East of the Sun, West of the Moon

Perhaps this week will bring me sanity? Last week the kids were home for 2 out of the 5 days and one of the remaining 3 days was used up by errands and other fun. Work-wise one day was mostly taken up by a failed harddisk in one of the servers, which might normally not take much time but this is a server in a place where the nearest person was about 1 hour away. I’m 2 timezones away, so couldn’t do much more than be irritated and communicate between two of the parties involved.

The week before that we’d just decided to put the boys in the afterschool program to give me back some more sane work-hours in the afternoon, which is typically the time I get up to speed work-wise, but then they had no school on that Friday, so that attempt had a bit of a false start.

The reason for our decision to make these changes is that M is now working a fulltime schedule at her work, while taking over (temporarily) for someone who quit her job. She did this with two weeks notice, which was enough to teach M what needs to be done on a daily basis, but there are probably some gaps in her knowledge still. Fun.

So she got busier, which made things just a little too crazy for me, so we decided to give in and use the option to let them stay 2 hours longer at school, supervised, after which M can pick them up after work, giving me longer stretches of work before & after lunch.

*crosses fingers*

It had been a while, but yesterday we gave in and did what we’d been threatening with for a while, to clean out the kids’ rooms the hard way, cleaning up their floor and taking away (most of) the toys found there. If they can’t figure out that they really need to clean up after themselves, they can just start practicing it with fewer toys, and we’ll see how that goes.

Of course we didn’t do that while they were there to witness it, although perhaps we should, next time, for added impact. No, they spent the day with M‘s mother, picked up around 7:30 AM to give us a relatively early start and getting picked up around 5-6PM (we did some shopping at the end of the afternoon, then drove over there).

Aside from cleaning up we also reorganised the rooms, one a bit more than the other. In N‘s room for instance we took apart one dresser that was close to falling apart all by its happy self and rearranged the wardrobe and other (new) dresser to give his room a slightly different layout. Hopefully a change for the better. In A‘s room I took the mirror from his dresser. He’s got a habit of watching himself in the mirror when he’s angry, upset, crying, etc, like he’s practicing his facial expression; The mirror also slows him down a lot in the morning when he’s supposed to get dressed for school. So hopefully that’ll improve a bit.

It was amusing to see if the boys would actually miss anything. They get so many toys from family around Christmas and for birthdays that it’s hard to keep up, sometimes. I think N maybe missed one or two small items, while we took a garbage bag full away out of his room, and it took A 3 hours to realise the mirror was gone!

We had planned to put bulletin boards in each of the rooms but because we picked up the boys on our way home we didn’t get around to that and today has been too fragmented to get anything done. Perhaps it’ll be a surprise for them when they come home tomorrow after school, we’ll see.

Yesterday we had the plumber visiting to check for gas-leaks. He didn’t find any which is a good thing, of course, but meant we had to dig further. Meanwhile I moved the bathroom heater thingy to my office and when keeping the door closed it actually managed to keep the room at a decent temperature. It probably helps that the outside temperature isn’t below freezing point like it was a few days earlier and although one of the boys commented that it was a bit cold, this morning, the house held on to its remaining warmth pretty well.

Today we had someone over to inspect the furnace. After some checking and mumbling and grumbling, he checked the pipe to the chimney. Whoa. It was clogged up with rocks’n'stones’n'crud! Well, yes, that would explain why the fumes were going into the house instead of into the chimney and out, wouldn’t it? Although he feared that it would be closed up all the way, he started clearing it up and after a bit of work he could actually see daylight around the corner of the pipe. Yay.

After putting everything back together testing revealed that the airflow was now in the right direction and while he recommends to replace the old furnace in the not-so-long-run, whatever not-so-healthy bits come out won’t be bothering us, now!

We’d been suspecting for a while that our heater might be leaking a bit under certain circumstances (mostly when it starts up, as opposed to when it keeps running for a while) and yesterday it was really noticable to M when she walked into the house, so we’ve turned off the heater and called somebody to come take a look at it today so that we can either rule out the possibility of a leak in the first place, or have it fixed.

Makes me wonder, if there was one, how much it had been affecting me. I’ve had more headaches in the past month or two than I had in the past few years, so I’m almost hoping that the two are related. If not, the next suspect is that I need my eyes checked and new glasses. That wouldn’t be a bad idea anyway, given that it’s been almost 4 years since the last check.

Meanwhile, awaiting the plumber person, I’ll keep my coat on and serve myself some coffee and tea to keep my hands warm.

Note to self: Just don’t expect any opportunity to get actual work done that requires concentration when you’re the only adult home with two boys of 7 and 8 years old, because it simply won’t happen.

The kids’ Christmas break will apparently be from Wednesday, December 22nd, to (and including) Monday, January 3rd. What kind of a weird schedule is that, what were they smoking? Do they expect the parents to just drop half-weeks of work for their convenience or something?

Funny how that works. I used to always have too much change, had ones hanging out of my wallet and so much in coins it didn’t fit in the coin-sorter I’d bought, aside from filling up the coin-section in my wallet more than it should. Then M started nagging me to try and pay with appropriate change or such that change would come out more easily in quarters, dollars, etc. On top of that I’ve switched to paying most things with either a check or my debit card.

So now the boys go to school and of course part of math is working with money. And they ask the parents if they can please fill up these film containers with these particular coins so your child can work with those throughout the year, after which we’ll get it back of course. Well, go figure, the 23 pennies I can manage, and the 1 quarter certainly wasn’t a problem (I’m quite fond of quarters because I try to get a complete set of state-quarters without giving in and buying them explicitely), but the 10 dimes I had to search in a few places and the 8 nickels… I only got to 4, bother! Maybe M has a few somewhere, otherwise we may just have to go and spend some money, the horror.

On the plus side, I found a Canadian penny among all the other ones, so that oddity has now been placed with the other foreign coins.

A‘s bicycle’s saddle was falling apart. Instead of investing X amount of money and then later, when his current 2nd hand bicycle falls apart the rest of the way buy an entirely new one and leaving us with a useless extra saddle, we figured we’d buy him a new one now that just fits, and he could grow into it. An early birthday gift, so to speak.

That’s the theory, anyway. We bought a bicycle this afternoon that, at the store anyway, he could just about manage to get on, and ride fairly comfortable after that. Silly us. Once we got home, he had trouble getting on the thing and trouble getting off it without falling and hurting himself. Unhappy A.

So to solve this problem I decide to put the working saddle on the old bicycle. This greatly offends A, of course, and he now sounds like he thinks he’ll never get to use this new bicycle! But what can you do, he’ll be unhappy with the old one, and he’ll hurt himself with the new one, at least for another month or so. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that he’ll have grown enough before his birthday (which is in just over 2 months) so he won’t hold it against us if he still can’t ride it after it!

Kids & rationality, two words not often found in the same sentence, are they?