Last night, we picked up an inch of snoo.

What's snoo?
Plenty, what's snoo with you?

I started back to work full-time this week. I've had good coaching from Sandra and from the EAP rep at work, particularly on the idea of keeping my work schedule to 40 hours per week. Good suggestion. I thought about it a lot during the past two, 11-hour days. (My boss's boss needed some material for an important meeting this morning. I met the deadline and only had to re-run the spell checker on one of the files.)

A couple of weeks ago, we walked in to the camp from the public beach, a bit less than a mile each way. In places where the ski mobiles had packed the snow, the walking was easy and fun. Where the snow was soft, however, it got tiring very quickly. That's how work has been - when the support is there, I can make good progress without much strain. When the support isn't there, my mood and energy get bogged down quickly. And then, when Marley takes off after a ski mobile, well, that's when the metaphor gets too complicated to sustain.

Our home computer just returned from a trip to the IBM spa. The hard drive went bad about a month ago. IBM sent me a replacement disk. (The machine was still under warranty.) Three times, they sent the wrong set of disks that would let me re-install the operating system. Finally, we agreed that they needed to do the re-installation. Although I do have good backups of our important stuff, it will take a good bit of work to get the machine back to a familiar working configuration.

Ten years ago today, we brought Marley home from the animal shelter. As some may remember, he ate a plastic wastebasket on the ride home. He's brought us good comfort and good fun these 10 years, all for the modest price of skritches on his head and back and a chance to lick out the frying pan.