A Post About Almost Nothing

I've been suffering from a case of blogger block, which has morphed into a moderate case of blogger's guilt, and I don't know what to do about it.  After consulting with myself, I decided my next course of action should be to post something, but unfortunately, I don't know what to post about.  I turned to my camera for some inspiration:  normally if I run into a case of blogger block, I see what pictures have accumulated on my camera that I can load up to the blog, and thus I can pass off a post of pictures as something creative that might be of interest to my poor readers.  Upon consulting my camera, however, I found that I have been less than diligent in the last little while when it comes to photographing happenings around here.  Perhaps we've been too busy being outside and enjoying the beautiful spring weather this March break has brought us.  So if it's not going to be pictures, it's got to be straight information, and although there have certainly been stories or events or news in the last little while, the stories aren't complete yet and are still under processing.  Maybe sometime soon, but not quite yet. 
So.  I'm still left with nothing to post about, but I do have a few mediocre pictures from the camera.  I'll post those with more description than necessary to alleviate the immediate symptoms of my blogger's guilt, and hopefully sometime in the next week or two, I'll feel the inspiration to sit down and write a worthy update post about something that is actually interesting.  In the meantime, don't say I didn't warn you that this post really has no valuable content.  
I will now bore you with excessive information about our television set.  The following is a picture of our TV while it was on the other night.  No, I'm not suggesting that you should go vacationing on a beach down south somewhere, nor do I think this commercial was anything out of the ordinary.  Yet, I post a picture of our TV.  Why?  Because it is starting to die in a variety of different ways.  It's always been a quiet TV, which doesn't really get any louder after about volume level 30 - after that going up to volume level 70 doesn't make any difference.  Lately, if I play a VHS tape for the kids, it makes a very loud fuzzy noise while the tape plays or the video goes fuzzy and loud every few seconds.  The other night we tried to watch a DVD and the picture quality was awful, but at least it didn't show the left side of the movie on the right side of the screen and the right side of the movie on the left side of the screen like it has done before.  If you try to watch TV, there will be occasional blips of bright colours, and the picture will go extremely bright and washed out, and no fiddling with the settings will fix it.  On the occasion of this picture, the visible part of the screen (inner white square) started slowly shrinking until we had a picture that was about half the size that it should be (outer white square).  We don't watch a lot of TV - actually we only get one channel - but I am still a little sad that our TV is reaching the end of its lifespan.  I like being able to pop in a short movie for the kids if they're incredibly grumpy or if I need to take a shower or something.  You know, for the sake of my sanity.      

Our fridge is also trying to bite the bullet.  It came with the house, and according to the sticker inside, it was rated "high" on the energy use scale when it was new twenty years ago.  I don't want to know how much power it sucks up now, but what I do want to know is why it keeps leaking.  Almost every day, and sometimes every few hours, a big puddle of water collects on the inside floor of the fridge and if I don't catch it in time, it leaks out under the fridge and makes a big mess.  I figured the drain pan or something was frozen inside because I had the freezer too full, so I emptied the whole fridge out and let it thaw for a number of hours last week.  I even unscrewed things inside the freezer and cleaned underneath the freezer floor.  Nate enthusiastically helped me clean it from top to bottom, and when we were all done I filled it back up again (not too full) and plugged 'er in.  The next morning, I found a big puddle of water on the inside floor of the fridge again.  Argh!

The other day I was heading out to Bible study on a Wednesday morning, when I discovered that I couldn't get out of the front door.  Why not, you ask?  Because Canada Post delivered this little box, and the guy decided to put it on the perfect angle that prevents the screen door from opening up.  There wasn't even enough room to reach my hand through the door to move it out of the way.  I don't think I could have done it again if I tried.  (see, I warned you these pictures were not going to be very interesting!)

A few days ago, the older two boys were happily playing outside and I had Nate inside with me.  It was a perfect day to wash the windows!  However, Nate currently has a cold, and has copious amounts of  boogers running down his face at any given time.  When he sees a window, he thinks the most fun thing to do is to smush his face up against it.  As you can imagine, this is somewhat counterproductive to the window-cleaning task.  So I let him play with the split peas that the boys had left on the table from earlier in the morning.  They are pretty good at keeping them on the table. 

Nate, however?  Not so much.  This is the price I paid for booger-free window washing duty.  At least split peas are pretty easy to clean up.