January 11 - 17, 2009

The big news of the week is that my sister got hired as a nurse at an area hospital! I'm so excited for her! We've celebrated all the milestones: getting her LPN degree, passing her LPN state board exams, graduating from college with her RN degree, passing her RN state board exams, and now this!

I worked a full 30-hour week this past week for the first time since the week of November 2 - 8 (I worked a four-day/24-hour week the next week, but had surgery that Friday). Boy, was I tired! And sore! When I went to see my physical therapist, she was really worried about my muscle pain and told me to back way off my exercises. I have done so, and while there's still stiffness, it isn't so bad. It does make me worry that it will take a lot longer to recover than I originally thought. The shoulder doesn't hurt; it's the muscle that comes diagonally across my upper back from my spine across my shoulder blade to the shoulder.

Thursday night was the first evening of a four-week Beginning Online Genealogy class I'm teaching at the Spokane County Regional Library. I had only two people show up; the weather is keeping them away, I'm sure, because the library did a great job of advertising. Oh, well! Maybe more will come next week, and I'm just as committed to the two that came as to a class of 20.

We have had furnace problems on and off for several months, and Friday morning I woke up to a freezing cold house. Fortunately, we all have electric blankets, so we slept well, but getting up and dressed in the cold was no fun. I called a repairman, but unless I wanted to pay an arm and a leg and another arm, I had to wait until Monday. Norm did some cleaning of the electronics board and found a loose wire and fixed it, which improved the situation some. It'll run and run and run, shut off for a few minutes and run and run again. Or it will not come on at all. Sometimes it brings heat, and sometimes it just blows air.

I started crocheting an afghan for Missy at her request. It's a zigzag pattern with black and shades of purple from very dark to very light, giving it that Amish quilt look of bright colors against black. The pattern is from a Seven-Day Afghan book my aunt gave me for Christmas some years back. The original color scheme called for shades of rose and white, but I like this one better (Missy picked out the colors herself).

I decided I wanted to keep track of the books I'm reading again this year, although I didn't do a very good job last year. Right now I'm reading three: A Week in Winter by Marcia Willett (I'm so happy to discover another British novelist!); Discovering the History of Your House and Neighborhood by Betsey J. Green; and Heritage from Heroes by Dorothy Rochon Powers, written about the famous and interesting people buried in Spokane's cemeteries. The last two books are for genealogy; the Green book is for a project I want to do later this year on my main genealogy blog and the Powers book is to educate myself so that I can do a good job on the Graveyard Rabbit blog I've recently started.

Matt was ill with that same nasty cold and cough I had, and missed school two days last week. Seems he is having a hard time, health-wise, getting back into the swing of things at school. Hopefully next week, he'll attend all week. My cold is better, though I still have an occasional cough.

We've had fog all week, gray overcast clouds and chill temps. It's supposed to be sunnier next week. I'm getting awfully tired of gray skies, gray snow, gray ice, and gray fog. I need some light!