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So Chris was sick all last night, which meant neither of us really got any sleep, which meant that I decided to make this my day off from work this week, rather than Wednesday. (Chris took off too, of course, because there's nothing as much fun as being sick all night and then trying to commute by bus from Philadelphia to Montgomery County when the snow is screwing up everything.) The buses are completely unpredictable at times like this (after this much snow, that is, not when one of us has been sick all night) and the drivers tend to be inconsistent about their detouring (the 48 is running on Pennsylvania Avenue! On Fairmount Avenue! On Pennsylvania and THEN Fairmount!) so one can spend a lot of time dashing around in 3-foot high snowdrifts, wearing heavy snow boots, just trying to figure out what the silly buses are doing from one moment to the next. Not helpful.
And then we got returned to us in the mail the transcript and recommendation letters Ben was trying to send to CUNY because there wasn't enough postage on the envelope. So he has to go to his counselor again tomorrow to get her to do another envelope for him (which will have TWO stamps on it this time) to send this off. Aaaaaand--now he's come into our study to say, "Since we had a snow day today and we'll probably have another one tomorrow, is there a point to going in tomorrow?"
"YES!" I manage to say without completely losing it. Barely. "So you can get the counselor to send off your transcript and recommendation letters AGAIN!"
He did a headslap and agreed, whatcha know, that IS a good reason to go to school!
In another universe that happens to be in the bedroom right next to Ben's, because Rachel got National Merit Scholarship-worthy PSAT scores but can't actually GET a National Merit Scholarship until she takes the PSATs as a junior (she's a sophomore) she's hearing from all sorts of impressive schools who are all falling over themselves to convince her to come there more than two years before she's graduating. One that she's particularly interested in is Swarthmore, which has the Parental Advantages of a) having amongst the best (if not THE best) financial aid packages in the country, and b) being a short train ride from Center City Philadelphia. Oh, and it's also a rather good school. ;) She's also looked into Sarah Lawrence, NYU, Mount Holyoke, Bard College and a few others. Seriously, she's getting a LOT of emails from schools who want to rope her in early. If we start getting admissions officers camping out on our front stoop I'm not sure what we'll do. Two more years of this? I think my head may explode before then.
I also really need to get back to cobbling together my presentation proposals for this summer's symposium, figure out a way to get to and from work tomorrow without the buses completely messing me up, figure out what I'm taking to Florida this weekend and how to get from the airport to the hotel where we're having the board retreat, and other fun things that I haven't put nearly enough thought into so far.
At nine I vegged out and watched Life Unexpected, followed by the local CW newscast, which I prefer to the Fox news largely because it's not owned by Rupert Murdoch and isn't just a mouthpiece for the RNC. About 15 of the 30 minutes were dedicated to the following:
1) This winter has seen a nearly record-breaking amount of snow.
2) Some people still don't have electrical power after the LAST big snow.
3) Seriously, this winter has been sucky.
4) We're about to get more snow.
5) As in when-the-hell-did-we-move-to-Alaska amounts of snow.
6) Some schools are already planning to be closed again tomorrow.
7) Did we mention how much this winter sucks?
8) When we get the next snow, we're going to break the previous records for most snow.
9) No kidding, this is going to add up to a LOT of snow.
10) Did we do the weather yet? Guess what's going to happen tomorrow afternoon?
And so on. I really, really hope nothing else of importance happens in the next few days, because then the news directors all over the area will have to choose between The Big Story and The Weather, and I have a feeling that The Weather will win and next week we'll be all, "WHICH famous person died? What military coup? Which company went belly up and laid off thousands of workers?"
Then again, that's probably business as usual...Current Mood:  awake |
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Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. We're very fortunate. We have heat again. We have enough food for several days, if not longer. We have ample entertainment via DVDs, the internet, tons of books and inordinately amusing cats. Said cats are also extremely useful as foot- and lap-warmers.
Right now Rachel is watching a Buffy episode in the family room, Ben is probably online in his bedroom, Chris is snoring on the couch here in the study and Skye is washing while sitting on the table to my left. The other cats are probably lounging about the family room, as they were earlier.
I have no intention of going outside anytime soon. Tomorrow's church service is canceled. If you absolutely don't have to go anywhere, don't.
Stay inside, stay safe, and stay warm.
And put cats on your lap if you've got'em.Current Mood:  calm |
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We have a new furnace. The old one has been dismantled and taken away. The house is lovely and warm and the kitties are all curled up sleeping and contented. The coldest the house ever got was 55F yesterday morning; by this morning it had actually gone up to 57F again. It was probably a little cooler in the kitchen and our bedroom, because those are the drafty rooms (perhaps low 50s) but considering the weather outside we definitely got off easy. Living in a rowhouse definitely has fringe benefits when you have no heat but your neighbors do. :)
I'm also continuing to enjoy Life Unexpected and am not missing 24 even a little.
