I can explain my absence.
I'd like to say that I've been gone on a fabulous vacation to someplace warm, sunning myself on a beach while drinking fruity cocktails, but that's not true. (Actually, I don't even like fruity cocktails.)
What really happened is that I stumbled onto a snippet of local Civil War history while reading something else and became obsessed with it. I've been spending a lot of time in 1864...at least mentally. (Oh, that I could travel back in time! I have lots of questions.)
Today I forced myself to live in 2012 and take care of some electrical issues in my laundry room. Things have been in a sad state back there for about a year. By "in a sad state" I mean that I've been doing laundry by flashlight because both the ceiling fixture and the wall fixture quit working. I tried to plug a small lamp into the only outlet in the laundry room, but the outlet is so loose that the plug just falls right out.
Today, therefore, was Laundry Day. No, that's not right...I still have a big pile of unwashed clothes in my bathroom. Today was Laundry (Room) Day. First, I ventured down to the scary basement to shut off the breaker. An utterly uneventful trip. No ghosts, no dead animals, nothing. Then I replaced the loose outlet, the ceiling fixture which operates with a pull chain, and the wonky switch that was keeping the wall fixture from working. I have lights!
And then, because there's no heat ducts back there and it gets mighty cold in the winter, I bought one of those oil-filled radiators and plugged it into the now-not-loose outlet. I have heat! (I should have done that a long time ago. It's really nice back there now.)
And after that, I took a hard look at the laundry room and decided it's in serious need of a makeover. Y'all, it's ugly. Just as soon as I get the bathroom done (and I'm just about finished) I am starting in on the laundry room.
If I can stay away from 1864, that is....
**PS: Is anybody else getting an error message when they click on the plus sign for Google Friend Connect? It doesn't seem to be working. Google eliminated Friend Connect for all non-Blogger sites several months ago, but now I wonder if they've abandoned it altogether.