(no subject)

evalerie came over around 11:00 yesterday morning. She brought a lot of plants from her yard in the hope that some of them would survive transplanting and do well in my raised beds. She yanked out all the weeds in the raised beds and cut back the sage which was trying to take over. I sat and watched, and we talked. She finished around 1:00. Our original plan had involved going to lunch downtown, but we simply didn’t have time. She needed to meet someone else at 1:30, and I needed to be sure of both getting lunch and being home by 3:00. She offered to drop me off downtown so that I could do my errands anyway, but I just couldn’t see taking care of everything, including lunch, and still getting back here in time.

Cordelia, her best friend, and her best friend’s brother all got here a little after 3:00, while the cleaning lady was still working. They ended up in the basement. I think they were watching a movie for a while, and someone did some really awful sounding things with Cordelia’s friend’s violin. I rather hope it was the younger brother, but I don’t know.

Our guests were supposed to bring money for pizza, but they never gave it to me if they had it. I spent about $35 (including tip) on pizza for the five of us.

The fifth grade portion of the orchestra concert ran half an hour. The sixth and seventh grade sections were only ten minutes each. Both older groups played two longer pieces, and the teacher didn’t talk much. I think that part of the half hour for the fifth graders was her explaining what each short piece had taught them.

Scott’s father came to the concert. Scott’s mother went, instead, to an event for one of Scott’s sister’s children (probably our niece, but I’m not certain). I was the only one of the three of us able to find a seat during the fifth grade part of the concert, but the couple sitting next to me left as soon as that was done, so Scott and his father were able to join me.

Scott discovered that the battery for the videocamera has completely died. It will claim to be alive when it’s plugged into a power source and then not so much as power up when unplugged. Scott ended up using my cell phone to record the seventh grade part of the concert. We haven’t tried to retrieve the recording yet, and I’m not sure I’ll believe in it until we do.

Cordelia’s friend’s mother told me that her daughter is starting to ride the city bus alone and wants to learn the ins and outs of taking the bus to our place so that she can visit whenever she wants. The other mother also told me that she’s making a project this summer of teaching her two how to ride the buses and that she’d be more than happy to include Cordelia. I jumped on that opportunity eagerly. Cordelia needs to learn, but she’s not willing to learn from me. I’m also not sure I’m a great teacher given my anxiety levels around riding the bus.

I’m having a devil of a time trying to remember the new names for the bus routes. I’ve been calling the ones near here the #1 and #2 for twenty years, so switching to calling them the #22 and the #23 and #65 is hard. The change also makes the Plymouth Road buses more difficult as the bus that goes downtown, the #23, doesn’t cover all of Green Road. To get that, one has to catch the #65, the bus that starts at central campus. I need to remember both the #23 and the #65 as, if I’m catching a bus from campus, either of them will work to get me home. I think the #65 would be a little bit faster, but the #23 runs more often— once every fifteen minutes between 6:30 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. and then every half an hour until 11:15 p.m. I just try not to take the buses at night because the light inside means that I can’t actually see anything outside of the bus, and only some buses announce time points (and not all stops are time points).

Scott did the bills last night and concluded that we absolutely must cut cable as soon as we can. Right now, his intention is, if he’s not working on Saturday, to take all of the equipment to the Comcast office on Saturday. I’ve started looking a bit at other internet options. I haven’t gotten far at all, and I know Scott has done this work before, but… He hasn’t looked at alternatives for hosting our websites.

( Website and internet discussion )

Anyway, for today, I’ve got a few goals— First, I have to find the damned genetics counseling paperwork and finish it. Second, I have to write. Third, I need to do some cleaning in the basement. I will probably end up doing some cat waxing in terms of looking at internet options, though.

Comcast isn’t a good option because they would only be cheaper than Earthlink for the first twelve months (and probably not even that, depending on how much we would have to pay to host our websites offsite). If we could limit our internet use to one device at a time, we could get something that would be cheaper than Earthlink, but there are three of us. The other big option around here is AT&T, but I don’t expect their prices to be better.

In Ingress news, I just got the badge for holding a portal for twenty days. The next step up on that one is steep— Holding a portal for ninety days. I think that’s pretty unlikely ever to happen unless I find a portal somewhere that’s only physically accessible once a year or something. I’m a very long way from most of the other badges. The only one I’ll likely manage soon is the one for consecutive days of hacking. All of the others are going to take months.

(no subject)

Why can’t I find these stupid forms? I’ve found a bunch of other things that never should have gotten buried. Apparently, the cleaning lady has been piling things on the shredding pile that include unopened envelopes and pieces of Cordelia’s art that have fallen off the wall. I found Scott’s colonoscopy report (which he’s been searching for) shoved in the bread box. I’ve recycled a stack of paper about couple of inches thick and thrown out a bunch of things that aren’t paper that were stuck in the stack waiting for shredding.

At this point, I’m sure the forms aren’t in the bedroom. I was really hoping they were because that’s simpler; there are fewer places to look. It’s also where the dratted things should be if I’d been taking proper care of them. I have a very specific place where I put in process medical paperwork, but these aren’t there. At this point, I’m worried that the papers I need are in a box in the basement. If they are, I may never find them.

I’m playing podcasts while I sort through papers and search the house.

(no subject)

I found the papers! They were, naturally, at the bottom of a pile that Scott had set aside for filing, a pile that was supposed to contain only receipts and bills. He assured me of that. Oh, well. I got a bunch of DVDs put on the shelves. I recycled a lot of papers and put aside a bunch of things that ought to be filed or that Cordelia needs to make a decision about.

I don’t think I’ll have the physical resources to do any basement cleaning today, not after two and a half hours of digging through the upstairs and moving stuff around. I think I can still write, though. I hope so. I should still be able to manage my daily walk down to the church, and I’m kind of hoping to get Scott to go out with me to do some Ingress stuff while Cordelia’s off watching movies with her friends tonight.

I think I’ll eat lunch (I’m not sure what I’ll eat, but I do need to eat) then make my own family listing because the genetics forms are poorly designed. I just need the forms so that I can confirm what information they want and so that I can pull out the information I already recorded there. Once I do that, I think I’ll be ready to mail everything to the clinic.

I kind of want a nap because I’ve been on my feet so much today, but there’s so much to do, and there will be three kids here in an hour and a half.