P.S. I hope no one gets confused by the tags "house" and "television" being used together. Apologies to anyone who ends up here because of searching for something to do with the show "House", which I don't watch.Current Mood: tired |
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The new furnace will be installed on Monday, taking up a little over half of the savings account (unless we take an extra month to be debt-free, but if we do that we'll be paying a little bit of credit card interest on the purchase price, and by immediately transferring the money from savings we can avoid that).
In the meantime, this weekend's magic word/phrase is "space heater". The heating guy brought three; I can borrow one from church and three different people in the congregation have offered others for us to borrow until the installation is done.
That's a different type of warmth, and it's always lovely. :DCurrent Mood:  touched |
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So Chris took off work yesterday in order to be here for the heating guy, who came two hours earlier than expected. And he determined that what the defunct blower in the furnace needed was a new capacitor. He happened to have a replacement capacitor in his truck. He replaced it, he got it working, and we had heat again.
All was good until it seemed that the furnace wouldn't shut OFF again when the programmed temperature was reached. The thermostat was programmed for 65F and the temp was 69F. Not terrifically high but certainly higher than the programmed temp, so the system should have shut off once that was reached. And it didn't. And one other time this happened, during extreme winter weather, when the furnace had been on a super-long time continuously, a plastic part MELTED that happened to be the key to the furnace being on speaking terms with the thermostat and we had to switch the whole system off (that time it got to 85F), after which we were without heat until a contractor came in and gouged us for what he thought we could afford and got it working again.
(NOTE: At the time we were supposedly 'covered' by the gas company's parts and labor plan, which was completely worthless because they told us they MIGHT be able to get to us in a month or so. Grrr. We haven't been on the gas company's plan since then, which was 16 years ago.)
So we turned it off again. And then it wouldn't come back on. So we put another call in to the heating contractor and we probably need a whole new system. So I'm here at home in a 58F house (and getting colder--it's about 20F outside today, not yesterday's 'balmy' 41F) waiting for a call from the contractor and hoping that I can go to my office soon to borrow a space heater.
Yeah, when the wind chill is in the teens I'm actually looking forward to leaving my house. What's wrong with this picture?
Oh, and the furnace will probably eat up about half of our paltry savings account, which I was figuring would be Ben's first semester tuition in September, allowing us plenty of time to put by the money for his second semester and his room and board.
Blergh.Current Mood:  cold |
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Brrrrr
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Jan. 27th, 2010 @ 10:42 pm
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I would REALLY like to be having some heat right about now.
Blergh.
And it's supposed to be getting COLDER tomorrow. ;)
Actually, the furnace is making heat; the fan in the darn thing just isn't sending it up through the ducts to the rest of the house. The basement is cozy. It's also concrete and dusty and filthy.
My cold is going to come back now, isn't it?
Blergh again.
ETA: And--they finally call back and say that the soonest they can come is around noon tomorrow. Which is 30 minutes after I'm supposed to start my office hours. And in the ten hours that I work on Thursday and Friday I need to do a bulletin and newsletter and I can't really do those things in much less than 10 hours--8, possibly, but that's assuming that everything, and I mean absolutely EVERYTHING goes completely and utterly perfectly, such as everyone who was supposed to send me contributions already having done so tonight, so that I will find everything I need in my office email account tomorrow.
:sigh:
Chris may be able to work from home and wait for the heating folks. He's seeing if he can move a meeting to make this possible. It's going to be darn cold to wait here in the house in the meantime. I may suggest that he take his laptop to the corner coffee shop to wait for the call from them.Current Mood: cold |
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(Gacked from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) selenak)
Name a TV show series in which you have seen every episode at least twice:
I can name a bunch - Terminator: The sarah Connor Chronicles; Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Angel; Arrested Development; and My So-Called Life. Possibly more, I'm not remembering now.
Name a (current) show you can't miss:
Modern Family (which is on later!)
( Read more... )Current Mood: chipper |
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I've been in love with Eric Whitacre's music since performing his Five Hebrew Love Songs. I'll put up a video of that soon, but for now, I've been really enjoying this video of Cloudburst, which I think must have been amazing to perform in such a large group (about 200), even though I'm partial to performing in much smaller ensembles.
Watch for the part where the singers all put their music down--and then listen to the rest of it with your eyes closed.
Current Mood:  enthralled |
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OMG, how cool is THIS?
