snow and two confessions

Finally it is snowing here, right when we all are tired of winter.  If you've never lived in the North, it may come as a surprise to you that we want snow.  Well, my particular family does, anyway.  My southern family members can never believe that.  But snow is required for downhill skiing (MadMax), snowboarding (PellMel), telemark (Dean), and cross-country skiing (Dean, PellMel, and sometimes me).  And everything is so dreary looking without it.  An inch of snow makes the frozen landscape out the window look like fairy land; without the snow, it just looks dead and brown.

But there is a time for snow, and it is January and February, and we hadn't had any snow to speak of since about mid-January.  They've had a bit more up at the ski resort, but still it has been a low snow year.  So even though normally I would be unhappy about snow in March, at the moment, I'm sitting at my laptop in front of our big front windows and happily watching it snow.

I've spent most of the last 18 hours that I wasn't asleep dealing with tech issues.  I bought a new wireless router since our old one was at least six or seven years old and I thought it might speed up our internet access more cheaply than any of our other options.  I installed one of these routers at another location a couple of months ago and it was a breeze-- took about 15 minutes.

But our setup turned out to be more complicated.  After I spent about two hours installing, uninstalling and re-installing, I finally called our ISP (local, great company), and after about 20 minutes of typing numbers into boxes, we got it straightened out.  We'll see how much it helps. 

But in all of that installing and uninstalling, I managed to delete the driver for the wireless adaptor on the back of the desktop (I had forgotten we even had one).  It is the same brand name as the new router, so I was uninstalling everything that had that name on it.  Oops.  So now I have to figure out how to download the driver on this computer (my laptop) and transfer it over to the desktop which currently has no internet access.

It's irritating, but my techie self is secretly happy that even though it turned out to be a stupid mistake on my part that is the problem, at least I understand why it's not working.  Before we got it figured out (which required about twenty minutes on the phone with the router/adapter people), I assumed that I was just too far behind the times these days to understand what was going on. 

And while we're talking about my dumb mistakes, here's another one.  You remember that Sadie was having accidents again.  So I took her to the vet to see if she had a UTI, which she didn't, but she did have white blood cells in her urine, and a low-grade fever, which means she had some kind of infection.  (So there really, truly might have been a reason why she was backsliding on her house training!)  So the vet put her on amoxycillin (I have no idea how you spell that and I don't care enough to google it).

He said to give it to her every eight hours, which we sort of  have.  She's had it three times a day, anyway.  Sunday I noticed that there were still quite a few pills in the bottle, even though we were almost done with the ten-day course.  So I finally got around to actually reading the label.  I was supposed to be giving her TWO pills three times a day.  OOPS.  So she got the correct dose for the last two days, and I tacked on an extra day just for good measure.  Tomorrow we go in to see if she is all better.  I'm not sure if I'll 'fess up or not. 

She's stopped peeing on the carpet, anyway, but I'm not sure if that's because of the antibiotics or because I've been making much more of an effort to take her outside every two hours.  We've been spoiled by Jazz, who has a bladder made of iron and can go 10-12 hours without a problem.

Sadie, the under-dosed dog.  Can you believe how big she is?