Partial to the bean…

I know I was all Squeeee! about the forecast for snow, but that’s because I was visualizing a cozy weekend spent in a warm house, watching the snow fall, eating homemade soup and Getting Stuff Done. But the heavy wet snow (we ended up getting more than 6 inches of it) weighed down the branches on all of the trees that hadn’t lost their leaves yet, and power lines came down all over the place.

We lost power around noon on Saturday. As I’m sure I’ve whined about here before, when the power goes out, we have no heat, no water, no Internet (can’t get a decent signal with my iPhone out here when our mini-cell goes down), and no phone (we have FiOS, so even the corded phone stops working after the power’s been out about 8 hours). So much for a warm house, homemade soup, and accomplishments.

Anth went over to his friend’s house (they only live about 2 miles away but they are over the line into some other power company’s territory and they never lose power, curse them) to watch various sporting events. The girls and I stayed home and did a jigsaw puzzle until it got to be too dark to make out the colors. By then it was getting coldish in the house (low 60s). We threw a blanket over the guinea pig cage and went to hang out in the car for an hour or so, listening to the radio, reading by the dome light and charging Alice’s phone with the car charger.

By 8:00 we were turning a little feral so I called Anth to come home and we cleared off the wood stove and he built a fire. That was an interesting process, which helped us to not be so bored and cranky, especially the part where we found an entire dead bird all mummified in the wood stove. Kewl. The fire warmed it up nicely, and the girls and I went to bed around 10. Anth was going to sleep on the couch and get up every hour or so all night to maintain the fire, but the power came back on around midnight. Sunday was spent gratefully getting hot showers and enjoying the heat pump’s magical actions.

I’d already said that the only thing I want for Christmas from Anth is a gas generator. Last night I added a good battery-powered Coleman lantern to the list.

Today was Halloween Fun Day at the school, so the girls dressed up. We worked hard on these costumes (well, compared to how hard we normally work on costumes), and I think they turned out adorably!!!

Also, I’d like to go on record here to say that Alice’s friends, who talked to Alice all week about their planned costumes (”I’m gonna be this! No wait, maybe this!” and “I’m not gonna tell you — it’ll be a surprise!” respectively) and then showed up today in regular clothes, leaving Alice feeling out of place and embarrassed for actually getting into the spirit of the day, are poopy butt losers. Bleaugh to them. Bleaugh, in fact, to most of the kids in the high school, who are too apparently damn cool-slash-lazy to dress up today. Bleaugh, I say!!

This probably doesn’t please you as much as it pleases me, but… There’s snow in the forecast for tomorrow! Possibly as much as 3-6 inches!! Yaayyyy!!!

As far as I can tell, they don’t make colored plastic wrap any more. I can’t find it, and I’ve checked multiple stores and the Internets. For the past 7 or 8 years, colored plastic wrap was my lunchbox signature move. Wrapping sammiches in see-through plastic just feels kind of unseemly now. If they put out a limited-edition run of colors for Christmas or something, I’m stocking up.

In other news.. The past couple of weeks have been hard for me, and it seems it was hard for those around me as well. Everything just felt gray, and it was hard to do anything. Maybe it was the weather changing, maybe it was all the leaves falling, maybe it’s because I’m in the rough month between the date of my father’s death (Oct 13) and the date of my mother’s death (Nov 13)…

At any rate, I’m trying to pull myself out of it, but it’s hard to tell what’s a good thing to be pushing myself to do, and what’s actually a waste of my time. Like, I have two books out of the library right now, and both of them must be returned in 2 weeks with no option for renewal because they’re hot new books with many other people waiting to read them. If I spend most of my afternoon reading, in the interest of finishing up these books in time, is that a better use of my time than, say, unpaid volunteer webpage work? Or laundry? I can’t tell, so I can’t tell if I’m being productive, or still depressed.

We turned the heat on this weekend. I was hoping to make it another week or so, but I caved because of the more delicate members of my family (these members shall remain nameless; draw your own conclusions). So that’s officially winter, basically — the windows are closed and won’t be open again until March or April. Just like my shoes. Argh, I hate closed shoes.

I made a big double batch of these over the weekend and froze most of them back for easy breakfasts and snacks. Yum.

Y’know, in the olden days it used to be, “Lawks, I have not received a letter from my friend in many months. I hope nothing untoward has befallen her.” Then when I was a kid, it was, “Jeez, I left a message on her machine yesterday and she hasn’t called me back. Where is she?” By the time I was an adult, it was, “Man, I sent her an email four hours ago, why the hell hasn’t she replied?” But now it’s, “I TEXTED THAT *%$# FIVE MINUTES AGO! WHERE THE &$#@ IS SHE?!?!?”

Is this really the world we want to live in? Feh.

We got our couch in today!! It took Anth about 45 minutes to figure out how to take the deck doors off. It took all of us about 45 minutes to clear everything out of the path in the living room and get the space ready. It took Anth’s two muscle-man friends about 45 seconds to carry the sofa from the garage, up the deck, and into the house. Now we have a living room again!!!

There’s garage spiders making nests in my new couch and an IKEA play tent in my living room and no, I haven’t shut up about this yet!!! *grump*

Anth threw his back out yesterday, in the process of discovering that we can’t fit our new couch into our freaking house. I am an unhappy camper.

We bought a new couch yesterday because our old couch was about as old as Alice, and it was freaking nasty. We didn’t pay the extra $100 to have it delivered, because we have a friend with a truck (and they wouldn’t have hauled the old one away anyway). Today we dismantled the old couch, picked up the new couch and brought it home. It doesn’t fit in the door. It’s in the garage until we can figure out how to gather sufficient muscle power to get it up onto the deck, and sufficient brain power to take the deck doors off. There’s nowhere to sit in our living room. I don’t want to talk about this any more. I have a headache and I am going to bed. I hate everything.