Hi.

I’m in my new office, do I look different?

I’m on the second floor, in the small bedroom, the one we called the nursery, the one we used as a bedroom for half the winter because it wasn’t as cold as the other room in the North corner, the one with “KATIE” stenciled on the window frame, coordinating pastel wallpapers and matching Noah’s Ark border. For a small room, it has two doors and two windows. It gets great morning light and if I sit at the computer too early, the screen is hard to read. No worries, a couple more months and the sun will move around enough for this to not be a problem.

We finally set it up, one rainy afternoon where it poured hard enough that not only the Internet went out, the tv almost went out too. Oh, and it’s damp enough here there are ducks and geese on my lawn all the time. Anyway, Ron finished assembling the hutch part and I gathered up all our piles and odds and ends, and wiped down dust.

My new office (okay, mine and RON’S but he gets it at night) is still a little bit of chaos and the old office, now the kid’s, is still a bit wild, but we can walk through both rooms and sort of know where everything is. Even if it’s “in that box over there”. My huge new desk surface is littered with papers.

There’s a futon in here. Meaghan sits on it, notebook on her lap, pen in hand. Or in  her mouth, as she gazes out the window, thinking. She writes. The light is better in here, she says.

Emma comes to visit, hanging off my shoulder. “I’m lonely,” she tells us. “I’m downstairs all by myself.” Sarah’s not up yet, but when she does get up, I can see her right away. “Hey,” she’ll say as she crosses the hall.

I don’t have her clacking the keys in tandem with me anymore. I can close the door and be alone and quiet, enough to hear whomever on the other end of the phone. I can see out one window if I turn my head slightly, see people walking down the road, some traffic, an occasional tractor with the lights flashing. I can’t turn around and show Sarah what’s on my screen though. I email her downstairs, send a link, forward an email with “print me plz :)” in the subject line.

Okay, now it’s really quiet. I’m feeling peckish. I have to go all the way downstairs, and hope I don’t forget anything on the way down or on the way back up. My travels through the house have changed direction. It’s faster to get to the kitchen if I use the back stairs. When I was in the other room, I used the front staircase more.

I may have spent a good half hour a day just in walking in circles around my house to go up the correct staircase.

Hmm. Wonder what they’re doing downstairs?

We have been asked to announce the death of Abby, beloved cat of Carl and Mam, who passed away Friday after a short illness. Abby is also survived by her housemate, Porsche. She was 18.

In leui of flowers, donations can be sent to your local SPCA.

If you’ve been wandering around online since sometime yesterday and wonder why some sites were down and some were not, I can tell you why.

Seems that a popular stats tracking code called SiteMeter made some changes and now everyone who uses their code (like me) has a site that won’t work in Internet Explorer. It’s been at least 12 hours and even the main SiteMeter site is down.

Well, only in IE.

On top of the oddness, there’s nothing on the Sitemeter site about it.

If you have SiteMeter code on your own blog, you might want to remove it until this is all fixed.

So yesterday, I mean Tuesday - was my mom’s birthday and I completely forgot to at least call her. Not really forget, mostly I remembered at the wrong time to actually pick up the phone and call.

I mean, I did call on Sunday because she never called me like she does at 11am on Sunday mornings, so I humphed and fretted and broke down and dialed the phone (okay, pushed buttons) and when the call as answered it was not my mom but Carl telling me she had gone out shopping, the nerve of her, and when she called me back later she said Carl told her I was putting all the stuff she ever gave me into the dumpster so I said yes, yes I did.

Then Tuesday came in a flurry of activity because I had to make it at least look like I got some work done in the morning, and we all had to be ready to leave at lunch time and go down south to the big city, drop off Ron at the doctor’s, do some shopping meet up with A & K for dinner, head on home again, check on clients and answer a few emails, then zip back into the local town and head on to the fair because it was Loonie Night (all rides $1) in the spitting rain and darkening skies, with the big lure for me being all the pretty lights to take pictures of, then to fall into bed exhausted, tossing and turning in the humidity, only to get up and seemingly do it all over again, the phone ringing the emails flying, client emergencies, digging around servers, and going to my happy place, keeping insanely busy on the anniversary of my grandmother’s death where we just try not to think of it really, and then I remember I still haven’t called my mother let alone blogged and I remember I have a couple links to pass on to her anyway and might as well post them so here you go.

*whew* Yes, my days have been like that again. Again or still, I’m not sure.

So! Happy Birthday Week to my mom, who took the whole week off and is probably headed to my house right now to see if we’re okay.

Here’s a new blog I found that posts pictures and commentaries of cake disasters. I had to go read every single post, until I got to the one that started it all, which I know I sent my mom the link to when it hit the internet, and she had to call me and tell me how funny it was.

Also, because I have some real estate clients and I like the house market, I read this blog about really bad house listings. Especially the really bad pictures to go with them. (Good thing I read fast.)

Here’s to another year. Try not to pee while laughing.

Yesterday we got a dumpster delivered. It was very exciting.

No, really it was, come back!

The guy came early, like I just got back from my walk early, and his truck was a wee bigger than I thought it would be. I got him to leave the extremely large container right where Ron told me to tell him to put it. He kind of had to wrangle the truck a bit.

And then? We noticed he had the lifter part of the truck caught on some overhead wires. Thankfully not connected to anything (I think) but wires nonetheless. So when he asked is he could borrow a shovel or stick or something to move the wires, well of course I said “OF COURSE!” and frantically looked around helplessly.

The guy and I had just finished saying to each other that neither one of us has any caffeine yet that morning either.

So that’s why I got to move the lever on the truck, see, because he was up under the back part that lifts, holding the wire up out of the way, and he couldn’t reach the levers on the side of the truck, so he showed me which one to pull to bring the level back down. All while he stood ther with it coming slowly towards him and both of us watching to make sure the wire got out of the way.

After that I was pretty much awake.

***

Today after my morning walk, I wandered around to look at the dumpster (it has a door) and saw MRS gopher runnign under it. I say MRS gopher as babies have been spotted.

This weekend we’ll be tossing things in a dumpster again, making a ton of nose and pleasing the neighbours. (They love it when we work in the yard - really.)

We loved the Wall-E movie, even knowing after the DVD comes out, we’ll probably hear & see it 2566501765 times. Even if people have objections (some quite venomous) and (admittedly valid) concerns over the associated products to consume. But this story, this one irght here? This is why we love Pixar as a company.

Someday Emma hopes to work there, and even if she just gets to visit, like the girl above did, that will be the bestest thing ever.