The future of Pray Creek West

I started this blog nearly five years ago in anticipation of our big move west to our new home in California. Our kids - we only had two at the time - were 2 /12 years and 9 months old. My main purpose was to record our lives and progress for the benefit of those we love... Our families, especially the grandparents (and my mom and mother-in-law have undoubtedly been the most faithful readers. Many thanks!) and close friends, whom we wanted to stay connected with and give us windows into our life. It was always on the personal side - to help maintain relationships that matter to us - and was never intended for widespread public use.

When I started the blog, Facebook was rather young and much less culturally pervasive. Texting, much less sending photo texts, was basically unheard of. Blog-reading through a reader was less commonplace than it is today. It was by every measure a different time, technologically speaking.

Overall I've enjoyed this blog and keeping it. I'm a record-keeper and a personal historian by nature, and I enjoy recording top-line components of our daily life. It's scrapbook-like, and I'm a consistent scrapbooker.

But I'm not sure what's supposed to happen with this space now. We're now longer "west" - making the title now misleading - and we're closer now to family and old friends.  Outside the grandmothers, I'm not sure how many people read here - either regularly or occasionally. I use Facebook more than I used to for general photos and updates, and I now have (at least in theory) another blog where I write more deeply and publicly than I do here.

Beginnings, like this new one we're kicking off in Virginia, are the right time to ponder one's routines and decide what to keep and what to toss. While I like blogging and the personal/relational angle that this venue allows, I'm not sure I'll continue with it if the readership is basically the grandmoms and one or two others.

Let me know your thoughts, if you happen to see this post and have any...

I'll end with a photo of our first snow day here in Virginia. This was Thursday, the second of our three scheduled school days on which we actually had no school. Monday was MLK Day so Tuesday was the kids' first day, which went well overall. Wednesday there was a power outage at the school so it was canceled. In the wee hours on Thursday morning it snowed two inches, and this yielded snow days on both Thursday and Friday. (!) So our four-day school week turned into a one-day school week. Rather awkward all around. Monday is a teacher workday, so we are out a full week after  the kids' first day.

It was a beautiful day. And - I gotta be honest - a difficult week. Tons to unpack, limited structure and activities for the kids, and another week of virtually no adult contact for me. But we're getting there. :)

Happenings

Eventful few days here at Pray Creek West. A few highlights...

Tick finding. HF went trail running last week and, at 10 pm, found a tick on his hip. The following day there was a tell-tale bulls eye mark around the bites, so in he went to the doctor with the tick in hand for analysis. Course of antibiotics for a few weeks to ward off potential Lyme's. Funny part about it is that he lived in fields and wood New England his whole life without ever having had an issue like this; now we live basically in a desert and he potentially gets Lyme's. Who would have thunk?

Computer crash. Literally. A frame crashed onto the top of my closed, new Mac laptop and cracked the interior screen completely. It was entirely my fault and very irksome. Mac quoted $750 to fix it (!) but I'm hoping the $250 solution I found - including shipping it to San Fran for repair - will work. Should know by tomorrow.

Carpet cleaning do-over. On Feb 1 we had the first floor carpets in our house cleaned for the first time (the first professional carpet cleaning I've ever done in my life, in fact). They were in dire need and I was super happy with the results. On Saturday night Angus had diarrhea literally all over our living room carpet - as if he'd taken a paint brush to the room. Unbelievable - both the mess and the timing. After many hours of work he have it back to passable again, but certainly not pristine. Such is life with dogs.

Pop-up camper. On Monday HF bought a 1983 pop-up trailer camper! It was a great deal we couldn't pass up, and we have been planning on borrowing one for from a colleague of his for April and June camping trips. So now we will be able to use our own. Bit of repair/upkeep work needed, but HF continually finds himself in want of hands-on projects in our suburban, rental-home life, so that suits him just fine...

Virus venting

This image is too perfect for me and the past week. We were unable to restore Google settings and eventually couldn't do any internet searches except on AskJeeves.com... Thank you very much, Abhorrent Virus. Only solution was to wipe and rebuild my laptop from the ground up, which has taken the better part of the past 24 hours. Terrible timing, but then hey, is there a good time to get a virus?

It has been a very eventful week, about which more to come soon.

