What's Up

After struggling for months with the location of the closet rods in the front closet, and not being able to fit the coats in, it suddenly crossed my mind, "DUH, we could move them!" But how long was that going to take me? So Paul took an afternoon last week and made all the adjustments in the walk-in closet. And now those of us with bursitis can hang up our coats on a rack that isn't 7½' in the air. And those of us with long coats are no longer dragging them on the floor of the closet. Every time I open up that closet, I am impressed with Paul's repair-job.

The tree finally got taken down, the decorations put away, and everything stored in the attic. Y'know, that tree that took up a lot of space in the living room takes up a HUGE amount of space in the attic!

The kids and I cleaned nearly the whole house today. The basement still needs some sprucing up. But it's nice to have that out of the way. Now there's only the taxes, the Christmas cards, soap-making, jam-making, and mending to do before I'll feel settled enough to get back to "regular life" again.

Paul was due back at college on Friday afternoon. The weather forecast for Friday was bad. All day Thursday I kept thinking, "I wish he didn't have to drive tomorrow." As we discussed it at supper, suddenly we thought, "Wait, he doesn't have to." So we finished eating, he gathered all his stuff posthaste, and left at 7:30 Thursday evening. He drove nearly 2/3 of the way to college and stopped for the night at a classmate's house. He pretty much drove to the east edge of the storm, slept while the storm passed overnight, and then drove the rest of the way on plowed Minnesotan roads while the storm was trashing our roads here. It worked out well, and he arrived safely. My worries are nothing like Polly seeing her kid off, but they were big enough for me.

There was a rather large fire in a neighbor's driveway early this evening. Worried, Maggie and I walked over to look at it, thinking we might need to start throwing snow onto it, and banging on neighbors' doors. Turned out it was nicely contained, and the neighbors were keeping an eye on it through the window. But as we walked back, the thing that surprised me was the TVs you could see through the windows. In our neighborhood, the houses are small, not built like the ones today, and everybody's TV is in the living room, usually right across from the big window. I thought our TV was large ... until I saw how tiny it is compared to the neighbors'. And it also struck me how much we as a society neeeeeed our TVs. Honestly, I think we'll put up with anything from the government as long as they don't deprive us of our video games, TV shows, ball games, and computer pastimes.

My computer has been driving me nuts the last week. Every time I click on a link, or try to open an email, the computer tries and tries and tries, then says it can't do it. But if I click on the "try again" button immediately, the window will pop right open. It's been taking forever to zip through mail or read blogs. Today Gary found that the registry settings had been fiddled with and fixed them. Hooray hooray! Now the computer is working right again. There's a little detail that somehow I have let some adware sneak onto the computer and it gives me pop-up windows with ads. But that's let's frustrating than taking one full minute to open each email. (Ah, how quickly we forget the days of having been on dial-up, six miles out in the boonies on old phone lines, back when I'd change a load of laundry or chop an onion to kill time during every instance of trying to open up a website!)