thanate | little things, domestic and expensive

Well, my trusty 10-year-old macbook pro is ready for its 4th battery; the off-brand replacement after apple stopped making them has lasted notably longer than the first two, and didn't swell up & take out the track pad, though the battery indicator in the menu bar has not been particularly useful for some time now. So, getting another of the same thing (I hope) and it's still a heck of a lot cheaper and less irritating than buying a new computer.

We are couch-free until sometime this afternoon; the old couch turned its ankle some time ago. I screwed the frame back together last year, but the screws had pulled out again over time and the bum leg was slowly slanting more and more, and grauwulf decided we should have a Family Activity, so we all went to Ikea and sat on couches. And then we sprang for delivery, since car seats and huge boxes don't go together so well, so sometime between 2 & 6 we should be getting a minimalist metal frame thing that fits between the bookcases around the window and has significant space for storage underneath. Meanwhile, we have been sitting on the old couch's cushions, and I am contemplating whether I can scavenge the springs from the frame to repair my old couch that has been languishing in the basement against the day we actually deal with said basement & want to hang out there, too. (It is not a large house, and one day we will theoretically have a teenager...)

We had a few nice jacket-weather days in the last week where I got out and pulled down a bunch of the invasive vines, since I somehow never manage to stop them when it's summer and nothing has gone to seed yet. (Have I mentioned recently how much I hate summer?) And I got permission from my co-homeowner to screw hooks in above the windows, so that I can hang bird feeders without getting suction cups to stay stuck to the glass, and rediscovered a receipt for a whole bunch of hardware store credit and got a larger squirrel-buster feeder. My brain was temporarily filled with several years worth of naturalist blog content with possible ways to break it down into posts, and considerations of what to keep & what to attempt to sell... and then my child jumped all over me another fifteen times and my husband talked to his mother for an hour and had a depressive crash, and I keep waking up in the middle of the night, and the pot (as it were) has ceased boiling again. But, nice to know that project enthusiasm is still in there, and here I am actually making myself sit down and type something, which really is progress, no matter how minimal it feels.

Tomorrow I have brunch with friends from the preschool adults, and then on Thursday I finally scheduled the "float session" I got a voucher for before school started. I don't actually know quite what to expect, since my computer won't let me go to their website on account of possible spyware (always a good sign...) but I have been daydreaming about having everyone leave me alone to float in a pool of warm water for years-- either since the Megatherium started swim lessons, or maybe since reading the bit in MCAHogarth's Mindline about the gravitational therapy pools. So we'll see how an hour of warm water with excessive amounts of epsom salts lives up to whatever it is my back-brain is expecting. And Friday I'm meeting my mother in Gaithersburg for the big Sugarloaf craft fair, and there will be warm roast hazelnuts and pretty things to look at.