Yesterday morning (Sunday) I woke up to Amy whispering "You DO NOT want to go downstairs."

My first thought was, "no, I want to go back to sleep. Leave me alone." (I'm not a morning person.)

My second thought was, "Why? What did you do?"

It turns out she didn't do anything. But our furnace was broken and blowing cold air into the house. The temp was down to about 59. That's cold. So Amy called the first heating place in the yellow pages, who told her they didn't have the right part (um, really? 'cause we're not sure what's even wrong with the thing yet...) The second place came and told us what was wrong. Something was broken. We could fix it, but the part would be $800. To fix it we would need to replace another part, too, which would be $300. Add on labor and you may as well buy a new one. They gave us a deal on the new one, didn't charge us for the Sunday visit, and promised to be at our house "first thing" Monday morning. They actually came second thing Monday morning, but since they went to a church first where pipes had frozen and burst on a daycare center, I won't hold it against them. They're my new favorite heating/cooling people. Reimers, I think, is their name. I'm saving to get air conditioning just because I want them to come visit again.

Mall Girls

Yesterday I went to the mall with some of my favorite people in the world:

I don't really have a story to tell...just these great pictures.

Deuce

Check out the coolest pictures of my nephew*.


*the "nephew" part is unconfirmed...and if it is my niece, I'm sincerely sorry, but I'm pretty sure he's a boy.

Toby's First Year, in Pictures.

Tomorrow (Valentine's Day!) is Toby's Birthday! He'll be 1 year old! This is the first picture I saw of him...I fell in love immediately and knew I HAD to have him.

He flew into Buffalo from Montana...or Michigan...or somewhere a few days later:

After that picture we sent him to boarding school and when he came back he was fully grown:

Ok, we didn't really send him away, he just grew so fast I don't have any pictures of him between tiny baby and fully grown. Mary's still his favorite, besides me, though:

I got this picture from Esther this afternoon:

I know, she's so damn cute it's almost hard to be jealous.

Almost...

because when I got that picture, I was outside...

shoveling...

for the 3rd time today...

in snow that looked like this: