Rainy Days and Mondays

Katie is very generous: she kisses the phone when Grandma calls, kisses photos of herself and her loved ones, gives toys to other children in her playgroup, and gives her cute little cold viruses to daddy. As is the case in the movie "Gremlins", the cute little cuddlies turn into sharp-toothed nasties. Her cute little case of the sniffles has laid me low with a gigantic head cold.

That's OK, since it's been raining all day here, so I'm not tempted to go out in the cold and worsen my malady. It's been a good day to catch up on things. Here's Soulmate reading the paper, and Katie about to make a call on her Ariel "cellphone".

Soulmate was going to host a playgroup event here this morning, but it was cancelled due to rain. My task before the event was to clean up the very messy pile of stuff I stash by my place at the kitchen table. Ouch. I found some stuff in there I didn't expect.

The earliest addition to the pile was from May, and is a request for a charitable donation. We do a lot of that, and probably receive 20 mailings a week from charitables asking for more.

The most important is the packet of post-placement adoption papers that need to be filled out and sent in to the state to "register" our adoption. While Katie could only be taken from us over my dead body, still the wonks in St. Paul need to exert their authority (and extract yet another pound of flesh).

The next most important, I'm embarrassed to say, is a rather sizeable bonus check from my office dated July 21, 2008. I feel a little like Albert Einstein (in behavior, not intelligence), who apparently used paychecks from the government as bookmarks in his many books. He was the original absent-minded professor, much to the chagrin of his heirs, who found the checks much later when going through his estate.

Anyway, with a lot of prodding I have levelled the pile, thrown out a goodly number of outdated papers, and filed away a bunch more. Now my pile is only 2" thick but contains quite a bit of work yet. So why am I blogging instead of beavering away at the pile? Because I'm SICK! Give me a break.

Here's a compilation of the bridge videos I've taken so far. They end with yesterday's update, but with the rain today there hasn't been any sign of the demo crew, and won't be at this rate. It's pouring right now.

Oooo--I think I'll use my camcorder from now on. My cellphone cam is pretty bad at this distance. I'll post better videos whenever it seems like they've made some progress.