The week in review

I had a couple ideas on posts I thought I'd write this week, but the week didn't go down quite as planned. On Wednesday I woke up feeling a cold coming on, and by afternoon I was crashing and burning. Terrible sore throat; back ache by Thursday morning; splitting headache. Thursday I actually didn't get out of my pajamas at all - the first time this has happened since I don't know when. And for what? A common COLD - no fever, even. How ridiculous. I slept a ton, day and night, pushed the fluids, all that stuff - blah, blah. Saturday my sinuses started to feel terrible, so I spent the better part of the weekend with my head over a bowl of boiling hot water with a towel draped over it... and experimenting with ginger hot compresses on my face. Today is laryngitis.

Time not spent napping was spent on the phone with Canon trying to sort out our digital camera dilemma. I broke it a few weekends ago on a river outing with the fam, trying to capture shots of the kids playing in the kayak. Or - to be more specific - when I brilliantly placed said camera in the breast pocket of my Patagonia jacket, right next to Q's sand shoes. Now I can spend $110 to get the camera fixed or $159 for a new camera. Awesome. This is the same predicament we're in with my printer that has not worked since the Great Laptop Crash (literal) of Dec '08. Rebuilding the computer from scratch proved 100x easier than getting my old, tired all-in-one printer to reconnect. I can pay $65 to talk to an HP tech phone rep to help me fix it, or spend $125 on a new printer. I can't bring myself to do either so keep putting it off and living without printing.

Latest technological mishap to befall the Pray Creek clan: this morning Y, while surfing with Dan, dropped Dan's new waterproof digital camera into the ocean... never to be seen again. Do we have a curse upon us?

What a week...

Numerous blog worthy events have occured in the past seven days... Where to even begin?

On Friday, not long after my last post, Q's conditition worsened to the point where I decided to take her into the doctor. Not finding anything evidently wrong with her, the doctor surmised that she might have a urinary tract infection and thus taped a bag onto her crotch to collect a urine sample. After which she, J, and I proceeded to hang out in the doctor's office for two hours, waiting until she finally caved and peed - which happily did occur moments before 5 pm when the office closed for the day/weekend. She did indeed have a UTI, poor girl, so she started another round of antibiotics (having just finished the prior course for her 2nd ear infection 48 hours prior). The UTI appears to have cleared quickly but the antibiotics don't agree with her stomach so she continues to be very cranky much of the time...

On Sunday we learned that power still had not been restored to Dover/Rollinsford NH following the enormous ice storm they'd had three days prior. We - along with every other homeowner in the region - began to fear for our properties there and potential freezing of the pipes... and accordingly began praying hard. Many of our closest friend were without power for three, four, and five days - sleeping on the floor with their kids in front of their fireplace or woodburning stove, or vacating altogether in the absence of one. [We would not have been able to stay at the farm, were we still living there, since the temps would have been below 40 in the house.] Thankfully power was restored by Sunday night and our three properties seem to have escaped damage.

On Tuesday we suffered our first Serious Computer Mishap. I was cooking with the kids in the kitchen and neglected to move my laptop's power cord up to the countertop, such that interested Q elected to grab it and find out what would happen if she pulled hard. It came tumbling the full 3.5 feet to the ground and smashed on the tile. Worst Laptop Nightmare. Two hours into a diagnostic call with Dell later we learned that the hard drive was finished. $400 and 24 hrs later, I was outfitted with a newly installed fresh hard drive and a repair to my plastics. Then today I spent about 6 hours rebuilding my laptop from the ground up with the phone assistance of my Tech Guru friend Ian Jukes, who was a savior. I back up all my data regularly so thought I would only lose a few stray items... Alas, I lost more than I thought, some quite sad/problematic. But thank God the damage wasn't worse and I was able to get it all restored to this point so quickly. I just started a 6-week contract with my client and can't afford to be without my computer.

It seems to be a tough pre-Christmas week all around. A dear NH friend who was without power for 5 days had a root canal today. My sister and her family are spending thousands on home repairs, and today learned their car needs $800 worth of work. Scrooge-ish circumstances, all.

In more fun news - J learned how to ride our neighbors scooters so we picked him up a $4.99 model at a local thrift store on Saturday. Short fall: it was a Barbie theme - see original photos below with PJ-clad rider J. Y and he painted it hunter green on Sunday, and it's as good (and comparatively masculine) as new. He LOVES it...