our neighbors to the north

The Olympics are on. Any second now, the pre-show blather will cease, and the official opening ceremonies will begin. In the meantime, NBC in their infinite wisdom has just shown an introduction to Canada, our neighbor to the north.

I’m sorry, am I the only person who finds this funny?

 

While we wait for the fun to begin, please admire my newly created training plan for the half marathon. Each month, a different color, in keeping with my overall decorating scheme of rainbow colors. 

 

Here’s the batcave, otherwise known as Charlie’s Napping Space. We’re going to be redoing the floor in here soon. It’s gross carpet now; it’ll be IKEA’s finest laminate. The point of this picture is to pay tribute to the drying rack.

Brother-in-Law Dan – not to be confused with Actual Brother Dana, who shares the same birthday (how cool is that?) – recently commented on an earlier post. He noted that my whining about a doubling in our electricity bill just might be due to the fact that we doubled our house’s size. In other words, quit blaming the clothes dryer and the treadmill.

Au Contraire, Mon Frere: same two people, same appliances, and same parsimonious use of lights. It’s the treadmill. The propane use, on the other hand – WHEW! THAT’S way up, because instead of just using the stuff for cooking misadventures, we’re doing the baseboard heating with it.

However, in the spirit of scientific inquiry, I’m using the rack for a while, and we’ll take a look at the next bill.

Baseboard notwithstanding, we keep things at a crisp 78 degrees with the help our our woodstove.

 

Here’s KB filling the woodbox. See the striped thing on the table? That’s our magic hammer, made for us by Michele. We use it – and a screwdriver – to pry bark off the logs to use as firestarter.

Oh my god, a revamped “We are the World” is being broadcast. I may puke. Onwards:

This blogpost comes to you from my newly reformatted laptop.

 

Here it is, a few minutes ago, downloading ServicePack 3. Sigh. Well, the good news is, it seems to be working just fine.

On tomorrow’s agenda: bacon.

La ceremonie commence! Enfin!