 Current Mood:  bouncy |
| » Calendars and Radioactive Mice |
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I put off buying 2010 calendars way too long and finally stopped at the Penn bookstore after work today to rectify this oversight. I need at least two calendars at home but unfortunately, it now being about halfway through January, my choices mostly consisted of:
- The cast of Twilight
- The cast of New Moon (There's a lot of overlap with the above, obviously, but they're not identical.)
- Robert Pattinson
- Photographs of sneakers (Yes! Twelve months of sneakers!)
- The ugliest graffiti art I've ever seen (I've seen much better on buildings in my neighborhood, frankly.)
- The art of Thomas Kinkaid (Kill me now...)
- Enough Mary Englebreit art to make me feel like my teeth may fall out just because I browsed through these calendars
- Pigs. Lots and lots of pigs. (I'm sorry, but pigs are NOT the new puppies and/or kittens. They're just not.)
I lucked out by finding a Frank Lloyd Wright calendar and then settled for a calendar of some generic-looking folksy pseudo-country art, both of which had already been opened and probably returned, from what I could tell. There were at least 20 or 30 copies left of each one of the calendars featuring Robert Pattinson, in and out of his film roles. I shudder to think how many of these were originally ordered by Barnes & Noble (the company that runs the Penn bookstore).
When Chris came up from the kitchen, after getting a bedtime snack, he asked me, "Is that a new anti-rodent device plugged in in the kitchen?"
"No, it's not new; we've had it for a while," I told him.
"Well, am I supposed to be able to hear it?" he wanted to know.
"Have you been bitten by a radioactive mouse?"
He was not amused. ;)
Jan. 14th, 2010 @ 11:27 pm
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| » Temporary Protected Status for Haitians living in the US |
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Does it make sense to deport anyone back to Haiti right now? Of course it doesn't.
Read more.
Jan. 14th, 2010 @ 02:32 pm
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| » Waffles and sunlamps |
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I've been waffling on bifocals vs. progressives because the only thing I can't do with my glasses right now is read small print; I have to take them off to do this. I don't mind taking my glasses off, actually, when I'm doing something like reading in bed, since I'm getting ready to go to sleep soon anyway, but the real pain is reading music. I'm a freelance singer and being able to switch back and forth quickly between my music and seeing what the conductor is doing means I need to wear glasses (or maybe contacts) during concerts. I can't be taking off my glasses in the middle of a concert and I can't hold my music six inches from my face or my voice will go right into the page and be lost. And if my glasses are off I can't see the conductor, who's going to be 12-18 feet away, on the other side of the orchestra. (Depending on whether I'm in the center of the group or closer to one side. At least I'm usually in the first or second row of the chorus, since I'm vertically challenged, and when I do solos I get to come way out front to stand next to the conductor to sing. I hate to think how bad it would be if I were a tall person in the back.) And seeing my music when I'm singing in church is a whole other kettle of fish.
Argh. I may just need to start memorizing all of my music. I even thought about memorizing my solo in the last concert because of this issue, but instead I kept my music up as a kind of cheat sheet and did my best to come as close to memorizing as possible. I think I nearly did have it memorized, since it was in German and I had to repeat it to myself a zillion times to get the pronunciation right. The next day I realized, in the shower, that I was halfway through the aria--with no music, obviously. So I did internalize a lot of it. I just wasn't convinced of that before the concert.
On a happier note: Cats under lamps!
Skye and Aya on the drafting table under the drafting lamp
Paisley on the endtable under a gooseneck lamp
Jan. 13th, 2010 @ 09:46 pm
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| » Haiti |
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Last year we had a seminary intern at our church named Malika whose family is from Haiti; one of the times when she preached she read a passage from the scripture in Haitian Creole, and it was so beautiful and you could tell it meant to much to her to share that with us. She's a deeply spiritual person and I can't imagine what she and the rest of her family here in the States are going through right now as they wonder about the safety of everyone they know back in Haiti. The images are horrific; it only seems slightly better than a nuclear blast because there is no radioactive fallout. Otherwise it looks pretty much the same: complete devastation. No remaining institutional structure. Complete chaos.
So I'm thinking of Malika and her family and the people of Haiti tonight.
Oh, Pat Robertson? GO AWAY AND SHUT UP NOW.
Jan. 13th, 2010 @ 07:19 pm
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| » Tum ta TUM TUM |
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So is it just me or does anyone else sneeze uncontrollably for several minutes after chewing Tums, especially the double-thick ones?
Just me? All righty...
:atCHOO!:
Jan. 13th, 2010 @ 12:11 am
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