A long talk with my friend Annie Holt last night. She called at 9:50, making me nervous when the phone rang. "Who can that be? No one I want to talk to. Jamie calls me at this hour, drunk. " But I answered anyway, pleasantly surprised that it was her. She'd like to be here, where I am and where Ken is. She misses us and misses Hawkeye. Even when I told her it was going to be -15 during the night. I was wrong, it was -19 when I got up. I'm so lucky, my house is warm, my stove works well, I have electricity and good heat and all works the way it's supposed to. 450 homes in Jay and AuSable were without power yesterday, all day. The high was about 12 and by 11 last night, when it was -8 they were still without power. My first thoughts were totally selfish: I'm so glad that's not me, so very, very glad. I know exactly what that's like and I'm just so happy everything is going well at my house.

Well, except for my refrigerator. Still don't have my new one. They sent a 40' truck to deliver it and they couldn't get it to my house. Will send a smaller truck on Friday, so I'm taking the day off to be home when they do. This means I work 3 days this week, spending tomorrow on the road. Two more library visits, Elizabethtown and AuSable Forks. Next week is Tupper Lake then I'm through for a while, I hope. That will make 10 libraries we visited in a month. Being charming, efficient, presenting a conversion and automation plan to each of them, convincing them that THEY should do the conversion instead of having us do it here. And they fell for it each time. But they don't know any better, as my colleague keeps pointing out to me. The old way was for us to do it, the new way is for them to. And they're all part of the new wave of automating libraries. Yeah for me.

Uneventful weekend. It only got really cold yesterday. I didn't do much during the 3 days I had off. It was nice to spend 3 hours at Ken's on Sunday and know that I still had another day of my weekend left. Ken went to sleep, Fred left for home and Bill wanted to kill an hour visiting before he made his next stop. I learned that Bill's cousin, who's a member of our enclave has lung cancer and will be operated on tomorrow. Tumor the size of a ping pong ball (apparently they can't think of a food that's the exact size so they've reverted to sports equipment in this case). Anyway it's really tragic because he's a wonderful person and we all adore him. Of course it would be tragic no matter what kind of person he is, but he's one of the people we're all looking forward to having here when he retires in a few years. He's only 57. Hopefully the cancer hasn't spread and he'll survive this.

Yesterday I actually accomplished a few things--cleaned the stove ashes out of my burn barrel so that I could burn some trash, emptying out my pantry and part of my mud room. Stored my wheelbarrow under the deck. Brought in lots and lots of wood (which I have pretty much burned, and will now have to replace when I get home and it's -5 tonight). It was sunny and there wasn't any wind so it was really pretty nice outside. The dogs had a great time. The brown girls ran and ran in the woods, which they love to do. They get far, far away and I call them so they can come barreling through the woods like a team of horses. They really are sweet.

Not so sweet were they at 3 in the morning when 2 out of 3 dogs pooped on the floor. Chances overloaded on sunflower seeds and Jackson apparently could no longer tolerate the antibiotics he was taking for his infected screw (in his leg), so he had explosive diarrhea all over the hallway floor. I got to discover that when I got up to let an empty-coloned Chances out. It was all like a dream, me on auto-pilot at that time of night, cleaning it all up and spraying the floors with Odo-Ban so it wouldn't smell when I finally got up in the real morning.

I had a doctor's appointment on Friday and was weighed. Bad news, gained more weight. This is very worrisome, but he has increased the dosage of my thyroid medication. We hope that will do the trick. I had it checked in the fall but he feels the numbers aren't always the true indicator of what's going on. I sure hope he's right because something is sure not right with me. You can't eat less and gain weight unless something is wrong with you. My clothes don't fit and I don't want to buy more pants in larger sizes. It's really discouraging, since I lost nearly 50 pounds and am now gaining so much back. I hate this.

So now it's cold and we're all focusing on the weather. A good thing to focus on. Supposed to be cold all week. A high of -5 today. More subzero tonight, up to 20 one day this week for warmest temp all week. Back down to -20 Friday night. I can take it, it doesn't phase me as long as my stove and electricity work. Then I feel safe, comfortable and just fine. I have lots of DVD's to watch. I've been finishing up The L word--the gay community TV series. The shows producers focus too much on these people's sex lives, which just encourages people to think that homosexuals are obsessed with sex. Other than that I'm enjoying it. Next I'll watch Garden State. I went online today and filled up my queue at Blockbuster.com. I have 19 items in it so I won't run out of things to watch and my mailbox will be full. I like this--I watch something, mail it back and wait for something new to come. Half the time I forget what I've selected so it's a surprise when it comes. Good-oh.