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I didn’t realize how much of an Internet addict I was until I got home yesterday to discover that half of the power was out in our house. Unfortunately, that half included the office where all the network stuff is kept (and my computer, for that matter), so I had to go an entire evening and morning without Web access. As I watched TV last night (the living room power stayed on, thank goodness), I had the urge to Google something. Denied!

Our house was built more than 50 years ago and the electrical system is, to put it charitably, rather cobbled-together. At some point, a previous owner installed a breaker box but failed to upgrade the electrical service coming in. It’s really rather amazing that we manage to run a modern household using our weak and touchy electrical system. I can tell you, we go through a LOT of light bulbs.

This time I believe the problem lies with the ancient fuse box that still lurks in the basement across from the more modern breaker box. It’s filled with old-fashioned “shotgun shell” fuses and the little glass fuses that screw in like light bulbs. It looks as though it should have a sign on it that says, “Touch me, I dare ya!” In fact, I understand that it really IS quite hazardous. The last time one of the fuses went out, I was forced to visit an electricians’ supply store to get a new one. While I was purchasing the new fuse, other customers (professional electricians) came up to me to advise that I not try to install it myself. Luckily my husband has a friend who is an industrial electrician and happens to live just a few blocks away. He’s our go-to guy for scary electrical stuff.

Of course, when I was growing up I used to run down to our root cellar and change fuses all the time. I don’t think it ever occurred to anyone that it might be dangerous. I was more scared of cellar itself than of the fuse box. The cellar was only partially finished with a huge heap of dirt on one side. Worst of all, my dad stored his huge, rusty chainsaw at the bottom of the stairs. It wasn’t a big stretch to picture Jason shambling out of the shadows.

Still, I’ve decided to let my husband and his friend deal with the power issue while I work happily away where there’s light, Internet access, coffee, etc. If no new columns appear over the weekend, you’ll know why!

It’s only 7:15 a.m., but so far today is all about spending money. And not in a good way.

First I wrote out the two humongous checks to the feds and the state for our income taxes. I followed that with a check to pay off my speeding ticket. I’m late again with the payment to the water softener company, so those phone calls should begin arriving tomorrow.

I have some other bills to pay, but since I pay most of them online they don’t seem as wrenchingly expensive as the ones that go out in the mail as checks. Online bill paying feels more hypothetical somehow, like the story problems in elementary school math class. “Jane has 650 apples and she owes 100 apples each to 7 different creditors. How many apples must she scramble to come up with before her creditors stop by the house with baseball bats in their hands?”

Obviously, today is going to be errand-o-rama. I need to stop by the post office to mail our tax forms because they’re in big, thick envelopes of uncertain weight. After that, I have a jam-packed work schedule that promises to extend well into the evening, thanks to an appointment at 6:00 p.m. that’s a good 20-25 minutes from my house.

Another of my friends had a baby last week and I’ve promised her a dish of baked ziti. I’ll probably gather the ingredients tonight, make it in the morning, and drop it by on my way to work. I’m definitely either going in late or leaving early or both on Friday, since I have at least three hours of work appointments scheduled for Saturday and Sunday combined.

By the way, I’ve added several more blogs to the “Other Blogs I Like” list. Enjoy!

I overslept by an hour this morning, so I’ll have to make this quick.

Yesterday we finally had the plumber out. $110 later, the kitchen drain is, well, draining. I ran the dishwasher and rinsed off the Easter brunch pots and pans. More cleanup will have to wait until tonight.

I finally got finished with a 16-page car club newsletter that has become my bi-monthly albatross. This is definitely the last year I’m going to do it, but I’ll need to soften up the club gently because I know it’ll be difficult for them to get someone else. As of June I’ll be the VP of my community service organization (assuming everyone doesn’t unexpectedly turn on me and write in someone else!), so that’ll really spur some scheduling changes.

Work this week has involved many, many hours of staring at Excel spreadsheets on a computer screen. I’m looking forward to finishing that project so I can go back to copywriting and other eyeball-sparing work. I have to conduct two interviews over the weekend, so at least I’ll be able to leave a little early on Friday.

So off I go to shower, make a protein shake and head to the office. My goal is to try to wring some more presentable fashion out of my wardrobe from now on. I passed up a happy hour with clients yesterday because I was underdressed. I should be able to afford a full-on shopping excursion once tax season is a month or two past. Until then I’ll have to make do with my oversized leftovers from last spring.

