Lazy kind of Sunday, except for all the work

Hannah has been on school vacation this week for the start of Lent, and I think she has gotten plenty of loafing in, although she claims she didn't get in half of the loafing she had planned. She went to tutoring 3 afternoons and had a dentist appointment one morning, so there went some of her loafing time. We didn't do much sleeping in, though, so I am hoping that getting her up at just past 6 tomorrow morning won't be too much of a headache.

I wanted to go over more of her school stuff with her this week, but just didn't get around to it as many times as I had originally thought I would. I realized yesterday that if I don't sit down with her and get her started, she will just disregard my many, many reminders, just like when I ask her to put away her laundry. Rather than blowing my top, which is my usual m.o. to finally get her to put up her clothes, I need to put my money where my mouth is and show her that her education is worth my time.

I also had a bit of work come in at the end of the week, and it was haaard switching gears. I am looking forward to getting back into my work/exercise/Hannah routine tomorrow. I didn't manage to exercise all this week and missed it. Running errands isn't nearly the same as rhythm kung-fu or skateboarding on the balance board (no whacky music, for one thing).

John and I also had our 16th anniversary on Friday. We tend to be low-key about these kinds of holidays for the most part. I made breakfast tacos for dinner, and John bought me flowers from the grocery store on his way home from the library. Then on Saturday I got around to sending him an e-card. (BTW, Hallmark now has a German online presence--woo!) John and I were bickering about something (we're in the throes of acquiring various paperwork for some German bureaucratic this-and-that), and Hannah was astonished that we would fight on our anniversary. Bickering waits for no one, kid, even on such a hallowed occasion.

I spent most of yesterday on two tedious projects, one rather gross and one rather extensive. I don't think there is much of anything between the wood paneling that constitutes our ceiling and the tiles that make the roof, and I know for a fact that a bat or two has called the space between the balcony roof and the outside wall home during the warmer months. Who knows if anything else is up there right now, but more than once in the past, I have heard the scritch-scratch of something scrabbling around above our bathroom ceiling when heading for a night-time pee. So when I saw that something black-ish and very dirty looking was escaping from the crack between the paneling and the tile wall in the bathroom, I didn't know whether it was rodent poop or just dirt. It had to be cleaned off, though. While I had a bucket or two of hot, soapy water on hand, I cleaned the shower stall, too. Luckily, it hasn't been that long since I scrubbed the shower floor, so I was able to give it a quick slosh with the left-over water and call it clean.

My other project was an organizational one: I put all of the digital photos I could get my hands on into one file on the external drive we have for backing stuff up. I found photos people have sent me, photos from our old digital camera, photos from various old film cameras that were put on CD as part of the processing, photos from CD back-ups, photos that had already been backed up to various files on the hard drive, and photos from John's old Palm device. I even managed to get them organized to some extent, but it took quite a bit of the day.

Now I need to go help Hannah, whose iPod was abused by iTunes and lost a bunch of music she had saved from our CDs. I think there is a copy of one of her older libraries on the external hard drived (spotted while searching for more photos) and we are going to try to fix it.

--Nee in Germany is already kind of tired