Chilly

7:30AM on Saturday - I've been up for an hour. Loaded the dishwasher as quietly as I could. Paid bills online. Confirmed we are solvent for at least the next week. Opened some mail that has been piling up and put 98% of it in either shred or recycle. Will start dishwasher momentarily when I head upstairs to shower. This is a weekend but I am treating it as a 'normal workday' in an effort to get my brain to accept what has to be done before I can sleep tomorrow night. Someone called me yesterday to follow-up on something I 'owe' him - our annual audit - and I basically had to politely say that I am whittling away at things as quickly as possible - it's going to be a long, long weekend of long, long days - but the weight will lift. I know this time of year is always massively crazy...and I manage to survive every year.

H., two of his friends and J. went to the Stockton Thunder hockey game last night - the elementary school the boys attended had their band invited to play the National Anthem...I was so relieved when the girlfriend of H.'s friend wanted to go 'cuz I really needed to just make it an early Friday evening and was more than happy to give her my ticket. Sounds like they had a great time and there were a lot of fights - J. will tell me more later. Why is that such a 'thing' in hockey? Isn't it poor sportsmanship to fight? I don't get that. There's a bobble head on the kitchen counter so it must have been a give away night.

It's cold in here. The street is piled high with leaves for the sweeper - only every house in the neighborhood (including ours) has cars parked on the street - so the poor sweeper can rarely get to the leaves. All carefully piled up to await the next gale that blows through and scatters them again. Our neighborhood is now 11 years old so the trees are HUGE - so many leaves EVERYWHERE. And all of our neighbors have trees that lose leaves hanging over our fences so we get the joy of raking their leaves, too....

That's it - this is all the 'leisure' time I can afford - I have work I could do at home but I know myself. It's hard to work at home - too many distractions. I'm better off just being in my office and plowing through.

Two more weeks before Winter Break.....