adventures in home ownership

it's that time of year again, the time when it always seems like the middle of the night. you get up and go to work in the dark, you come home in the dark, you go to bed and wake up in the dark to use the washroom and go back to bed and wake up later on when it's still dark to go to work again. the 'flu is making the rounds, and so is glumness and tiredness. this is nothing at all what Richard III had in mind when he got all long winded about "the winter of our discontent", but it sounds about right...

don't get me wrong, i love winter. love it. i love coming in from the cold and i appreciate the exertion of shovelling while wet snow turns my hair into a frozen nest. i love the excuse to have hot chocolate or warm honeyed milk, and i love the way a snowfall, consisting of millions and millions of teensy weensy fluffy beautiful flakes can slowly bring a whole bustling city to a muffled standstill. every season has its drawbacks though, and for me, winter is a time of feeling old and tired. i've been suffering a recurrence of the elbow/arm/wrist problems i had earlier in the year, caused by and accompanied by all sorts of barely tolerable work nonsense. what a body needs, in this sort of situation, is something fun and new, a good, satisfying learning experience or two!

byron and i embarked on some home maintenance work over the weekend; i think it was pretty routine, as far as work goes, but it felt like a real adventure. i was all atwitter with excitement as we took measurements and drove to home despot, where i happily spent less money than i feared we would have to. we have finally conquered the crawlspace under the house! the crawlspace which, in my mind, was inhabited by rabid hobo squirrels and colonies of malignant centipedes, actually turned out to be a just little space with a dirt floor, inexplicably strewn with clay pots and bricks. i discovered to my delight that i'm just the right size to sit on the entrance step and get in and out easily. we soon replaced insulation in the floor of our kitchen with a lot less effort than i would have expected. dunno how byron feels about it, but i thought it was great fun. we'll see if the eavestrough cleaning holds as much potential for amusement!