my tired old laptop

Last night I thought my computer had died completely - and me, here, without a backup - eeekkkk! 

I couldn't take the trauma of it so I went to bed and pretended it was fine.  When I got up this morning I waited - again with the ignoring of the trauma - until Stella took a nap today and tried to boot the little beast.  Hooray!   

First thing I did was back up just about every bit of info on the computer.  

But, just in case I don't show up here for a very long time. . . it could be that it happened again. Poor thing has been making some moaning noises for quite some time now.  

We'll see how long we can stick it out  : )

March Forth!

Ah, well, I missed it by a day. Whenever I get to the date March 4th I think of my mom & her dad who said that day was also a command. And so we shall march forth!

March 4th at our house consisted of a whole lot of time spent in the bathroom. Though not as painful as that sounds by itself. : ) Stella is potty training and we spent a good part of the day yesterday running upstairs to get her to the potty on time and then "hanging out" while she waited for the pee to come.

The high temp was at about 7am and it got colder and colder all day long. A "wintry mix" - which is a euphemism if I've ever heard one - all day long and apparently it turned to snow last night because we woke up with the most snow we've had so far. Probably 5 1/2 or 6 inches. The sad part to me is when it gets warm enough to melt it. Really. That is the sad part. : )

I got up at 5:30 this morning (not by choice. . . that'd be one of the perks of having a toddler) and got the driveway shoveled before Ben left for work around 8. I'd rather shovel it early and get to it before the tires pack it down and make it really really hard work. Stella cried inside while I was working because she wanted to help me. Once Ben let me know she was crying I came back in and got her all jacketed and scarfed and we went back out to finish. Her "help" involves wiping the snow off the little metal animals on our porch and knocking the snow off the handrails. She also scuffs around in her boots (which aren't really snow boots, but that's what she's got this year) and makes trails next to the stray cat's footprints all over our yard.

Last time it snowed like this we made a mountain out of the shoveled snow and made a snowman (perhaps my first snowman with a ball diameter longer than a foot ever!). So far today we've only made a snow mountain, but that is still mightily impressive.

SNOW!

Last night it started snowing right around the time Ben got home from work.  7 ish.

  

Stella and I heard the frozen rain from inside the house an hour or so later, making me wonder if we might be in for an unmentioned ice storm.

I woke up at 7 this morning and I think it must've snowed all night.  

It is wonderful out there!  This is what snow is all about - yay winter!

sleep & books

some nights it is pretty easy to find
others....

Lately the thing that has kept me from sleep are the books I'm reading. That's too bad, because I love sleep. I would say I prefer sleep over reading. Judging from my behavior over the past two months though I suppose it may not be true. I've been getting very very little sleep some nights just so I can read a little further in the book.

Maybe that just shows how good these books are.

The ones that have kept me up lately are:
The Mercury Visions of Louis DaGuerre - night before last I was crying as I neared the end
Fluke - this one was more amusing than compelling
Dead to the World - this is part of the Sookie Stackhouse series that I am trying to pretend I'm not addicted to - notice the word "trying"

I'm aiming to read a book about my baby's self-esteem next. Another highly recommended one, although not nearly as escapist as the fiction is for me. I hope to enjoy it.

Good morning!

In-Laws etc

Ben's parents came up last weekend.
They were our first houseguests here.

The bed upstairs has no boxspring so I'm sure that was fun for them. They camp, so they'll survive, but it's just not very comfy to have to get all the way on the floor.

The kitchen was out-of-order for half their stay since the landlords decided to receiling it the weekend before and sand/repaint it this weekend. It looked amazing by the end of the weekend though, and we got a great meal or two cooked before they left.

Showed them around town some: the city and checking out the different neighborhoods/parts of town. Sylvia and I talked about going to the science center with Stella, but Stella took a nap instead.

We took them on an extended tour of Sweetwater (where Ben works) and then had lunch there too and played some video games. Stella made sure to explain to them in detail how the boxes travel up and down the conveyor belt in the warehouse - there's an observation spot near the bathrooms and I think she could probably watch boxes all day if we packed a lunch.

They managed to come up for a relatively balmy weekend here. It got up into the low 40s and has since gotten down to single digits (and they only left yesterday).

Stella had SO much fun with them & keeps talking about them and asking when they'll come over again. I have a feeling that we wouldn't be seeing so much of them if we hadn't just moved their only grandbaby away. That's okay though, I don't take any offense. I know they love her. She loves them too, so I'm glad they want to see her.

We had snow on and off while they were here. It's funny how quickly you get used to things. One month and already the snow is not such a big deal. Don't get me wrong - it's still cool. There's just so much of it and so often that is really is like any other precipitation here.
Not like the phantom-magic-scarcely-ever-seen-perhaps-even-mythological snow of the south. : )

land

Ben got a "talking to" by the landbaroness
(that's instead of landlord, see - it's funny)
for my blog(s) disrespecting the house here.

She took it personally when I said the house smelled like a dog.

Well.
It did.
It still does sometimes, but mostly in the basement now.

I get it. I hurt her feelings. I didn't think my landlord would be reading my blog on myspace, but really it's not like I named her or gave the address or did anything to let other people know who it was.

I was venting about things that have been stressing me out and making me physically react since I moved here.

That is what this kind of thing is for, right?

we moved

So, we have talked about moving someplace where there are real winters for years and years and in January 2008 we did just that.  We moved.  From Georgia to northeastern Indiana.  We've gotten snow and snow and snow and it now feels warm out when it's over 32, so it's official - we moved north.

We had been talking about Boston, Chicago, New York, Portland, and perhaps a few others.  By early December Chicago won out.  We got a renter for our house in Atlanta (Decatur, actually), we put a deposit down on an apartment near Wrigley in Chicago, and started packing up the house, even though we had no job(s) and no real idea of what we'd be doing.

The day after we put the deposit down in Chicago, Ben got a call from Sweetwater in Fort Wayne, Indiana asking him to come out for a job interview.  He went for the interview a week and a half later and got the job offer two or three days before Xmas.  So, just for funsies we added to holiday stress by deciding to pack up and move to Indiana.  

Ben left on New Year's Day to come up and find us a house to live in before he started work on the 7th, while Stella and I stayed behind to finish packing up the house & prepping for the move.  Who knew we'd end up with more than we could stuff in a well-packed twenty-four foot truck?!  We have a lot of stuff apparently.  We've decided that maybe we should be more zen/buddhist/... and learn to live without things.  We'll see how that goes.  : )

And so. . . we moved.  It seemed like a sudden thing to some folks, but we'd been working on this plan for some time.  Moving is kind of like the first three months of pregnancy - you don't really want to start talking about it until it is really more likely to actually happen, otherwise you get people all focused on that possibility and then something else comes up.  No need to ruffle feathers and get people thinking we are moving until we actually are.  Right?   

Good.  

That's how we felt about it anyway.

And so. . . we have moved.  And here we are.  In Fort Wayne, Indiana.  We are now Hoosiers.  Unless there is some requirement that you be born here or live here for more than a month before you officially don the title "Hoosier"

I'll post my dog-house adventures at a later time (date actually, since it's past my bedtime). . .