All this Happiness

I took a few weeks off from blogging and other on-line life--a little longer than I'd planned, actually.  Meant to come back a week ago, but a nasty virus really walloped me just as the school year began, and every moment I didn't absolutely have to be doing something (teaching, prepping classes, family business) I pretty much had to lie down and sleep.  At one point I tried to sit down and get some things done, and I promptly fell asleep in the chair:  it was one of those bugs.

Anyway, I felt a little better yesterday, and this morning the swollen glands and awful fatigue are both fading, so here I am. Huzzah!

***

The Christmas break was taken up with lots of nicely physical projects.  We redid my son's bedroom, giving it a new coat of paint (a lovely earth-tone called "toasted cashew," instead of the pastel he'd had since childhood) and buying him some new furnishings to go with it.  My wife and I then swapped work spaces here at home, as I've urged her to do for several months now.  That was a bigger job:  my son and I had to get a treadmill down two flights of stairs, and the whole family pitched in to bring her files and computer equipment upstairs and mine down, along with doing another fresh paint job.  Very joyous work, though, and since R works at home, it's a real transformation of her day-to-day, hour-to-hour life.  Me, I'm snugly situated back on my treadmill, my body in the basement and my mind in cyberspace, surrounded by twice the bookshelves that I had upstairs.  Improvements all 'round.

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Today, one more make-over is on the agenda:  a new couch!  One of my wife's friends from quilting turned out to be selling a lovely matching couch and easy chair, both leather, both quite out of reach for us, new, so we're off to rent a truck and bring them home.  We've practically worn through our current couch, which we've had for about 15 years, so the timing is fortuitous.  Nice to have a strapping nearly-17-year-old son around for these big moving jobs, though--I gave my lower back quite a hard time, doing the study-swap.  Might need to focus on strengthening that, rather than on pushups or pull-ups, in the coming year.

***

Well, the couch moving went quite well, with lots of handy activity associated with it (driving a truck, taking screen doors off hinges, etc.).  When it was done, though, my son needed to drive off to school to work on lights for an upcoming dance concert.

A short while later, frantic ringing on the doorbell:  my son had been in an automobile accident on the way to school.

No one hurt, thank goodness, but the other driver's car needed to be towed, and he'd been so flustered at the accident site he'd locked himself out of mine.  My daughter was on our phone at home, and neither R nor I had our cell phones on us, so we'd missed his calls and texts.  Finally, the local police had simply given him a ride home to get an extra key.

I gave him one, and they drove him off, back to the cars, to get things sorted.

What a slender thread it all hangs by, all this happiness!