Getting back to normal

Katie, the cocka-poo is alive and well!  Her surgery went as expected and the liver shunt (a very large one) was easily found and corrected. Other than a little inflammation in her eyes and a very long incision she is doing great according to her Veterinarian.

She can have visitors today so I expect that Merrily will go over to see her at lunch time.  I am still sans-automobile and she works just a matter of blocks from the NCSU vet hospital and I doubt you could keep her away.

The snow is melting like the wicked witch of the west.. but more quietly.  An occasional chunk falls off the roof with a clunk but I expect that by this evening things will be back to normal.

More cold is expected but  not as bad as the last few days so maybe I can get a few outside things done, like fill the water tanks and dump the blackwater.

I have been suspecting that there was some pressure loss in the water system but the big icicle hanging from the shore water connector confirms its the inlet check valve that has gone south, first, and left us here.

During this “cave time” I have been installing Windows 7 beta 2 on my laptop. I installed it on an older laptop drive so I would not place my Vista ultimate system at risk and so far, it has been perfect.

It certainly seems faster in my environment than Vista (which was way faster than XP ever was on this same hardware) and so far, all of my hardware has worked ok on it.

Just prior to installing Win7 I had installed Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 on Vista and that made a lot of difference in how my internet browsing worked.  I will say that I have been using Firefox 3 for quite some time, more for the cool add-ons than for the “better browser” aspects.  IE has a growing set of accelerators that are similar to Firefox add-ins but not exactly the same ones. As for speed, IE 8 is definitely on a par with FF and the Windows 7 version (a different build of IE8 from the Vista version) is not pushing me to go back to Firefox without feeling that I am losing something.

Enough techie stuff. The Workamper 101 class is still set to start on Saturday night at 8pm EST and we are getting really excited. 

One other item on our list of preparations is connected to my Christmas gift to Merrily of dancing lessons for the two of us.

I figure that once on the road, there will be a lot of opportunities to go dancing and though I resemble a hippo in a tu-tu, I have been inspired by Warren Sapp’s performance on Dancing with the Stars this past season.   I think I can get it down well enough to not embarrass Merrily every time we go out.

The more different we can make our new lifestyle the easier it will be to not try to compare it to the past 60-odd years and to just enjoy it. We have never done dancing in our 30 years of marriage so it will be exciting and new to us.

We had intended to start classes a couple of weeks ago but things have gotten a little too busy for the moment. However, it will not be allowed to slip away into that vast vat of well intended but never implemented plans.

ttfn