Lots of little things going on. Nothing major.
It's been cold for over a week now. I mean "my nose is running in the house because of the cold" cold. I am not used to that at all. We had rain on Monday, supposed to be a third of an inch, it was 1.14 inches. It rained late and there was no gunfire and no fireworks going off at midnight. Nice.
Spent the week from the day after Christmas to New Year's day watching a Game of Thrones marathon. Each day they ran a season.
My neat new digital photo frame started having a burping problem. The slideshow stopped working because "can't transcode" this file. Turned out the router was dropping the wifi output. So, when the television couldn't access my cloud, it stopped running. I updated firmware, then things really went south. I figured the router was crashing (and my googling the issue seemed to back this up), so I ordered another router, with the intention of filing a claim (I bought an extended warranty when I got the router). Set up the new one, have one for backup.
While waiting for the new router, I got the old router running and set the wifi range extenders set back up and things are running nicely. It took almost a week to get it working right and everything set back up. Alexa quit, my Google devices quit, it wasn't very much fun at all. Streaming shows wouldn't play without buffering. I'm not pulling the photos from the NAS now, I'm putting them on a USB flash drive. It works okay, just a pain to add photos since I have to remove it from the television.
Cats are okay, I think Mario's back is hurting more, he's not climbing into bed now, spending most of his time sleeping on the sofa. Sagwa is having problems, he's not eating as much as he had been and he is very, very clingy. Clingy to the point where I can't move my elbows when I'm typing and at night he sleeps with his face in mine. And if he doesn't, I go looking for him to make sure he's okay. I don't wake him when I see him, I'm just checking.
It's so cold all of the black cats are sleeping in the house now. Joey and Phoebe had been spending most of their time in the garage or outside. Now, they're in the living room.
Brian has picked up a lot of my work around the house and I couldn't understand why until we were talking about a conversation he'd had with his brother. His brother knew someone who had bad knees and put off doing anything about them and by the time he was ready, his knees were in such bad shape, nothing could be done. Brian doesn't want this to happen to me. So, he's doing dishes, preparing meals, even does the dishes when I cook. My favorite thing he does is the litterboxes. Earlier this week I started to clean them out and he yelled at me "where are you?" and I said "laundry room". He comes out and said "let me finish that". Okay. With the house closed up we have to be mindful of the smell from litterboxes.
Orders were really, really slow the last couple of months and money was tight. I've wanted to get a new cordless vacuum (well, he wanted it - my old one is dying and is really whiny when I run it; the last time I did, he sat there with his fingers in his ears, finally got up and went outside). I haven't replaced a vacuum in years, the last one I got was in a mystery bag, my little BotVac.
Well, the past week orders picked up and I checked CostCo online. They have a Shark cordless for $299, the same one on Amazon is $495. Since we have some money, after discussing it with Brian, I ordered it. Really excited. And after my hip is fixed, we have a lot of stuff to start getting rid of. Like old, disabled vacuums.
He asked me this morning (I had a very vocal discussion with him last week about spending money before we have it in the bank; he placed an order for $1,000 with one of his suppliers and that put our account below a thousand, which doesn't really sound bad, but there are automatic payments that come out, like our weekly UPS invoice) if we had enough to get the gardener here. Yeah, go ahead.
I'm caught up with invoicing and new account set up. It was pretty frustrating until I got the router situation taken care of. I couldn't connect to the NAS, which is where I have my Quickbooks files. I run QB from both the laptop and the PC, so having common access to the data is a huge help.
Our black and white laser printer is dying. It will print on regular copy paper, but when I use a heavier weight colored paper (these go in with the shipments we send out) it jams after seven or eight pages. I have to take it apart to get more printed out. Not cool. Found a cheap one at Office Depot, should be here next week.
Anyway, life is just life. Nothing exciting.
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