You could get upset but.....

Molly and Gaston and Biggles are visiting in a few weeks so I have been busy on the weekend buying baby things. I mean things like a change table and a bath and diapers. Naturally I got most of the stuff I needed from Amazon but if course got the diapers and baby wipes from Costco – which has a vast array and kept me busy for a few minutes choosing the right ones.

I also got from Costco a rack of Australian lamb for an astonishingly low price.  Costco is the only place I have seen racks of lamb since we have been here. Amazingly – when I cook this it will be for the first time ever.

When iTunes was invented so long ago I transferred all my CDs onto my PC. There were more than 1,000 so this took some time. Since then I have only ever bought music online – and now have 20,000 tunes on my various Apple devices.

Weirdly – some of my tunes – in fact a lot of them – seem to have vanished over the years. Either I have deleted them or Apple has stolen them from me.

The latter would not surprise me as when you download songs from iTunes you do not legally own them. You are in fact borrowing them – you are purchasing the right to use music on certain devices – and the music is always owned by Apple – or Amazon or whoever.

You could get upset about this but there is no point.

I finally put together all the shelving I bought before Christmas for the basement. So now I have been able to put away all the boxes of books and junk that have been cluttering up the basement for so long. Naturally I pulled a muscle in my back while I was do this so have been reduced to a hobble.

There was lots of snow on Saturday and more is forecast for the middle of this week. We have let Sissi out to play in it on the upstairs balcony. Monika – being a more sensible cat – stays indoors and lies on the heater vents.

What will they think of next

I forgot to tell you that I received a Shun chef’s knife for Christmas. It is fabulous. I have only ever used German knives in the kitchen - but have fallen in love with my Shun.

The snow is pelting down again today – it has been snowing now for about five hours so I am guessing I will be out shoveling later this afternoon.

There is a squirrel digging through the snow outside the kitchen window to find the bird seed I scattered there a few days ago. I have not seen any birds for days.

I found another brilliant App. It is called Paprika and is for recipes. You can input your own recipes or – when you find a recipe on the Internet  - you can  import it into your library. What will they think of next.

Boris and his team are here today setting up our sound system. There are speakers in the ceiling in a number of rooms and we were led to believe when we were looking at the house that they system was ready to go.

We found out after we moved in that the speakers were not connected to anything so we are fixing that problem We will be able to put our Bose system back into storage. We can only operate this by using a voltage converter which is the size of a small refrigerator and weighs six tonnes.

Boris is Bulgarian and last time he was here he gave me a long lecture on Bulgarian politics. I followed most of this and it convinced me that I do not want to live in Bulgaria.

How clever is that!

I chopped the Christmas tree up into very small pieces and put it into large plastic bags. Then I took it to Broadripple park where the Christmas trees go to die. This took about four hours. Next year we are getting a smaller tree.

Then I tried to vacuum up all the needles – of which there were approximately one trillion – and were all over the house. I vacuumed for an hour and when I had finished and put the vacuum cleaner away I found even more of the little blighters hiding in nooks and crannies.

I will hunt them down over the next month or so but I suspect they will be a bit like the hairs from the Reindeer rug - and haunt us for years to come.

Did I mention that Cate resurrected the Reindeer rug? It now resides on the sofa in our bedroom – and scatters hairs to the four winds. I took some to Canada with me on the bottom of my bag and spread them around Montreal and St Johns.

Today I finally downloaded Shazam. This is an App that listens to music and tells you what it is. How clever is that!

I think Shazam has been around for some years but I have never really needed it because I listened to – and watched - a lot of music when we were in Vienna.

We have about 275 channels on our satellite TV – but none of them is a music channel – and we have no Indie music stations here – so I have to ferret things out as best I can. They do have country music stations here – which I like to listen to in small doses. But there is a limit to how long one can listen to someone howling mournfully about lost love.

Anyway – I occasionally hear music on the local stations that I like – but they never say what it is – hence Shazam.