Well, whattaya know? It’s been over a month since my last post. But what a month it has been!

Week before last, Houston (and most of Texas and the southern states) experienced a freak winter storm. In Houston, we’ve had the occasional overnight freeze, but this year it lasted about a week. The weather folks on the news had to go back to 1898 to find daytime temperatures as low as was predicted for that week we had. At one point our temperature was below 20º and we were below freezing for several days. I had the water trickling in both bathrooms to help avoid freezing the pipes. My power was out from about 4:45 on Tuesday morning until 1:00 Wednesday afternoon, about 30 hours, give or take a little. Literally millions of people lost power and water for several days, and because of so many people with frozen or busted pipes, all the major hardware stores were out of stock, causing further outages until things could get repaired.

We are, of course, still in the COVID-19 pandemic, and people are still refusing to do the bare minimum to help bring the virus under control — wearing masks, avoiding crowds, etc.

I have been very good for the most part, only going to clinic visits and the local Kroger as needed. I am on the waiting list for my vaccine shot at my clinic. I’ll be glad when more people are vaccinated and life can return to normal. Or at least a reasonable facsimile of normal.

Another problem is that my fairly new-ish computer decided to no longer wake up. So for several weeks, I was connected to the rest of the world only through my phone. What a royal pain in the ass that was, but I managed to do nearly all my work through the phone. The one thing I could not do was edit my Web pages — the screen is just too small for me to copy and paste large blocks. I also could not figure how to upload yarn pictures from the phone. Thankfully that is now behind me, and I have what I need to press forward. The one thing I need to get is a hard-drive reader, so that I can extract the hard drive on my old computer and collect the years of files and pictures. Then I can figure out why the old computer wasn’t working, and hopefully get it working again. I will definitely be more diligent in using the external hard drive for storage and regular back-ups.