Okay, so I don’t really work in a meat locker. However, I am reasonably certain that you could hang a side of beef from the ceiling next to my desk at the office and it would stay fresh for days on end. It’s that cold in our building right now.

Evidently the building custodians decided that it would be a good idea to turn off the boilers and turn on the air conditioning system as soon as the clocks moved ahead. I admit that it was very hot in the office only a week or two ago. However, things have gone too far when everyone in the office has to take frequent breaks to sit on their hands to warm up their fingers. We’ve been going through a lot of coffee, too, but mostly so we can hold the hot cups next to our frozen cheeks and noses to try to encourage some blood circulation to return.

I kept my jacket on all day long today, except when I went to lunch away from the office. Tomorrow I’ve threatened to bring my old, ugly fleece robe that looks like a frayed horse blanket and wear it around the office until I warm up. It won’t make any difference, though. I’ve seen no evidence that the tenants in our 73-year-old office building have any access to thermostats.

I wonder how my co-workers would feel about a chiminea next to my desk?

Let me begin by saying that plumbing is almost a complete mystery to me. I know it can’t be that difficult, but I have a mental block when it comes to the routing of drains and the connectedness of pipes. I actually re-plumbed the guts of my toilet earlier this year, and I was so thrilled at my new domestic goddess-like achievement that I e-mailed all my friends to report what I’d done.

It can’t have been more than a month ago that one of my husband’s friends came over and discovered that our bathroom sink drain was largely dependent on the big plastic bucket we’d put underneath the trap to catch all the water that had been leaking from it. I’d fully intended to look online to see what it might take to re-do the drain…someday. Luckily our friend is a take-charge kind of guy. He returned over the weekend, accompanied me to the hardware store to make sure I got the correct materials, and put in a whole new drain in less than an hour. Lunch was the only payment he would accept.

Today I hosted an Easter brunch for seven people. I made deviled eggs, scrambled eggs, blueberry scones, honey-wheat bread, cheesecake, egg salad, bacon and sausage…a big feast. As is my usual custom, I ran most of the eggshells down the garbage disposal as I peeled the hard-boiled eggs. I probably grind up a dozen eggshells in the garbage disposal every week, along with all manner of vegetable matter, lemon peels, and anything else that seems okay. I don’t grind up potato peels in the garbage disposal anymore (there was an incident – don’t ask), but everything short of watermelon rind usually seems to go down fine. Until today.

As I began rinsing dishes for the post-meal cleanup, I realized that water was backing up into both kitchen sinks. This is very bad. There’s no way I’m going to call a plumber on Sunday, especially since I can’t really afford to have one stop by even during regular business hours. For some reason, I don’t own a plunger. I do own a big bottle of drain opener – I’m pretty sure it’s what caused my bathroom drain to begin to dissolve. Drain cleaner it was, then.

Since then, I’ve been alternating applications of drain cleaner with flushes of water that cause gouts of ground-up eggshell and vegetable fragments to float up the drain and into the sink where I can wipe them out each time the water subsides. I figure if I do this enough times, surely the clog will go away eventually. This is assuming that I’m not in fact resurrecting the last six months’ worth of ill-advised garbage disposal fodder.

So that’s where I stand right now. I can’t run the dishwasher, I can’t wash the pots and pans, and I’m not too sure how I’m going to manage to make dinner. If you happen to drive down the street and see a women washing dishes in her yard with a washtub and a hose, just pretend it’s nothing unusual, for my sake.

After nine years of mowing our enormous lawn with a push mower, I am delighted to report that we’ve turned the job over to a professional. One of our neighbors – who also happens to be a fellow sports car enthusiast – has a lawn care business. He and his daughter mowed our lawn for the first time yesterday, but not without some critiques of its condition.

Because I grew up on a farm, I have no real concept of lawn care. As anyone who grew up in a similar environment can tell you, the “lawn” is the part of the vegetation around the house and outbuildings that you mow regularly. The rest is “pasture.” Weed control, fertilization, seeding, etc., etc., just don’t enter into the equation.

Now that I’m a suburbanite, I’d like to have a yard that at least keeps me from being the disgrace of the neighborhood – I just didn’t know where to start. Now I can remain blissfully ignorant of lawn maintenance details and let someone else take care of it. Hooray!

My one small contribution to the process was in tilling the bare earth portions of the front yard and applying grass seed earlier this week. We had a new driveway and sidewalk put in last summer, but never got around to dealing with the aftermath. Last year, some really awesome succulent weeds of a type I’ve never seen before grew on either side of the driveway in the late summer. We speculate that their seeds were trapped beneath the asphalt until it was torn up to put in the concrete. You see? Nobody who thinks that huge, creeping weeds are cool should be allowed the responsibility of creating a presentable lawn.

