Snowy morning coffee

Yes, I said coffee, not tea. With Anthony working at Starbucks and bringing home free coffee, I'm not only having a little tea in the morning but also a little coffee. So, I've joined the ranks of the coffee-swilling masses in Seattle. It feels good to belong to a group.

And yes I said snowy. It snowed about 2" here at home overnight. It started around 20:00 and probably snowed off and on all night. It's really pretty, especially since we don't see snow on the ground that often in Seattle. The problem is that for the first couple of hours of snow, the ground was too warm so it melted when it hit. As the temp dropped it of course turned to ice so there's 2" of pretty snow with about 1/4" of ice underneath.

I'm kind of hoping the snow and ice hangs around for a couple of days so I have an excuse to work at home. The sun is breaking through the clouds and I see some melt happening on some of the roofs but not much. It's supposed to not get out of the 20's tomorrow so we'll definitely have more ice. I would really enjoy a work at home day!

Luckily I don't have to go anywhere in the truck today. I think our plans today are all home-based: we still need to finish decorating the x-mas tree; we're trying to organize a load of items to give away before the end of the year; we've got to fix breakfast still; and we need to straighten up the house. Sounds like a busy day, but it should be OK. If we have to go anywhere out of the house, we'll walk.

My big project lately is that I have spent the last several weeks, off and on, ripping all of my CDs to MP3. I figure I've done about 475 discs and a total of about 7167 songs. I know that's not a lot compared to some peoples' collections, but it took a lot of time to go through every CD. It's actually nice to finally have everything digital. Now I'm thinking of ideas to be able to get rid of the CD player in the living room and use a laptop connected wirelessly to my server in order to play the music on the stereo. I think it would be pretty easy, and pretty user friendly. Sadly the sub-woofer on the stereo decided to die the other day, so there's no point in doing anything until I get that replaced. It's always something...

My other big project has been organizing the files on my PC at home. Jayson and I used to share the PC so there was stuff scattered everywhere. I've been organizing it all between the five hard drives I've got and trying to make the folder structure make sense. One of the biggest reasons is that I've got a backup job that copies everything to the large external drive and I want to make sure that it's grabbing everything I want. But, I also got tired of multiple copies of things in three different locations, all with different names. Folders named "New Folder 5" don't do any good when trying to find something! I've gained back at least 40 gigs of space across all the drives, which is pretty good! Now I just need to add more RAM to my PC to help it run better. Like I said, it's always something...

I pretty much have my x-mas shopping done this year. We all three agreed to a strict spending limit this year. None of us really NEEDS anything and money is tight all around. So, we'll each have a nice selection of things to open x-mas day without having gone into debt to do it. We always do fun things in stockings so I've got to pick up a few things for that. We're going to be spending the day at home that day which will be nice.

Well, time to get working here. Plus we still need breakfast and it's almost 10:00. And maybe we'll even go see if we can scrape together a snowball!