The Week In Pictures, sort of

Dreaming of the beach cabin...only a month and a half before we can go.

Sugaring almost every night.

Snowstorm that thankfully melted the same day it fell! And I got a new laptop...so I was playing around, doing cheesy things to pictures with it's photo program...

More baby bum pictures!

I just like these barns on the way to Jim's.

My wee Anne?

"The Mushroom LIVES!!!!"

That's what The Kid screamed many, many times today while racing through the house holding a carved, wooden mushroom over his head. Yeah, I don't really get it either, but it seemed sort of funny. I have a new computer since they went on wicked sale last week...and I haven't quite got it all figured out yet, but at least I've got a spot to store all the photos from my completely full digital cameras! The sap has not been running that great yet, hoping it will today...the sugar bush along the Foundry Road is always late, but the ones in our yard are really giving well, it's so nice and sunny down here. Later all!

My Sweet Babies

Made the first syrup of the season last night... Yay! It took several days for the pans to sweeten, but it should be hourly from here on out! That's the good news, well, that and the fact that everybody is healthy and happy for the most part... Bad news is: We woke up on Saturday morning to the smoke detectors going off. We are NEVER turning that old oil furnace on again...No more cement is going to do a thing for it. It's been hobbed back together a dozen times. Justin decided he would cut down a half-uprooted tree that has been leaning towards our barn for a while, and fire up the wood furnace. As luck would have it, his chainsaw died and he spent half the day tinkering with it before we got cold enough to go get some wood from Mom & Dad's house. We actually ordered three cords of firewood months ago, but the guy had no wood to deliver, and kept telling us he'd get some soon, but winter's practically over! Anyway, it's warm today. I just gave the baby his first chocolate chip cookie after lunch. He seemed to enjoy it and then the next thing I knew, he had gone and chewed on my white dining room curtains with a mouthful of chocolate...not a pretty sight. Uuuggg. He also had a diaper explosion earlier while seated on a dainty, lacy, floral throw cushion. Right now he's seeing if he can cover every inch of the kitchen with dog kibble...the only thing worth playing with, in his opinion. It was a rather calm morning though, as The Kid slept in until 9:30, an unheard of time for rising in our house! All the sugaring/snowshoeing/late nights are getting to him. I am forseeing school mornings to be trouble with a capital T! He had a fabulous time raking mud in my parent's driveway yesterday. He was caked with it from toe to chest, but quite thrilled with himself. On Saturday, we took the kids to see Goodnight Moon/The Runaway Bunny by the Mermaid Theatre, a traveling group from Nova Scotia. I highly recommend it for little people, absolutely wonderful, and they loved it. My hard-drive is still dead, not dead and buried, but certainly dead for the time being until we can afford to have the data recovered. My pictures on here may be very limited for awhile because there is no room on my computer to hold them. I can upload straight from my camera onto flickr and then pull them from flickr to here, but that seems like an awful lot of work at the moment. Just putting a couple of pictures on and typing a little is a lot of work today...The Kid leaned over to see these pictures, and fell out of his chair, yanking out a good sized fistful of my hair on his way down. And now they've both left me nursing my bald spot to go play in their rice table. E calls to me every few seconds to tell me his brother is eating it/dumping it out/spitting in it/mixing in dog food/or wrecking whatever he is trying to do, but they are very cute playing together. Spring sunshine is pouring in, the river is rushing along, all choppy and brown, bare patches of ground are growing barer and mud-squishy...things are improving, maybe not in looks, but I'm thawing too. A little less tense, frozen and grouchy every day closer to bare feet, green grass and wide open windows.

Last Straw

Well, I feel pretty much as low as I've ever felt. This evening, the dang dog jumped up and pulled my external hard-drive off the table, smashing it. All lost. Every picture I've taken for the last five years was on there. Only a tiny percentage was saved on cd as Justin has always scoffed at my "anal need to double-triple save everything". We had to drag all my files on to it because our computer was overloaded and about to crash...I had just started to double-save things on disks, when we ran out of them and hadn't gotten more yet. I think I average somewhere around 100 shots a day...I do put a half-dozen or so on Flickr daily (thank goodness), but a million other pictures of my kids and my portfolio of professional stuff was recently sorted and moved to the drive due to lack of space on the computer. I threw a box of crackers across the dining room and spent an hour in the bathtub sobbing. I'm sick and tired of EVERYTHING. Calling around, we discovered that there are places that can get the info back, but it is thousands of $. Not possible for us. I am miserable. I make memories through pictures, I can't remember shit unless I have a photo to trigger the memory. My pictures are more important to me than any other thing I own, they aren't a possession, they are part of me, and I feel horrified and defeated to know they are pretty much lost to me now. I mean, taking photos is the only thing that I DO, my only outlet, the one thing that makes me feel like I am anything other than a boring, pointless, little housewife. Each of those shots is precious to me. They ARE me. If it wasn't for my cameras, I sometimes think I would lose my mind. I feel like that terrible nightmare that I always have of my house burning and my pictures being lost has come true. Brokenhearted tonight.

Clogging

Some of my kids danced in the Mini-Mud Season Talent Show last night...they are just the cutest things!

Tapping!

Most beautiful day!!!! Warm, sunny, melting snow, mud, birds singing, the ping, ping, ping of sap dripping into the buckets...Ahhhhhhhhh! Spring!!!!! Of course I took a zillion photos, and of course I'm too lazy to upload them in here. Head over to Flickr to see more.

So....

Our furnace died. Again. Whatever. Anyway, I was explaining something about the situation to Myra, who asked why it died...I said "Because it is an ancient piece of shit" or something of that nature. She admonished me that the kids were going to start to repeat these things. Eli gave us a devilish look, and started chanting "Ancient, ancient, ANCIENT!" in a sing-song voice.