Category: Life

I was happy yesterday when my farrier called and decided it was too snowy to shoe the horses here at home. It seemed too damp and cold to be standing in the barn holding a horse. I usually don’t feel I need to be here when she shoes, but I wanted to be here the first time she did Hap since he has a talent for extracting drama from every new situation.

Recent forecasts of snow have only resulted in one or two inches so I was quite surprised that we actually ended up with six inches. Aside from one quick trip to the grocery store, I spent the day organizing, cleaning, and nursing a beef stew on the range. The stew was excellent, and not harmed by Jack getting home a lot later than usual due to icy roads.

Today is the first day of “COSine”:http://www.rialto.org/cosine/, a science fiction convention being sponsored by our club here in town. I volunteered to pick up our Guest of Honor, “Barbara Hambly”:http://www.barbarahambly.com/, at the airport. I have been reading her books since her first fantasy novel, The Time of the Dark, was published, and am looking forward to meeting her.

In Bathrooms, bleh I whined about painting our bathrooms. Last night, I finally finished Jack’s.

More than ordinary procrastination had kept me from finishing his bathroom. I had some joint aches this weekend, especially in my left thumb and elbow. Among other things, I thought the painting I did on Thursday might have caused them. (Fishing ice out of drinking buckets with my bare hands probably didn’t help.)
Continue reading Bathrooms, Bleh, Reprise

As a cheaper alternative to sending your dogs to obedience school, agree to dogsit a year old, hyperactive, fifty pound puppy that can scale five foot wooden stockade fences. We lost Gracie from the dog run three times in the same morning. (Obviously, she is a faster learner than I am.) After I gave her back to her owners Monday morning, our dogs looked like miracles of canine deportment.

I am painting two of the three bathrooms in our house. I painted the third over five years ago. It took me that long to forget how tedious it is to paint bathrooms. When I painted the kitchen a very pale yellow, I had one full gallon left over, and we decided it would look good in our bathrooms.

Fortunately, I only have one more roller coat to go in my bathroom, and Jack’s bathroom is completely festooned with masking tape and newspapers over every flat surface. I think Jack’s bathroom will be easier to paint than mine, not least because his has a natural light from a window.

We are replacing the icky old towel bars and I have a new medicine chest to replace the mirror that used to be over my vanity. As always, I was relieved to see that I actually do like the paint we chose in the room. The old color was a cool shade of white, and the pale yellow warms the room considerably.

Yesterday I finishing shopping and wrapping presents. Considering that some years I am still wrapping presents on Christmas morning, I am quite pleased to be done so early.

The weather has been mild, and today I will go play with Lily and take a birthday present to a friend. Tomorrow, Christmas Day, we will be going to Jack’s sister’s for dinner.

I saw Return of the King yesterday with some friends yesterday and loved it. Usually I hate seeing a film made from a book I love, and I have loved the LotR books since I was twelve. I think Scalzi’s essay on Why The Film is Better than the Book addresses this question better than anything else I have seen.

I may even go see it again with Jack. This is quite an accomplishment for a film since I rarely see more than one or two in an entire year.

The technician for our wireless provider showed up this morning and quickly determined that we had a bad cable leading from the antenna into the house. Jack had to do some fiddling to get the router talking to the LAN again, but everything now seems to be working again.

I love the “Pikes Peak Library District.”:http://library.ppld.org/ Right now I am using an Internet connected PC in a very crowded room on the ground floor of the Penrose Library system. I had never been in this library before, which is in downtown Colorado Springs. The only drawback to their Internet lounge is that they limit your sessions to 55 minutes with a clock ticking in the corner.

I usually use the libraries in the north end of town, but Lody is having her teeth cleaned at a nearby animal hospital, and it didn’t seem worth while to go home and come back all that way. Our vet usually comes to the house for routine stuff, but uses the operating room of this clinic when she needs to do anestheasia.

Being without constant Internet access has been stressful. Even when I travel, I usually find someway of touching base with my email and regular web sites. I feel so out of touch. I have been reduced to watching TV for news updates. It seems very unnatural: how do people stand all the commercials?

Right now, we don’t even have an estimated time for when our high speed wireless Internet access will be working again. The signal is getting to the antenna on our house, but is getting lost between the antenna and the router. The regular technician has been sick with the flu and there has been an amazing lack of communication between him, the company for which he works, and us, the customers. I’ve been stuck at the house most of the week waiting for telephone calls that don’t come and service calls that don’t materialize. Slow, but reliable dial up service is looking better all the time over high speed but non-existant wireless access.

Obviously, non-family readers of this weblog can skip this post.

I’ve updated my Amazon Wish List for those baffled by what to give me for Christmas this year.

If I wanted to get myself a present, I would be baffled too, since indoor riding arenas are expensive! In addition to the Amazon list, I no longer have any clothes in my favorite color of teal, I am very low on cotton knit turtlenecks (since they keep shrinking every time they get washed), and we could use potholders and kitchen towels and a teapot cosy.