• You might’ve heard that we had some snow (5-8″) last Wednesday.

• Followed by some cold – it was -5F/-20.6C when I got in my car Thursday morning.

• Brrr!

• My drive was particularly exciting Thursday morning, since I had to drive to the car dealer to get the ASC repaired.

• What’s ASC? Automatic Stabilization Control – the thing that kicks in when your car starts to slide on slippery roads.

• Yup, roads are pretty slippery after a bunch of snow.

• The drive was… memorable, in a white-knuckled sort of way.

• Sure is nice to have ASC again.

• Friday afternoon, my car got stuck while I was trying to get into the parking lot behind my building.

• Many thanks to the two neighbors who helped push and got the car unstuck!

• Sunday morning we woke up to no heat in the condo – turns out one of the pumps on the boiler went out.

• Fortunately, it only took a few hours for a repair guy to get the heat going again.

• Good thing, since the cats were holding me personally responsible for how cold it was: “If you loved us, Mom, it wouldn’t be cold like this.”

• Do you wish you lived in Minneapolis yet?

• Sunday afternoon I learned how to use a drain auger and spent a nasty hour or so cleaning out a massive clog under the kitchen sink.

• Said clog seemed to have been formed by the unholy union of cat hair (note to self – try to keep Mayhem from sleeping in the kitchen sink), coffee grounds from rinsing off the espresso maker, and primordial ooze.

• Ewww.

• I am actually knitting!

• However, it’s for a present, so I’m not sure I’ll post about it until after Christmas.

• One of the things that’s been sad for me since going gluten-free is not having good bread for sandwiches.

• Most gf bread has an unfortunate texture or crumbles into bits when used for sandwiches unless it’s toasted.

• Only eating sandwiches on toast gets old really fast.

• I discovered Udi’s Whole Grain Bread, which is perfect for sandwiches! *nom nom nom*

• Sadly, it lacks substance when toasted, so I’m going to stick with my Kinnickick Sunflower Flax Rice Bread for toast.

• If you require a gluten-free diet (or know someone who does), I highly recommend the magazine Gluten-Free Living, which I’ve been reading since it was a newsletter.

• Are you confused by the conflicting gluten-free diet information provided by various organizations? Gluten-Free Living examines such information scientifically to support or debunk it.

• The current issue is especially good, as it’s a “best of” issue.

• Make sure you stop back tomorrow, when I’ll kick off an ebook (by a Twin Cities author) giveaway to celebrate its release!

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Can you figure out this picture? (Nope, you are right, she’s not in the kitchen sink… at the moment.)

“…..zzzzzzzzzzzz…..” -Mayhem

• Thanks for the happy lucky upgrade thoughts!

• My upgrade went well, albeit a bit differently than I’d planned.

• Apparently, there isn’t an upgrade path from Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional, so I had to do a clean install. (As in… format and install.)

• How happy was I that I had the operating system isolated on its own partition?

• Pretty damn happy.

• True, I’ve had to reinstall a lot of software that lost registry keys and settings during the format, but it’s definitely not as bad as I feared it would be, based on my Vista experiences.

• Make sure you have a good backup (preferably not compressed, in case you need little bits of things) before you start such a project!

• I know that I was very, very grateful that I did.

• Windows 7 is so much faster than Vista, it’s almost like I have a new computer.

• If you use Windows, I highly recommend checking out Gizmo’s Freeware for reviews and links to all sorts of Windows goodies, such as free backup software, free antivirus software, and much more.

• *happy dance* My downstairs neighbor moved out over the weekend. (Backstory here and here and here.)

• Please cross your fingers and think good thoughts my way for a sane, pleasant, non-smoking downstairs neighbor next time! Thank you.

• Oh, how I love the extra hour of sleep when Daylight Savings Time ends.

• Oh, how I hate the first week of kitty dinner time after Daylight Savings Time ends.

“Starving… to… death… Dinner… late… Not… going… to… make… it…”-Chaos

…it’s just so, so wrong to have snow this early.

“Big kitty, look! Look outside! Thousands of little white birds falling out of the sky!” -Mayhem

“Mayhem, that’s snow. We go through this every year.” -Chaos

“Hmph.” -Mayhem’s tail

“Definitely birds. The big kitty’s just dumb. Mom, why won’t you open the window so I can get closer to the pretty fluffy white birds?” -Mayhem

The old toilet was original to my condo, complete with a 1968 date stamp in the tank. The old toilet worked ok most of the time, but would periodically decide not to shut off and require manual assistance to do so. I vaguely remember it working a bit better before I got Chaos.

You don’t see the connection? When Chaos was a wee youngster (only 9 or 10 pounds), he used to chase his tail on top of the toilet tank while I took my shower. This bent the tank against the wall; I ended up sticking some felt pads back there to keep the tank from thunking against the wall.

I guess the tank always had a hairline crack from the handle around the side, but over the past several months, the crack got wider and water started to leak out of it. Hmm. Very inauspicious, that. I started shutting off the water to the toilet whenever I left the condo, just in case. Hmm. The shutoff appeared to drip. Very inauspicious, that.

Tuesday I finally got around to calling the plumber to find out when he could come and replace the kitchen sink shutoffs, the toilet shutoff, and the toilet itself . (Disclaimer: Yes, I know I could’ve done it myself and saved some money, but I am so, so, so unhandy it was worth the money to not have to deal with the frustration. There would’ve been blood, too.) Anyway, he had an opening Wednesday morning. Um, ok… so I bought a toilet on my way home Tuesday night, and by 10:30 am Wednesday… Ta-da!

“For all the noise and commotion, I expected more than a new litterbox for you, Mom.” -Mayhem

Hopefully I adjust to this new, taller toilet without too many painful middle-of-the-night incidents…