We’re just back from our New Year’s visit to David’s parents; we took the new route and once again, it was no faster, but is a lot less complicated. It’s cold, cold, cold, and it snowed all last night and most of today. As we came back, along a long, 2-lane country road that leads to the new extension of I-355, we watched threads of blown snow whip across the blacktop.

There are still farms out there, but the blight is already taking root: all kinds of chain restaurants and big-box stores are creeping along, with more construction obviously coming.

Still, it was pleasant to drive along and think warm thoughts, until the wiper spray gadget stopped working, and the traffic kicked up enough salty spray to freeze solid on the windshield. David had to stop halfway and slop liquid direct from the bottle onto the windshield, and then he refilled the reservoir and cleared the little spray heads.

And we were off again, but the spray gadget still wasn’t working. Joy.

Friday was a really busy day for me, and yesterday was kind of a busy day, but the rest of this week may prove hellish indeed, as will next week.

Let me tell you about Friday.

I had to do a laundry run for the local homeless shelter – it’s my turn about once a month. And because of the Christmas Eve hoopla, I was prevented by locked doors or bad weather or didn’t get around to making the swap earlier in the week (why didn’t I do it the previous Sunday?). Friday, I HAD to get it done, because that’s the night of the shelter at the local Lutheran church.

I had at least been able to pick up the dirty laundry, and I’d been hauling it around in the back of the car since Thursday afternoon, as I got off work early. But the Lutheran Church had closed early and no one was around. So I got up early, made it to the hospital in time to swap out old for new with a friendly guy from the housekeeping department, and then arranged an extra long lunch to head to the church. Called first, as we were having a snow storm, and was told “Well, I guess I could wait for you…” and got the okay to scoot from work right then. I chatted with the lady at the church, who was a member there working on a display for New Year’s, and trotted back and forth with the laundry card that I hate so much, I should give it a name and send hate mail. Hate! With the fire of a thousand suns! I hate it! but it gets the job done.

That very physical volunteer task done, it was back to work until pau hana (translation: work’s done time), which on Friday was until 6pm, I think I had to cover for my team leader, so I couldn’t request unpaid time off with the others, even though the phones were dead, deader, deadest.

Home again, I dinked around for a while, and then suddenly bestirred myself cleaning the kitchen…actually cleaned the floors, too. Hmm.

And then I collapsed on the sofa, all pau Ginny. Totally done.

So here we are, New Year’s Day, and it’s a work day tomorrow, and I”m all screwed up on the days of the week. Thank God it’s another short week, and I’m really not looking forward to next week, which will be sheer drudgery for 5 long, full days.

For Christmas, I got a new telephoto lens, and had previously “inherited” David’s digital camera, which is a Canon 30D, which replaced the Canon EOS Digital Rebel that we sold. I’m hoping to get back into photography again, and shake off the willies it gave me when so many pictures I took on our vacation in the Caribbean were ruined because I didn’t realize my telephoto lens was damaged. In fact, I have a number of pictures from our vacation in Maui in September that I need to upload, too. And then I’ll need to get into taking more “people pictures” for Holy Moly, too. More on that in the next post.

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