Brain Dump

Well.

Because sometimes when you feel like saying something you maybe shouldn't, well works.

That, or Man is born to trouble, as surely as sparks fly upward.  And I've never seen them go any other way.  But well works for me.

This is only the fifth day of the new year, and thus far... well, it's been interesting.  Or maybe it just seemed that way, as we went 40+ hours with no phone or internet service.  

My life is very difficult. 

I'm sure you've all been on pins and needles, wondering what the Grasshoppers were up to.  Good news.  The wait is over.  (/sarcasm)

1.  My hair was driving me crazy.  I can't stand it touching my face, thus it must be long enough to pull back, or short.  (I know, I know, this is the hard-hitting journalism you come here for.)  After whacking about 14 inches off for the big road trip last fall, I figured I'd grow it out long again.  Turns out that right now I don't have what it takes to push through that difficult in-between stage.  I'm spiky again.  And it only took Kerry twenty-nine hours to notice.

2.  Equal mass, baby, equal mass.  I like to clean and purge all year long, but especially after Christmas.  We all know that what goes up must come down, right?  Well, what comes in, must go out.  At least an equal amount.  Although sometimes it feels a bit ridiculous.  Like that fact that I had an entire grocery sack full of socks for the consignment store.  I bought short (ankle) socks for the boys last summer because I thought the boys should like them.  Because that's what a lot of boys wear.  But they like crew socks.  And only crew socks.  (Yes, we are geeky homeschoolers.  Thank you very much.)

3.  The Office Tornado.  Apparently I've discovered a new phenomenon.  It's the only reason I can imagine admit to that my office is such a wreck.  No crafternoons until I get it picked up.

4.  We hit the Potluck Trifecta over New Year's.  Neighbors I had invited here had us to their house for dinner (score!), then we had two potlucks, back-to-back, at the Chapel - New Year's Eve, and New Year's Brunch.  And we all know that Chapel potlucks are the stuff that legends are made of.  I was too tired to make anything for the brunch, but the boys begged to go anyway, so we brought... drum roll please... a large bag of bananas.  I'll make up for it next time.  Promise. 

5.  Tate, Gunnar and I had an errand marathon yesterday.  Yah.  That was fabulous.  Running around in a monsoon (a moonsoon!  I tell you!  And, no, I never exaggerate.  Why do you ask?)  Doing ten errands I've been putting off (and, in other news, trying to break Wyatt of the habit of procrastinating.  Where does he get that?!?)

Well, we had a sweater to exchange, you see.  And Grandma Grasshopper - bless her, and may her tribe increase - is a good sport, and very gracious about understanding that when you're a kid, "brown" isn't recognized as a color.  A forest green sweater is on its way.

6.  I was so glad to get home, out of the yuck, I just sat in my living room and enjoyed my candles.  Just some of them.  Because do you know how many candles I have out right now?  Forty-one.  No kidding.  Of course, lots of them are just tea-lights.  But still.  Sometimes a girl just needs some sparkly cheer on a dark day.  And it was a very dark day.  And sometimes our power goes out.

7.  Also, just before Christmas and the visit to the in-laws, and possibly Festivus and the Airing of Grievances, the phone started getting all crackly.  And the internet kept crashing.  Fun times.

At first, I thought it was just our phones. They have issues.  The corded phone upstairs (because everyone has a corded phone for when the power goes out, right?) somehow lost its DSL filter when someone borrowed it for his office.  And let me tell you, crawling under the bed to plug in the new filter is not a job for a forty-five year old mom, for crying out loud.  I almost had to have Wyatt pull me out.  And the things I saw down there?  Well.  Let me tell you, somebody needs to speak to the maid.  If we had one.

And the cordless phone?  Well, let's just admit that it's been dropped a few times and leave it at that, shall we?

So it was easy to assume the problem was the phones.  Except that it's not.  We finally realized that the scratchy phone and the crashy internet were worse in bad weather.  Could it be because the phone line snakes through a tree, between our house and the pole?  Just possibly?

Why yes, I think it could.  Especially when the phone kept giving me a dial tone.  After I dialed.  And then went well and truly dead.

While we waited for the phone company to come fix it, I sent the older boybarians out to cut some branches off the tree.  I probably should've held a big sign that said,

Please don't call CPS

with an explanation, judging by the way traffic slowed down and people stared.  I guess you don't often see two teenage boys up in a tree, in 40mph wind, with metal saws, and a long metal pole with metal clippers on the end, hacking away at a tree with what looks like a power line winding through it.  The sign should probably have included

Low-voltage phone line.

Of course, we waited to do this until it was getting dark, because the d*%# watershed zealots would probably try to fine us for pruning a "city tree" without a permit.  If memory serves.  Not that they would ever prune it.

At any rate, two cheerful guys from the phone company brought a cherry-picker out today and replaced the line.  Which was - unsurprisingly - nicked in a few places.  They also cleaned a yellow-jacket nest out of some sort of connector box up on the power pole.  Boy, I bet they were glad for the cold weather.  (Makes for slow insects, in case you didn't know.)  And now?  All fixied.  :o)

8.  H98.  We learned something new this week.  If you're microwave tells you H98, then either your inverter (?), your magnetron (??), or your programming circuit (???) is no longer working.  And you can probably get a new microwave cheaper than you can fix any of those things.  Just in case you wanted to know.  And, more importantly, you can reheat pizza in your actual oven, in a pinch.

9.  So it's been an eventful week.  Not terrible, but not one I'm anxious to repeat.

10.  This is not the first brain dump that starts with "Well."  Just in case you wondered.  And the other one had a funny picture.  And I'm too tired right now to find a funny picture, so there you go.