From Xmas to now is a blur.  It always seems to go that way.  There's the year-end holidays, their buildup then the relaxing afterwards.  Getting back to the day to day, the grind.  And it's smack in the middle of winter, the cold weather keeping us indoors more.  Then before you know it, two months have slipped by.

Emma colored me the picture of the buffalo below the old skull.  Janis bought me a carved ironwood buffalo.  It's just to the left of the old skull but only appears as a dark outline - drat.  And I found a wonderful photograph of a buffalo grazing in a wide open place.  These are reminders of how very different things were around here not very long ago. 

I keep a rich mix of stuff around me.  New things pile on the old.  It may seem a mess, but each item got here in its own time and for its own reason.  It's kind of a drawnout reflection of my life.  I'm quite comfortable surrounded by it all. 

Things have been chaotic here for the last week or so.  Janis got some sort of viral infection, but she tried to keep her schedule in spite of it.  That didn't quite work out as planned though.  The virus ran it's course in about a week.  Then Emma got sick, but not as bad as Janis.  Mary got a bit of it too.  In the middle of all that, we had the kitchen wood floor refinished.  The fumes would make your eyes water.  We spent one night at the Holiday Inn down the road.  That was fun.  I mini-vacation of sorts.  The kids & I were the only ones in the pool and jacuzzi.  It was a nice little break in the routine. 

But the house is still disheveled by having the kitchen shutdown for the refinishing of the floor.  Today I'm looking forward to putting the table and chairs back in there, and getting the familyroom back to normal.  We learned that if you cut off access to our kitchen that this house ceases to function very well. 

For my 20 year anniversary of working at StorageTek, I received $300 in coupons to be used at Best Buy.  I fretted a bit about what I'd like to get.  Then settled on a CD writer.  Very good choice indeed.  I got the kind that you just plug into the printer port, so it was up and running as soon as I had it out of the box.  So now with the scanner and video capturer, I can have a place to archive pictures, video snapshots, and scanned images of the kids artwork.  Just didn't have enough room anyplace else.  

I like it in that now almost all computers come with a CD reader.  The CDs I write I can share with others easily.  The media is incredibly affordable now.  Regular price is probably about $3 per CD that holds 650 million bytes.  I've been going to stores that offer rebates on the purchase of the CDs and so far have gotten 16 CDs.  With the rebates these CDs will be FREE!.  Over 10 gigabytes of storage media for free, whoa.  I can buy read/write/erasable media too, although that runs more like $20 per CD.  Apparently I can also create audio CDs with this setup.  That might be nice, but I'm not too interested in doing that now.

Got more memory too.  Bought 32 megabytes for $50.  That is so cheap compared to that last time I bought memory.  It would have cost me $1200 at the price I paid a few years ago!  Been thinking about getting another PC for the kids/Janis.  They're very cheap now.  Still mulling that idea around though.

Mary has seen Titanic four times.  She has here bedroom door plastered with pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio ("Jack" in the movie).  We have the soundtrack CD and Celine Dion's CD where she sings the theme song "My Heart Will Go On".  I tell ya, everytime I hear the Irish flute intro to the song, a tear comes to my eye and I get a little choked up.  

If you haven't seen the movie, go.  It is truly amazing.  I think about what goes into writing a short note so someone, communicating some idea, thought, or feeling.  And I know that there can be an art to it.  A well written letter can be genuinely touching.  There are many ways to share a story, each an artful - in song, narration, photograph, acting/theater.  But this movie combines so many forms, telling its story with such power and depth.  I'm still silenced by the images.  It stirred me.  A masterpiece of so many art forms.  Stunning.