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There's no school again today. This time, it's road conditions. I have doctor's appointment downtown at 11:00, but I don't know if we'll (I'll have three kids with me) be able to get there safely. I was expecting that, if they cancelled school, it would be for the cold. In that case, getting a cab to downtown would be manageable. If the roads are bad, cabs will be unreliable. I've called my doctor's office to express my concerns over whether or not I can make it in. Although they didn't cancel school for the cold, it's still pretty cold-- -5F with the windchill. I'm not sure I should try taking the bus with these kids. I might try it if it was just me and Cordelia, but with two extra kids...

I am dressed for going out in the cold today. I put on a pair of leggings and then a pair of pants under my dress. Normally, with a dress, I just wear leggings, but I thought that, if I might go out, I would want more layers. I have a sweater sitting on the couch next to me that I will put on if I go out.

If we do go downtown, I might buy us lunch down there. There's a cheap but not awful diner a block from where the appointment is. I have enough cash to pay for food for the four of us. I try not to use a credit card when I go there. Of course, buying food for four is probably enough to make a credit card not a big deal. When it's just me, my meal is under $10, and a credit card feels excessive when cash is an option. But buying lunch downtown would solve the problem of what to feed the kids. It'll be mac 'n' cheese if we eat here.

The thing on my back still hasn't resolved, but it's getting better. I'm wearing a bandaid over it to protect my clothes (I'm tired of needing to soak my dresses). Fortunately, I had Scott around last night to put the dratted bandaid in place. I wouldn't have been able to do it on my own. If nothing else, I'd have had trouble keeping my hair out of the way.

Cordelia is watching The Regular Show on the DVR right now. I do not enjoy The Regular Show. There's too much humiliation humor, and I get frustrated with the characters being stupid. Cordelia also likes The Amazing World of Gumball which has similar problems for me. She's watching Disney channel less. She still catches the new shows there and will watch reruns if there's nothing else on, but she doesn't seem to want the channel on all the time the way she used to.

I'm not sure what we'll have for dinner tonight. The soup and the turkey turnovers are gone, and nothing else is thawed. There are some potstickers left from yesterday and about one serving of turkey and one serving of baked beans. We can eke out a meal from that and the green beans we cooked yesterday. The baked beans are probably mine. Cordelia and Scott don't really care for them.

We plan to take down the Christmas tree this weekend. I don't know if it will happen tomorrow or Sunday, but it will happen. My family tradition dictates taking the tree down on the 6th, but that really wasn't feasible for us. It always needs to wait for a weekend. We haven't had the lights on much this year-- The timer we usually use to turn the lights on and off stopped working altogether, and we never figured out how to get the new timer to function. Plugging the lights in every morning and then unplugging them at night has seemed like too much trouble as the power strip is a little hard to get at. At first, Cordelia really wanted the lights on, but after a couple of times plugging them in, she gave up on that.

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This is the last of the topics offered specifically to me for the December meme. I have a handful of others remaining that someone posted for anybody who wanted to write to them. I don't feel so motivated to complete those, so I may or may not. I'm putting off the rest of the Fandom Snowflake Challenge until later because Day 4 requires a little more thought and a little more courage (and really isn't something to post about here anyway. It's something to do rather than a topic to write about).

Moment this year when you were the most proud of yourself. (for mergatrude)

I'm not really sure how to answer this one. I feel like the things I achieved this year were small triumphs. Life was mostly everyday stuff that leaves me reasonably content. Thinking about it, though, there are a couple of things--

First, "Not All My Grief" passed Rheotaxis for number of kudos on AO3. I'm very pleased with what I managed with that story (even if the recipient never did comment). It did exactly what I meant for it to do.

Second, I managed to figure out how to post fics on fanfiction.net. I got all of my fic that are appropriate for the site up there. None of them get a lot of hits (I write a lot of obscure fandoms), but people are reading them, people who wouldn't go to AO3 or my website. I'd been afraid of posting on fanfiction.net for a long time, partly because of its reputation and restrictions and partly because anything new scares me. Now I just have to get myself past the next anxiety barrier there and comment on somebody else's story. There are some stories there that I really do love, and I've never been able to let the authors know before.

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( Day 5: My fannish origin )

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I want a cup of coffee. If I do that, however, I won't have enough mix left for coffee tomorrow morning. Scott would probably tell me to go for it, that he could pick up more on his way home, but he's scheduled to go in early tomorrow, so time will be something he doesn't have a lot of. I suppose I could have tea, instead. I've got some decentish chai and a good bit left of my pu ehr samples. It's just that I don't want tea. I want coffee.

