This morning I got all the fresh ingredients sliced, diced, and browned, and now have a full crock pot of beef stew simmering for dinner tonight.  I also got (most of) the ingredients into the bread maker.  Unfortunately Tom must have thrown out the box of non-fat dried milk (that I only use when I'm making bread) when he mucked out the pantry after we found some critters in some of the packaged staples.  My recipe only calls for 2 tablespoons, and I thought I might see how the bread turns out without it, but luckily an SOS to Estera has solved that problem.

COX showed up right on schedule, though "Murphy", who seems to keep a close watch on us, made his usual appearance and things took a tad longer than the technician expected.  The expectation is that now we will continue to have phone service whether or not it rains.  Since more precip is forecast, it should be a good test.  At least they did actually cancel this cycle of irrigation.

Jose and a helper showed up right after COX started, 

so there has been lots of activity for Tyga to supervise.  

As long as we had to move one of the couches out of the way to get to the duct vent to remove it, I decided it would be a good time to vacuum the temporarily vacated space and evict the giant dust bunnies and other crud that had collected.  The clunking sound as I dragged the tool across the bottom edge of the wall was my first clue that I had sucked up the screws.  I did take the vacuum's collector off and sift through the gunk, but the screws have apparently vanished.    

They have washed all the vents, and just started the actual vacuuming, which isn't as noisy as I expected and doesn't seem to be bothering Tyga too much.