Good stuff

dreamtigress and I had a very nice prime rib dinner with Mom at a new restaurant in Culpeper. Dinner was very good and they sang happy birthday to Mom too!

Commute in: Not too bad, maybe an hour and 20 minutes
Commute home: an hour and a half (I left the office at 4 pm)

Had the pleasure of interviewing a former AKA co-worker with Kim today and was tickled when Kim was as excited about the prospect as I was. While another person is not really in the budget, this would be a great opportunity for both parties and I hope that we can make it work.

Bleh ... just read the fine print on the deal that www.letstalk.com has on the Motorola Droid and learned that it requires a contract of $79 a month or more; I'll need to investigate further. If that is for cell only, I will most likely not qualify (although it would be great to have at least Mom on the same plan). If the data plan can be included, then I will (sadly) hit $79 a month easily.

When I was walking out to get the mail, I found a box turtle in my yard which was a wonderful treat. A few times now I have pondered if trying to keep my home is a crazy idea and finding the turtle is a good sign.

What is not a good sign is the smoke I had in the house last night. I had made a fire in the wood stove since the temperatures were still quite cool. The fire was a little slow to catch (not that unusual since I am no boy scout) but it eventually got hot enough for me to shut down the stove for the night. As I was sitting at my PC, I started smelling smoke and when I checked the living room and kitchen both had some smoke, so I opened some windows and ran the house fan for a bit. The smoke cleared out and the fire seemed ok, so I came back to the PC.

Fast forward another 20 minutes and I smelled smoke again. However when I went to check this time, the living room was filled with thick dark smoke! ACK! Running around to open windows and get the fan on so that I could open the stove safely I realized that the smoke was REALLY bad. I grabbed a wet wash cloth to cover my face with and shut the dogs in the spare room. (Tucker was going nuts barking because he knew something was wrong.)

Eventually with both the house fan running at full blast (and my heat turned on since it was so chilly) the thick smoke finally cleared. Since I was pretty paranoid by this time, I stayed up until 11 pm so that I could babysit the stove to make sure it was going to be okay through the night.

The smoke alarm never went off so I will be replacing it soon and Mom gave me a fire extinguisher tonight since Brian took the one that we had. Before the next wood-burning season, i will need to have the chimney sweep come out and do a full examination of the stove and chimney and hopefully not have any more scary episodes with the wood stove.