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Last week, for the first time in so many years I can't remember, my employer had President's Day off. If I had lived in Massachusetts, it would've been ideal because last week Massachusetts schools were closed for winter break.

I'm not sure of the origins, but the winter and spring breaks in New Hampshire always follow those of Massachusetts one week later. So if I observed President's Day last week, it would've been just me 'n Michelle, because our kids did have school that day.

Meanwhile Michelle was concerned about the chemotherapy she was scheduled to have during the winter break. She asked if I could postpone my observance of the holiday so that I could be home with the kids without needing to take a vacation day.

I checked with my supervisor and he was fine with it. Today was that day.

So what did we do? Not terribly much. You see, a storm is hovering over New England. When we woke up this morning, there was about five inches of heavy snow on the ground. I scheduled its removal to wrap up just in time for Michelle to pull the car out of the garage. I just hate it when vehicles crunch down the snow and make it impossible to shovel later.

Unfortunately my negligence failed Michelle in two ways today. First I told her to take my car because it does better in snow — lower center of gravity, better handling, electronic stability control, snow tires, more airbags, etc. Unfortunately I'd forgotten that I had left the car with only a few gallons of fuel. So as soon as she pulled out, the warning light came on and she decided to fill up before heading in to Nashua.

The second major problem was that she took our prepaid phone with her. With the kids all home from school, she feared that if she took her cell (which has our "official" home number on it), she'd spend much of the day fielding calls from our girls' girlfriends. "Can Abby play?" "Can Claire come over?" Sadly no one had used that phone in over a month to notice that it had expired. She found this out after she had arrived at the hospital. That phone needs for me to put some money on its account at least every three months. Usually I write down a reminder, but since this crossed a calendar year, I couldn't. I lost $40-50 worth of credit that could've carried over if only I had remembered. *sigh*

As sure as day follows night, Claire got a call around 9am to play with a friend. While Michelle was probably thinking Claire could give me a hand in her absence, I didn't want to keep Claire stuck at home during her vacation week. She's so busy with homework and activities the rest of the school year. The rest of us caught another episode of "Chuck" that the girls had watched last night. (Abby didn't mind seeing it again.) I liked this episode ("Chuck Versus the Cougars") because it gave us new insights into the character of "Sarah Walker".

Around 11:30am I checked the Doppler radar and saw that soon things would change over to rain. I hustled the rest of the kids outside and we gave the driveway one last clearing. While only an inch had accumulated since my clearing before Michelle's departure, it was heavy! The kind a snowblower does not handle well.

I rewarded the kids afterwards with a generous lunch downtown, including a tasty dessert. When we got home, the kids were actually a bit tired from snow removal followed by a big meal so they were willing to take it easy. The boys worked on their workbooks. I spend some time in car lust looking over antique cars on the web. Today it was old restored Chevy Corvairs and VW Beetles. I'm strange that way.

Before long Michelle got back. It was probably the earliest I'd seen her back from chemotherapy. She said it wasn't very busy there today, probably due to vacations, so things went smoothly.

When she got home I did a bit of computer maintenance. I backed up the iTunes collection on our first iMac (the primary source for music) and decided it was time to upgrade it to Snow Leopard. I also decided to remove the old MacPorts directory on my laptop since I've since been using a newcomer lately called "Homebrew" instead for classic unix software and it has been serving me well so far.

Tonight Timothy found an old GameCube disc that he wanted to try: MarioGolf. We bought that when he was just a baby! It brought back memories to see it again. Now compared to playing golf with a WiiMote, golfing with mere button presses seems a bit lame, but it was still a bit of nostalgia to when we were Nintendo newbies.

I wrapped the evening up after the kids went to bed by installing TeX Live. For the 99% of folks who've never heard of it, it's a professional document preparation system that goes way, way back. I had it under my MacPorts installation and wanted to have it again under Homebrew. If nothing else, my résumé is maintained with it 'cause I'm just that nerdy. Installation was a bit slow because of all of the legacy software I have, it's one of the largest packages. A few of the downloads gave warnings and had to be restarted.

So tomorrow it's back to work as usual. The kids still have off. Michelle has a morning dental appointment. The girls have their friends from Belmont coming down to visit and sleep over. And Claire has a gymnastics class. After being out of gymnastics for over a month due to dealing with Lyme disease, she is so excited to be back into it. More precipitation is expected tomorrow, but it looks like it'll be warm enough that it might just come down as rain.