I thought, briefly, that I could get the kids out of the house for a little bit to give myself some time to relax-- they wanted to go sledding-- but the other mother said no. Her two have asthma to cold air and need medication before being out there for such a prolonged time unsupervised. That's perfectly reasonable as a concern, and, under the same circumstances, I'd make the same decision. It's just disappointing because I was hoping for a little space. She did say that, next time they come, she'll send their inhalers so that sledding is an option. There's a nice hill at the science and nature center, two blocks away, and there's just enough snow to make it work.

I have no idea why they cancelled school today. It's definitely not cold enough (according to the National Weather Service, the wind chill puts it at -5 F), and the roads really aren't bad, not for January the day after a snow. The cabbie we had on the way to my appointment said that some roads are a bit slick, mostly those getting a lot of traffic, but that, over all, it's not particular difficult going. The sun is even out.

Scott does say that the roads were challenging when he went to work a bit after 6:00. He says there were places where he couldn't reliably tell where the road was. Apparently there was a big accident (Scott says fifty cars and a semi full of fireworks) on I-94 this morning. Scott takes M-14 to work, so he wasn't anywhere near that, thank goodness.

My appointment was at 11:00. I called for a cab about 9:45 because I wasn't sure how bad it was out (I was expecting bad what with the schools closing). I wanted to be sure of getting to the library at least fifteen minutes before my appointment (five minutes for the library and ten to get to the appointment). As it was, the cab came so promptly that we got to the library just a few minutes after 10:00. Cordelia watched her friend and her friend's brother play two games of chess on the large board in the children's room at the library.

We got to my appointment about ten minutes before time, and the doctor was running ten to fifteen minutes late. The kids sat quietly and looked at magazines. I tried to interest the boy in the Bloom County compilation they have there, but I think too much of it went over his head because it relied on cultural references from the 1980s.

My doctor and I agreed to try dropping my Geodon dosage further, from 20 mg twice a day to 20 mg once a day. I have had some issues with anxiety over the last month, but they've all been things one would expect to be stressful. I also haven't really challenged myself much, so it's hard to tell.

We took a cab home. I'd been intending to take the kids out to lunch, but our guests' mother sent lunch with them, and I didn't feel like I could feed them something else instead, so we came straight home. The kids had spaghetti with tiny bits of beef while I had baked beans. The spaghetti had to be reheated on the stove because it doesn't microwave well.

Cordelia and her friend are working on cleaning Cordelia's room. They tend to do some every time the friend comes over. Right now, they're working on Cordelia's clothes closet. (She has two closets, one of clothes and one of toys she never touches.) Their motivation is that our cleaning lady announced yesterday that she intended to make a special visit (free!) just to work on Cordelia's room. Cordelia hates that idea passionately. She doesn't see why anybody cares what her room looks like.

And the cleaning lady just arrived. Maybe the three of them will make some headway. I've already seen four trash bags go into the room, and Cordelia brought me a stack of books she wants to get rid of. My goal for the cleaning is to clear out and get rid of all the stuff she's outgrown. There are toys in her closet, buried toys, that date back years, and she can't currently get to her bookshelves (which results in piling books on the floor).

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Cordelia, her friend, and the cleaning lady have been working about an hour now. They've pulled out seven trash bags of stuff to donate and a bag of trash (which I ought to sort because some of it can be recycled). They've put aside a few games that Cordelia no longer wants that the friend's brother is interested in taking home. Some of the things going into the donate bags are things that people paid a lot of money for a few years ago. I'm not sure I should let her donate the keyboard, for example, but she never plays it and hasn't for years, so I'm not sure there's a point in keeping it.

The hallway is crowded with boxes and a couple of things to be donated that are too large to bag easily. I'm not sure I could get to the bathroom if I needed to, and I definitely couldn't get to my bedroom.

There is one thing we're going to have to keep even though Cordelia no longer wants it. Scott's parents gave her a doll cradle years ago, and I'm 75% sure that Scott's mother's father built it. If he didn't, then Scott's father made it. Either way, we can't get rid of it. We're pretty much obligated to store it until we can find a young girl in the family to pass it on to. I wonder if Cordelia's three year old cousin in Seattle would use it? Shipping would be nasty, but we could do it.

One the plus side, Cordelia found her videocamera. She'd been adamant that she didn't actually have one even though Scott and I both knew we'd passed along the old one when Scott replaced it a couple of years ago.