The Latest and Greatest

Well, it's safe to say that January is working out to be a typical "accountant's" January for me, which means that I am extremely busy. Unfortunately, the work crunch has already begun and I spent the majority of the past weekend working, in addition to pulling late hours during the week. I'm hopeful that the pace will drop off a bit after the end of January, but that's still a few weeks off at this point, and there's no guarantee that it will.

That fairly well sums up all my meaningful activity for the past week or so. It has continued to be cold, cold, cold, and it wasn't until Sunday that the temperature actually passed 35F or so - it's been running between 18F and 36F for about a week. The papers say that it's the coldest cold snap Britain has had in 15 years. So anyway, all the cold resulted in our pipes freezing (twice!), and then on Saturday, I got the joy of participating in cleaning out the drain. It was effectively the same experience as you might have if you had to clean the sewers. I won't talk about that much, for obvious reasons, but they were frozen as well. Not fun stuff. Fortunately, the really cold weather appears to be over for the time being.

Yesterday, we were presented with a rather interesting dilemma. When we registered Dalton for his school, we put Maggie on the waiting list, and she's been on the list for the past year and a half. Because there wasn't room, Mich has been homeschooling her for the entire time that we've been here. Yesterday, we got the call that now there is a space for her. Admittedly, this was a perplexing choice. On the one hand, Maggie is dying to go to school - she already has a school uniform, gets Mich to pack her a lunch when they go to school, all that stuff. On the other hand, they start school earlier over here, so Maggie isn't exactly at a comparable place, education wise. Then there's the fact that she's Maggie - and if you've met Maggie, you know exactly what that means - talkative, bouncy, and all that jazz - and to be honest, we're not sure how she (or the teacher, for that matter) will react to being in school. Still, in the end, we opted to let her take the place. So today will be Maggie's first day of real school. I promise to get pictures of stuff coming soon, including one of her first day of school.

And that's all the news from this side of the pond.