anagramofbrat | Will the sun never shine warmly upon my face again

I'm being melodramatic, of course, but holy crap it's been a shit week. Hence the silence.

It's been ass cold again. We didn't get any of the snow or 80mph wind gusts that the coast did, but the wind we DID get was fierce and cold enough thank you. I am well sick of single digit wind chills. Thankfully this seems to be the end of it; at last check the 10 day forecast ahead calls for highs of 60 (!!!) and lows of no colder than 30 and it keeps notching slowly upwards, which is encouraging. Rainy for most of it, sure, but 60 after any of this winter is positively tropical. Time to start thinking about what to put in my "garden" and how, I think.

So car. Yay right? Except Drew took it for the seven day registration inspection and it failed. Somewhere between the initial trip to the mechanic for evaluation and last week the car developed a tie rod issue. This is not entirely surprising, as the roads around here have developed so many potholes that driving is not unlike traversing a wedge of swiss cheese, and some of them, especially out 202 way, are big enough to fuck up your front ends. We must have hit one somewhere. Phooey. So we were carless again for about a week. Thank goodness for zipcar rentals. From the sound of things, that's getting resolved today, though.

Guess which one of the cats is peeing blood again. >_< Y'all, I'm about at my wits end with this cat. After doing some reading about feline cystisis and talking to other friends with similarly beleaguered cats, I'm suspecting stress may be the culprit here - all three cats have been absolutely FREAKED for the past week or so (why a bit later). Meantime I'm bribing him with tuna water and encouraging him to drink moar, and hopefully tomorrow before I head out to Boston to get the kids I'll have a minute to run a sample down to the vet. Hopefully now that the source of the stress has settled out, so will he.

So the kids' grandfather has sold his house, and the past couple weeks have been dedicated to moving and cleaning it out. Drew's been helping with the cleanout process and meanwhile I've inherited a few items which I'm very pleased about - not only do I now have a Singer sewing machine, but we have some wine glasses finally and a couple other small odds and ends that we needed. We also finally have the bottom half of a bunk bed for the kids - the main reason the cats have been so freaked out is first there were bed pieces strewn around the living room, then MOAR bed pieces when we finally checked out an SUV from zipcar and moved the rest of it over, then we moved Drew's futon from the kids room into our room (it is now a cat/human hangout/read corner), cleaned their room THOROUGHLY (mmm, 3 year old dust bunnies) then assembled and made up the bed. It mostly gave me an excuse to clean the upstairs like a fiend (it needed it, rather desperately, and it looks really nice now, so I'm happy. And hopefully the cats will get used to it too.

But yeah, there's been some sad and angst over there with the emptying house and the moving and the giving away stuff. Hell, I had a MOMENT when the husbeast came home one night with a bag that turned out to be full of knitted squared and a half finished afghan, which I immediately recognized as the wedding present Barbara has told me she'd been working on before she died. That was rough. I'ma see if I can match the yarn colors at Webs at some point and make some attempt at finishing it., even though my own knitting skills are at best half-assed as fuck, but I think she'd have liked it. *sigh* change is a hard thing. Thankfully that will all be done by the end of the weekend.

Nothing new on the bead front - waiting for my latest order from delibeads to come in, and then I can start Banzai Bill. Meanwhile I've been using the downtime to work on my website, which I'd been neglecting since, well, Dad. It's slowly coming along to where I want it. And wow, working with virtual photoshop beads is almost as much of a pain in the ass as regular beads.

There's more, but I gotta bounce on out the door to meet the husbeast for the shoppings. So I'll leave you with the assurance that while it's been bad, things are now looking up. Oh and if you wan a giggle, have a short video of Ash and Moonbeam attempting to play with the kids' Hexbug.