I’m sure my niece will be very disappointed when all our “flowers” are gone. Last weekend she carefully picked a big bouquet of dandelions because, she said, “My mommy likes flowers.” Hee! Maybe the time I save not having to pick up sticks and mow will allow me to plant some real flowers for a change. We can only hope.

Good morning, everyone. I’m pausing a moment to check in even though I’m mondo busy today. Last night I didn’t get out of work until after 7 p.m. (they lock my usual exit door sometime before then, I discovered), which meant I missed a board meeting. I was supposed to drop off some forms to the nominating committee chair for another club but I forgot, so now I have to try to do it this morning.

I’m scheduled to interview someone in a few hours, but I haven’t yet developed an outline for the questions. My clothes for today are still in the washer. I only have a 30-minute data card for my tape recorder, and I’m not sure where to go to buy a bigger one. I’m hungry because we didn’t have any food in the house when I got home last night, so all I had for supper was a package of EasyMac and a bag of microwave popcorn. I forgot to stop by the store for frozen fruit, so I’ll be forced to make eggs for breakfast, rather than a more convenient protein shake. Deep breath….

Anyway, thanks for stopping by. I foresee things calming down after today. Happy Wednesday to you!

Rather than continue with my usual self-absorption today, I thought I’d give over my blog space to try to help someone else.

A gentleman I know named Frank Esteban is afflicted with multiple sclerosis. His constant companion is his assistance dog, a collie named Surf. Sadly, Surf has been diagnosed with lymphoma and needs some expensive medical treatments that Frank cannot afford unaided. Enter IMOM, a not-for-profit organization whose motto is, “Companion animals shouldn’t have to die or suffer in pain simply because their caretakers are financially challenged.”

IMOM is featuring Surf as one of their pets in need, and is set up to take donations to help pay his vet bills. They accept credit cards, PayPal and will even set up payment plans.

If you’re inclined toward charitable giving and you feel you can spare a little, please consider making this one of your donations. It’s a worthy effort and I know it will make a big difference for this family.

I packed an impressive number and variety of activities into the weekend, which in turn inflicted upon my musculoskeletal structure an impressive number and variety of aches and pains. Considering that I’ve been an inert, deskbound mass lately, I’m lucky I feel as well as I do.

Saturday began with about an hour of leaf raking and bagging, followed by flower planting. I haven’t even touched my own yard and garden yet this year, so even that little bit of labor awakened some dormant muscles.

Next came horseback riding, which ended up lasting about three hours, rather than the hour I was expecting. Saturday was a gorgeous day to spend on horseback. We saw about eight deer and a wild turkey during the ride, not to mention lots of hawks and other predatory birds. I was riding a small, spunky horse named Josie who was not allowed to lead because of her penchant for leaping over streams and perpetrating other horsey goofiness. Her short stature saved me from a lot of tree branch scrapes, although I found a scratch on one temple the next morning as I applied moisturizer. (Downside of riding Josie: I had the song, “Josie” by Steely Dan stuck in my head throughout the ride – and now I have it stuck in my head again!)

By the time the ride ended, I was already getting some sore muscles in the area my four-year-old niece would refer to as the “booty.” By the next day, most of the muscle pain was centered on my upper back muscles and inner thighs, although I certainly have no wish to sit on any non-cushioned surfaces right now.

After we left the farm, my sister and I headed to her house so I could pick up my niece for our evening of fun. We saw “Home on the Range,” which my niece seemed to enjoy (she enjoyed the Skittles and popcorn anyway). After that, we stopped for pizza. By then it was so far past her bedtime that as soon as we got to my house, I got her into her pajamas, helped her brush her teeth, read her one story and then it was lights-out.

I went to bed within the next few minutes myself, and it was a good thing, too, because my niece woke me up at 6:30 a.m. (okay, it was really 7:30, but we’d forgotten to set our clocks ahead). I was moving pretty slowly, but managed to spend the morning watching cartoons and our DVD of “Shrek,” painting with watercolors, playing three rounds of a hiding-and-finding game my niece made up, and coloring on the back patio with chalk. My sister and brother-in-law came to collect their daughter and we all went out for a lovely brunch.

The activities continued apace, but you get the idea. Tonight’s plan: Christmas light removal (I know, I know!), roto-tilling and grass seed planting.