Wow -- I feel special. I went away (up to Hugo's house) for three days, and I came home to find four packages waiting for me! One from each of Mom, Graham, and DeMara, and one from big bean music -- the Kris Delmhorst c.d.s I ordered last week. Thanks to everybody who sent me packagelets. Hooray for people that love me! :)

School ended up being cancelled for the entire rest of the week last week, so I went up to Hugo's house on Thursday night to spend the weekend, since I didn't have any homework to do. I ended up spending a few hours each day shoveling snow from the driveway in the hopes of making a passable route to get Roger (Hugo's dad) down to the van, which was stuck at the bottom of the driveway. Small tangent here to describe the geography of Hugo's house so my reader can understand what this means. It is a very long driveway that runs from the road uphill around to the back of the house where the back deck leads to the kitchen. (Key word here is uphill.) The front door does have steps down to a path that leads to the bottom of the driveway, but that route is even steeper, covered in even deeper snow, and extremely unconducive to wheelchair access. So we were trying to make it possible for the van to get up the driveway to the back of the house so we could get Roger into it (the van, not the house -- he'd been stuck there for four days.) Back to story. "The Big Thaw" was supposed to begin on Thursday, so we were hopeful that the ice would melt and allow the van up the drive. Unfortunately, it still hasn't happened, so we couldn't. Also as a direct result of this, they had to reschedule their flights again for Saturday, and we decided to skip the Portland airport altogether and just drive them up to Seattle instead. We spent Saturday breakfast brainstorming ways to get Roger down the driveway to the van, one of the most innovative (and the way we very nearly did it) being to sit him in an opened hard-case suitcase and pull him down with a strap. This was after discarding the stretcher idea and the carrying in a chair idea. We ended up being able to wheel him backwards all the way down (verrrrrry sloooooowwwly) in the wheelchair, but it was not a pleasant ride. Anyway, the upshot is, we got them to Seattle, their plane left, and we all got home safe and sound, if rather worn out and exhausted. I don't know why I felt the need to recount that entire story to you poor people reading this blog, but there you go. I think I was talking about shovelling.... In any case, I'm quite sore and I'm going to take a nice hot bath tonight. Mmmmmm......

That's about all I've got to say for now. I have to go to school tomorrow. It's almost like having to start all over again with the first day of school, since last week didn't really happen. Silly.