A Really Big Boo Boo
I broke a ceramic bowl last night. It was quite a surprise because the bowl came apart while I was washing it. It didn't even hit anything: it came apart from nothing more than the force I applied with my two hands. Coupled with my great surprise was an incredible pain, and a great deal of messiness... but I suppose I can skip the gory details.

Luckily, Sheryl's dad arrived about two minutes after the accident (he came to Juneau for a series of meetings, and will be staying with us until Sunday). He was a medic in the army once upon a time. He helped with the initial bandaging, went to retrieve Sheryl from school (he was using the car Sheryl commutes in), then drove me down to the emergency room.

Five stitches. Missed the tendon. Severed one of the two nerves in the finger. I am told there are two microsurgeons in town who do this sort of work, so there's a reasonable prospect for getting some feeling back into the numb area. Since the finger is immobilized, I don't know how much the nerve damage may affect my ability to play the guitar, and probably won't know for several weeks. It is somewhat harder to type at present.

Is there a lesson to be learned here? Let's see... 1. Dirty dishes are okay. 2. Cleaning dishes can be hazardous to your health.

Here in the Real World
Now Playing: NPR on-line
Over a month. That's how long the last game of Civilization 3 lingered on our computer. We didn't play every day -- in fact, Sheryl quit playing a couple of weeks ago -- but the game was a more-or-less regular feature in our household for over a month. We could fill a few pages with the tales of conquest and/or salvation that made up this particular game, but the bottom line is that Sheryl's country dominated through most of the virtual timeline, while Michael struggled through most of the game against a strong and persistent nemesis. At one point, Sheryl's armies had to come to the rescue to prevent Michael's country from being diminished to the point of obscurity, but in the end the two countries left standing were the two of ours, another victory against the forces of virtual evil.

It's a good thing to have diversions for the winter months in Juneau. In past years, I [Michael] have done opera in the winter. Unfortunately, there isn't an opera this year (scheduling conflicts prevented us from securing auditorium space this year), and even if there were it would be a hardship to spend so many evenings away from the kids. Fortunately, the kids offer plenty of opportunities for diversion on their own (I am typing this with one hand while feeding Michael a banana, for instance), so there always seems to be activities of some sort going on.

It is snowing here today. Looking at the weather page on the internet, it appears that Juneau is going to see snow of some sort or another for the next several days, just as we've seen snow every day for the last week or so. Some days we've gotten several inches, some days we get no more than a dusting, I've been out on most days to run the snow blower over the driveway, and on most of those days Becky has come out with me to play in the snow. We haven't gotten a pile like the one that accumulated last winter, but it's only January, and we've still got a lot of potential for snow for weeks to come.

And so life goes on in our household. We haven't been posting much because there hasn't been much to post about, but now that we're replacing virtual activities with real live ones, we may post a little more regularly.

A Long January Weekend
Now Playing: Robots/Heidi

I love three day weekends. During a regular weekend, it takes me a day to get caught up with laundry and chip away at the housekeeping. A day is spent playing with and tending to the kids and Michael, and the next thing I know, it's Monday morning and I'm tackling an even longer To Do list at work. So when I get an extra day off, I try to tackle something I've been postponing indefinitely.

I'm working on the cataloging of the CD's and DVD's. We already have a database for our DVD's, but every half year or so, I need to enter all of our recent acquisitions. The kids have been exploring every drawer and cupboard that isn't bolted down so the old DVD storage area is in the process of being converted into toddler leveled toy storage, complete with teak cabinet doors to hide a bit of their stuff in the living room. The DVD's will be filed in Case Logic zip up CD wallets, and stored high above the reach of our two year old and her protegee.

Michael is in the study, archiving old photos by burning them onto CD's. He's also tending to the mass of paperwork that we have accumulated. I have an aversion for loose papers on the kitchen counter, couch, dining room table, hall tables, dressers, etc. So I regularly snatch them up and stash them safely in the study, in these nifty bins we installed just for this purpose, away from little hands and fresh-cut teeth. Then I forget about them, or at least, try to forget about them. Since we have almost all the bills on auto pay, so it's easy to avoid going into the den for long periods of time. But sometimes it becomes pretty obvious that it's time.

The paperwork's has been signed, title change registered, and the check deposited; Michael has finally sold his old log house in Lemon Creek. With the exception of our principal mortgage, this is the first time I have been out of debt since I signed my first college loan promissory note when I was 18. Yahoo!

On a not completely different note, Michael has been talking about getting a new laptop for several months. Our old PC is only 3.5 years old, but as Michael points out, it's not quite a laptop any more. Neither the touch pad or keyboard work, and both require external replacements. The battery is good for only a few minutes, so you needed to be hooked up to some AC. None of those reasons, in my book, justify purchasing a new computer, since we aren't out in the back lawn in an Adirondack chair in the snow surfing the Internet this time of year, and it is running the current operating system.

Michael's favorite computer game is Civilization III. He's been waiting for Civ IV to come out, but was really bummed when he found out that our video RAM was insufficient for the newest version of Civ. It wasn't until we came upon the idea of giving the not-incredibly old computer to Steven, Michael's nephew, as a high school graduation/birthday/Christmas/off-to-college gift that he could convince me a new computer might be a reasonable investment. The next day, we ended up coming home from Costco with chicken nuggets, yogurt, and a new Toshiba laptop computer. Civ IV really does have notably improved graphics, but I'm still working on our Mac.

