Ma and Pa's Blog

This afternoon we had a Skype video call with Jeff, Sebastian and Anna Marie:  computer video w/speaker-phone audio.  While our connection was kinda annoying and jerky visually, it was wonderful  to actually see them.  Sigh.  We appreciate the effort and patience it takes, and hope they realize how much we enjoyed the call.  Our chat today was the best of both worlds:  a brief visual contact then the customary phone conversation.   I’m looking forward to another Skype conference soon, crappy connection and all!  We miss the California crew!

My three year old Lenovo laptop is beginning to crumble before my eyes. In the past three months I replaced the battery (after the better part of a year constantly tethered to the AC adapter), then the keyboard (several keys stopped responding), and yesterday the hard drive failed in the middle of submitting my taxes online. So, today I replaced the hard drive. I’m still less than half way to the price of the cheapest netbook out there, so it’s probably all worthwhile. I just wonder what the future holds. On the bright side, each component was replaced in less than five minutes — formatting and installing the OS (and updates to the OS) to the hard drive took a good bit more than five minutes, but I do that for fun anyway.

Fortunately, Ma’s five year old Apple Powerbook continues to hum along. Apple does some things better.

Since joining the ranks of FB zombies, I was still a little baffled by its appeal, but then I realized why  it’s been a long time since we updated the blog.  Facebook has sort of taken the place of the stream of consciousness posting that sometimes occurs here.  It’s a lot easier to write a random thought, no frills, over in FB than to compose a blog entry.  And, after all, do we really need an entire blog  to say, essentially, “Holy Freaking God, When Is This Damned Winter Going To Be Over?”, which is pretty much what our Ohio February lives are like.   So I guess the FB appeal is to let our “friends” in on the minutiae of our humdrum lives without the burden of worrying about composition.

Not that this is particularly well-composed, but still.

I’m sure we’ll post more blog entries when we can get some sun and fresh air and blow away the winter brain-fog that grips us every February.   Oh, and as my silvery stripe of growing out gray hair becomes more visible, I’ll be sure and share the horror of accepting my 60 year old hair with grace and dignity .

We had so many postcard-worthy vistas yesterday morning. Here are a couple shot from our driveway.

I missed this during the Super Bowl, but had to laugh when they showed it again this AM on Today.   Mike and Jeff will appreciate, I’m sure.

We got ours overnight . . . our snow, that is.   We should be done in a few more hours.   Looks like about a foot so far.

We were determined to put off upgrading the TV until the old one failed.  My will broke yesterday at Sam’s Club.  Ma made a valiant effort to dissuade me, but I prevailed.   Here’s a picture of the new addition and our modified entertainment center.