Waiting in the wings, life is waiting to interfere again. With a batch of cherry jam and cherry-spearmint jam completed, I have re-cleaned my kitchen and am prepared for the next onslaught. This afternoon, Kat and I are going to tackle peach preserves, and afterwards, the kitchen shall need to be cleaned again.

Tomorrow: Sean attempts to rototill the other enormous flowerbed (on the other side of the patio and of the same size as this one) while the ground is still sodden from this week's rains. While he's doing that, Kat and I will probably make a run out to the Huntsville Botanical Garden, which offers free mulch for the hauling. Since we have a lot of bare ground, we could use a lot of mulch, and this appears to be the cheapest way to handle it.

We'll place the mulch and then it'll undoubtedly be time for everyone to take a break.

I'm going to step back for a moment and give you an uncharacteristic taste of what it's like to be me.

Repeat after me: *squealy squealy boingy boingy bounce bounce boing!*

I'm cautiously optimistic that things are slowly returning to normal over here. The machine that hosts domesticat.net is actually located in England. (This is the sort of thing that happens when you have a British friend who once worked for an ISP.) Yesterday afternoon, meaning late yesterday evening GMT, the uplink to the machine died. It took somewhere between six and twelve hours to get everything restored.

Then, of course, shortly after the server uplink was re-established, our cable modem went nuts. Our cable provider's DHCP server elected to barf on us. Thus no net connection for most of the day.

Oh, well—there were plenty of tasks that needed doing. This year's Stanley Cup is proving to be quite entertaining; for the first time in my life, I have friends around that enjoy hockey. Tonight I did something I've not done in years—called someone up on the phone and said, "Hey! The game's on! Are you watching?"