Back online for now

Let's start with two quotes I love.

"Outside of a dog, a book is your best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. " Groucho Marx

and

"Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn."
Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

God Bless YaYa's Godfather. How grand it is to have a buddy who's an IT tech. The desktop is still presumed KIA but now our backup is up and online, due solely to a five minute phone conversation with the man. Thanks!

RE: my falls. The one at their school was out of my hands, solely the result of an ice patch under a dusting of snow. I took a step and did a banana-peel move. Ouch. I could sue, but crap it's Wisconsin. Good luck clearing out every patch of ice on a parking lot.

The fall at home goes back to 1892. You might recall that as the year our house was built, and up until the time we bought it in 2006 the second story was an unfinished attic. Now there's four bedrooms and a hallway up there, but we still have the same narrow steps with a sharp turn midway up and no landing. They weren't built for daily use, and they sure as heck weren't built for a size 13 shoe.

Come the theoretical 'someday', we'll get around to gutting and replacing them.

The kids stayed home from school today, LuLu with a fever and YaYa with a stomachache that was bad enough for her to come and wake me at 4:16 in the morning. After an hour of pain and tears, some Pepto, and a trip to the bathroom she was good to go, but with only a half day of school scheduled I played it safe and called them in.

That absence cost them both a free Bucks ticket for perfect attendance in February. It can't be helped, but the lousy part is the "yoo-rah-rah here's your incentive to come to school!" flyer wasn't sent home until the fourth of the month. Great planning.

We had planned to see the premiere of Coraline today, but that was scrapped by time constraints and the fact that a matinee was $9 a person. WTF????? I'm sorry, as a wannabe writer I'm all for intellectual property, but if you charge that for a noon showing you deserve to have some schmoe bootleg your movie.

Instead Lisa and I took the kids out for a cheap fish fry (ah, the joys of payday!). Suprisingly, they were well behaved. LuLu as usual paid meticuous attention to the coloring sheet they gave her and asked for my help, while YaYa and Lisa worked on a word find. Come to think of it, I don't think the kids called each other names or even swung a fist THE WHOLE MEAL!It was as miraculous as the Last Supper.

[I saw Marquette's loss tonight. Depressing]

That's it. There's really no reason for this rambling post, except that I sorely missed being online for the past 36 hours :)