Happy 2008 everyone. Hard to believe… 2007 came and went. Seems like only yesterday that everyone was freaked out about the Y2K bug (even though a) Y2K is 2048, and b) nothing happened anyway, thanks to a lot of advanced planning and midnight coding sessions.) I won’t even get into the millions of people who insisted on celebrating the new millennium a year early.
So, what happened in 2007… I finished my internship for culinary school, only to not go back because of a bunch of medical issues that needed to be handled first. One was sorta taken care of (I don’t think the surgery was a success) and another won’t happen until the end of January. I’m cutting it awfully close to the March term.
Summer was pretty uneventful, then in September we brought in a contractor to rebuild our decks and lay a stone patio. Here it is 5 months later and we’re still waiting. Paula found this guy selling the patio blocks as extra from a previous job, and he laid out this great song and dance about how he could get all this stuff done before winter. They barely even started the job before winter. Every week we had nice days where no one showed up, rainy days where no one could show up, and then snow where they suddenly had to scramble to cover up all the materials they hadn’t used yet. All they did was demolish the old deck and patio, put down a couple patio stones, remove some tree stumps and lay sand all over the place, and put up the flooring to the deck. The day after Christmas, the carpenter replaced the sliding door in the kitchen (after telling us that the door was not the size we agreed to) and still has to finish the trim on the inside. We’ll be lucky if we can stick the grill on the kitchen deck by summer 2009 at this rate.
So here it is, January 1st, 2008. It’s snowing. Again. Previous years, we wouldn’t see much snow until maybe late January or early February, but this year we have had fairly consistent snow since Thanksgiving (in fact it snowed ON Thanksgiving.) We’d get anywhere from 2-6 inches at a time, some would melt, then we’d get more a few days later. The last snow we got melted quickly from the roads but now we’re getting more. And guess who gets to run the snowblower to clear it from the driveway? Wheee…
Paula found a couple desks when a company moved out of her office building, which we dragged home and into my new/old office. I have moved my office so many times I am thinking of just getting a tent. 🙂 I started out in the basement, then we moved everything upstairs into a spare bedroom, then my desk got taken apart to take to school in Vermont in 2006. That desk is still in storage and probably won’t survive being disassembled and reassembled again. While I was home I just used my laptop in the living room, but I decided that since I was going to be here a while longer than planned, I didn’t want to clutter the living room with my stuff, so I set up a folding table in the spare bedroom where my desk used to be. That just got replaced this afternoon by two old Digital workstation tables of some form – I am still trying to figure them out. They are woodgrain with a gray insert on the surface, and have a space on the back for power cords (one of them has the cover, the other lost it someplace but it’s against the wall anyway.) There are two switches on the front which don’t connect to anything, but it’s anyone’s guess as to what they were supposed to do. While cleaning the area and shuffling boxes around, I came across a box full of CD’s that I thought I had lost. Mostly old games that I never figured on being able to play again, but I found out it’s possible to play DOS games under Mac OS X, so I was gonna install Baldur’s Gate or something. Sometimes it pays to clean! Just don’t tell my mother.