed off. As it turned out, she is quite ill – she thinks it’s pneumonia – but that didn’t stop her from trying twice to light up a cigarette in the five minutes we were there.
We left the poor girl to suffer in solitude and came “home” to wash our clothing and ourselves. I had changed wigs before we left the house, but I still had to strip down completely and wash my scalp, anyway. Blech.
I moved Jane’s laundry from the washer to the dryer, put in our clothing, took my shower, and The Squire and I are now eating fresh homemade black bean and rice chili while waiting for the laundry to finish up. I emptied the dishwasher, and just hope Jane can find where I stashed all the plates and cutlery!
thisendoftheswamp 
When I was doing bar visits in Montana, smoking was still allowed. I used to make The Kid take all my smoke-infused clothes to the laundry room while I was sent to the decontamination unit (shower) to get rid of the smoke. Life got better when the indoor smoking ban took effect.