A couple times each day, Becky walks up to the bookcase on top of which we store her Playdoh stuff, looks up, and waits for us to come over, engage her in a "conversations" about wanting to play with her Playdoh toys and modeling compound. Today, she has decided on a green hairdo for one of her new friends.

Little People, the Carpet, and the Cabin
Now Playing: The Incredibles


We don't know what Becky had in mind when she arranged her little people earlier this evening. This is one of several arrangements she's set up on the shelf, sometimes involving the playhouse (in the background) or one of the other structures her little people have, sometimes involving the horses that go with the set. It's very interesting to observe.

We've got our carpet back, at least for a short while. The Geotrax trains are fun enough, but they take up a great deal of space. Of course, every layout uses virtually every piece of track we've got, and no matter how we envision it, there's never quite enough track to fulfill our vision, so we have to compromise using the track we do have. This phenomenon has remained the same even after the track that came in the mail (thanks Dad and Kathy) and the trip Sheryl made to the store. Even when the living room is largely filled with a layout, there still isn't enough track. Michael Robert, meanwhile, still thinks the tracks are there for him to climb over, and the chaos makes for quite a debris field once the layout is scattered across the floor. So the tracks, buildings, rolling stock, and all the other big and little parts are currently residing in four plastic tubs in a corner of the living room, and we have our carpet back.

We're still waiting for the cabin to close. There always seems to be one snag or another, and the latest is delayed paperwork. I [Michael] went by the cabin today so the oil delivery folks could measure the oil in the tank. I need to be going by there anyway, because the old heater cut out three weeks ago, and even though it hasn't quit again (I did some minor maintenance at the time), it would be a nuisance for the pipes to freeze right before closing.

A Belated Merry Christmas
Now Playing: Nothing!
It's been a busy week. Between finishing burning, printing, packaging, and mailing DVD's and Christmas cards, wrapping and unwrapping our own Christmas gifts, making and eating Christmas dinner, the day-to-day chores of dishes, laundry, diapers, we haven't really set aside the time to blog.

Baby Michael cut another tooth (second one over on the bottom right), bringing his total to seven. I expect the matching tooth shortly. Baby Michael is also commonly referred to as King Kong these days. Santa (with the help of Uncle Mark, Grandma Kathy, Grandpa Bob) brought us a healthy collection of GeoTrax (a train set for kids as young as 2 1/2). Michael, 10 1/2 months, prefers to climb over or through the elevated train tracks, pickup and/or derail as many engines as possible, and otherwise wreck havoc on the day's track layout.

Becky has been gradually opening her presents. She was so satisfied with the train set that it has been hard to divert her attention long enough to unwrap the rest of her presents. So we left them in a pile, and every day or so she manages to unwrap another one. We are finally down to two gifts left to unwrap.

Michael and I (Sheryl) finished the last Civ III game late on Christmas Eve and THEN proceeded to help Santa get a working track, discovering that, in all, 24 AAA batteries would be required. We had enough batteries on hand to run two of the trains and remotes, but purchased rechargeable batteries the day after Christmas.

Somehow, Michael convinced me to play a second game of Civ III. I was satisfied with the first game (we had advanced technologies during the Middle Ages, and each conquered our own continents), but Micheal wanted to play a game that had lots of exploration and colonization. I wanted us to get a bunch of things on my "Honey Do" list done. So we compromised. When each of us is waiting for the other to complete our turn we pick something that needs doing (and there is no shortage of that in this household). We have even managed to add a lot of coat hooks in the arctic entryway, move lots of stuff headed down into the crawl space into Roughneck™ plastic tubs that should withstand flooding, just in case the sump pump manages to not cooperate again.

Sadly, our beloved Canon PowerShot S400 Elph digital camera is dying. When it displayed "Memory Card Error" earlier this month, we ran out and bought a brand new & bigger compact flash memory card, only to discover that the camera intermittently loses great pictures and our faith in its ability to capture and keep our cherished memories. Michael is talking about replacing it with a Canon Rebel digital camera, but the Elph camera is so small that we don't hesitate taking it with us; we're both concerned that we would be reluctant to take the chunky Rebel with us. We'll see.

Dorothy, a couple of her Fairbanks friends, Alora, and M.J. stopped by on Monday evening. This was Dorothy and half-brother Michael's first meeting, and the first time she's seen Becky in a long time. Dorothy is a junior at UAF. She is currently thinking about a career as an opera singer, and may be going to Chicago in the spring to audition with one of the professional opera organizations.

The cabin closing has been pushed back again, this time into early 2006. It seems the out-of-state lender was not thrilled by backing the mortgage of an old, kit-built cabin, so the buyers had to find someone in-state who would do the job. They did, but it takes time to reassemble the paperwork. What we don't know is how this will impact us, tax-wise. It does mean we have the better part of the year to figure out what we are going to do with our capital gains.

We continue to discuss what we are going to do to create more living space for our growing family. One option is to build an addition; other than the lack of space and sunlight, we like the view, the modest mortgage rate and payments, and layout, and wouldn't mind staying here. Another option is to keep the modest mortgage on this place, convert it to a rental, and purchase a larger home (preferably with more space, sunlight, a double car garage, etc.). Whatever we decide to do, I don't see us doing any moving until this summer at the earliest.

Just a few days of winter break left. We've had a lovely, extended pajama party around here, but in a few blinks of an eye, we will be back to our work week routine. So we are trying to squeeze the most out of what's left of our holiday.