The Elysian Fields

So this year, I decided to change up my home desk calendar a little bit. It's the same basic layout, but I made the box for the days/dates a little different, and I haven't bothered with any of the tracking stuff I was using, so I dropped all that in favor of a One Line A Day page and boxes for books, movies, and household notes (like "new contact lenses" or "changed furnace filter").



Also, every year since I have started doing this, I've run into a month where I ran out of time to decorate the pages and ended up grabbing some old Far Side Page-A-Day calendar pages and used those. This year, I colored them in with colored pencils.

It's Monday again. It's currently 10°, but it's not supposed to get much warmer. 16°, maybe? The forecast is calling only for flurries today, rather than yesterday's steady snow. We got at least a foot of snow yesterday. I didn't expect to see the snow guy, but he showed up around 5:00 p.m. I think I'm going to pay him half again what I normally pay him. That was a lot of snow. Looks like he was using a larger snowblower than usual, too. In any case, after he was gone, I had to put on my coat and boots and hat and two pairs of gloves and go outside to clean off the van and then shovel the resulting mess. Sometime between the time Snow Guy left and I got outside (twenty minutes or so later), the plow went through and left a sizeable ridge along the end of the driveway, so I'm going to have to shovel that this morning -- though I'm waiting until the plow goes by to get dressed to go out there.

I was really kind of counting on not being able to get out so that I wouldn't have to go to work today. All of the schools in this entire end of the state are closed, but of course my office isn't. Le sigh.

Yesterday was actually something of a productive day. I scrubbed the kitty fountain in the kitchen, and had such a hard time getting it apart that I think I'm going to have to scrub it weekly instead of biweekly; I think the condensate (precipitate?) from the hard water here was kind of glueing it together. I scrubbed and refilled one of the basement bubblers. (The other was still half full.) I brought three containers of kitty litter (two bags of clay and a jug of clumpable) in from the breezeway and took them down to the basement.

I also did a bunch of stuff at my desk. I had a bill that came after my last bill paying day, but was due before my next paycheck, so I paid that. My bank statement was sitting on my desk, so I balanced my checkbook, and it was the usual pain in the butt because of my abysmal math. There's a reason I keep the balances in pencil. I downloaded the new version of the software that I use for my taxes and installed it, then did my taxes, so that's done.

By that time, it was well after 1:00, and I was sleepy, so I decided to skip lunch and take a nap, which didn't, somehow, happen for another hour after that. Chasing noises, maybe, because there was a lot of animal noise yesterday. A lot of skittering and then a chirruping sort of noise from over the ceiling in the library, so I definitely need to call the removal specialist guy this week, even though it's the worst possible week for it: freezing cold and so much snow on the ground. I only heard the chirrupy noise twice. The second time I tried to record it, but it stopped before I got my phone unlocked.

I did eventually get my nap with cats.

And because of going out to clean off the van, I didn't get supper until late, meaning it was even later by the time I got the kitchen cleaned up, so no movies for me last night.

I am a bit concerned about Tegan. I'm not sure she has been eating. I don't know whether Parker has turned into a bully about the food or whether she has decided she doesn't like the bowls or whether she doesn't want to eat where there have possibly been rodents (remember the spilled kibble that disappeared?), but she kept pussing my legs while I was washing dishes last night like she wanted to be fed, but both bowls were full. So I pulled a spare bowl out of the cupboard, put some kibble into it, set it down next to my feet, and she went for it immediately. So I guess I'm somehow going to have to feed her separately from Parker. And I did have to nudge him out of it, of course, and she was very shy about coming to it after I had to nudge him out of it, so I'm inclined to think he's being a bully about it -- which he never was before, so I dunno what's going on there. I'm thinking of getting a camera (trail cam or nanny cam) to train on the food bowls to see what's going on there. I don't even know where I'd feed Tegan that's separate. Upstairs bathroom, maybe, but I don't really want to get into having food up there. Though with Kethri, I did eventually have to have a litter box up there, so....

Anyway. If I'm going to shovel the end-of-driveway ridge and still get to work in an hour and a half, I need to move my butt. Le sigh.