By James Bow

The cold that first afflicted Nora and then crept over to Erin has finally hit me. I was under the weather most of yesterday, and pretty sick today. Both kids are fine, though. Which, given that Erin and I are both under the weather, meant for a tiring and stressful day. But we managed.

We made pizza. Erin’s been really getting into making bread dough, and has started a new tradition at our household: she kneads the dough, and the kids put what they want on their own pizzas. It’s been a learning experience. Last week, we tried to put together a full-sized pizza, and found that we had absolutely nothing available to slide the pizza onto the pizza stone we had in the oven ready to cook it. So, instead, we had a calzone, which was quite good. Today, we went with four personal-sized pizzas, which had the added benefit of everybody in the household putting them together as they liked.

We’ve also had a bit of an expensive month. Earlier this week, the washing machine conked out. Not that I have much reason to complain. The Maytag, which had served us so faithfully since we purchased the house may well have been original to the house (thirty years old). And a visit to the local scratch-and-dent outlet gave us a quality front-end-loader machine (from Frigidaire) for roughly 33% off the retail price. We also went with the scratch-and-dent outlet when we replaced our harvest gold refrigerator, so when it comes to new appliances, we may never purchase retail again.

Mind you, with the loss of our old washing machine, we have now replaced every single major appliance in the house. Erin says that this means we finally really own the place, now.

Yesterday, though, things got a little more expensive, as we took Lance the Elantra in for its 100,000 km servicing. This combined with its seasonal oil, lube and filter plus Ontario’s mandated Drive Clean test pushed the cost of the trip to the garage to over $1000. Ouch. Mind you, I can tell that it’s money well spent. We replaced the timing belt and flushed out all of the systems, and when I turned the car on, it ran so much more quietly, I wasn’t sure at first if the car had actually started.

Well, what can you do? These are the costs of home and car ownership.

Between all this, and strong movement on Icarus Down, it’s been a little hard to keep this blog updated regularly. Also, I spent most of today upgrading my friend’s web site to Movable Type 5.0.1. He was complaining about sluggish operation and no commenting functionality, so I tried to do a simple upgrade. This quickly became an upgrade from hell. At first the upgrade froze, and eventually this led to my trying to do a clean install of his Movable Type onto a new database.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to me. It’s alarming and frustrating to see the upgrade process on Movable Type just sit there, minute after minute, with nothing happening, and there isn’t much online support for this situation out there on the Movable Type boards. The previous time, I was able to downgrade back to version 4.26, do a clean install on a new database, and then import the data over. This time, the downgrading didn’t work out, so the clean install took place, and the importing of data had to be done manually: SQL database to SQL database. That’s rather like performing acrobatics without a net.

But it’s mostly done. Check out Jack Cluth’s What Would Jack Do, where you can now comment on his posts for the first time since January. He’s been blogging for some time, and his blog is well worth reading.

So, that’s where things stand for me and my family. A lot of boring stuff keeping me from blogging, here. But stay tuned. I’ll post some more of Icarus Down tomorrow, and maybe another book review or two. And maybe something political will catch my attention before that. We’ll see.