The end of a long month...

I started January well enough. I spent New Year's Day putting about a ton of top soil into a new flower bed. The bed is about half planted with bulbs now (mostly tulips), and as spring comes we'll pick out some annuals to fill it up with.

But January turned out to be no bed of roses. And by the 3rd or 4th I'd contracted a computer virus that Norton didn't stop. In the process of getting rid of the virus I somehow messed up Windows. And for most of the month I was without my PC.

The PC itself was not the problem. Emails, lesson plans, personal records, student records, account user names and passwords for various and asundry web sites, three or four thousand personal photos I'd take over the years, and ten gigabytes of music - I was locked out of it all. I spent January starting from scratch with a laptop I have, reinventing the wheel, etc. It wasn't until the 20th that I finally found a techie who would return my calls. I got the PC back up and running a few days ago. I'm still trying to get it set back up the way it was.

Today I spent sixty bucks on three 8-gig Scandisk drives and I backed up everything important. I suppose I'll start doing that monthly.

But the computer wasn't my only problem. It seems like routines changed. Basketball season has required my wife to work late at school. I take her dinner and stay there with her. It seems like twice a week we end up leaving the house by 7:30am and getting home 14 or 15 hours later.

We've also developed the habit of going to Bluefield on Saturday to shop for snacks that can be sold at school. We take a calculator. The snacks have to have less than 200 mg of sodium, get less than 35% of their calories from sugar, be under 200 calories per serving, get less than 35% of their calories form fat, get lest than 10% of their calories from saturated fat, have less than half a gram of trans fat, and a meet a few other requirements I can't quite recall off the top of my head. So we spend a few hours most Saturdays do that - time I used to spend doing other stuff. That's okay, but I haven't adjusted yet.

There were other distractions. There was the night my dumb dog got free and chased a rabbit up into the woods. It was 9 or 10pm and six or eight degrees and I spent an hour outside calling her event though I was already sick. My dad spent a few days in the hospital (he's fine now) and my daughter brought her boyfriend up for a visit (I enjoyed seeing her). Somehow I didn't manage to finish everything this month.

Maybe February will be nicer to me...