Random Thoughts Before Shoveling Yet Again

It snowed overnight again, so when I awakened at 2:15 am, I decided to go ahead and get up. My hope was to catch up a little on my emails and blog comments before once again shoveling the driveway before the gym. That's my goal, in any case. We'll see if I can successfully achieve it. 

I was looking for a good graphic for "catching up" and
saw this one posted by someone wanting to catch up
with Phoebe and her Unicorn (named Marigold).
What really caught my eye was the scarf and
leggings that Marigold wears. Too funny for 3:40 am,
so I just had to share. If you want to read the graphic
novel, it's available on Comixology for $9.99. 

It's a week of taxes - year-end reporting for the state and federal governments as well as attempting to get the W-2's done and the sales tax. I actually got quite a lot of these finished yesterday, but the W-2's are being their usual reluctant self. The business section of Social Security is always a bear to get into. I have a notation to phone them as soon as I get into the shop today. I need to get yet another entry code since mine has been used for the maximum permissible number of times.  Annoying ... did I say ANNOYING! Their phone banks open at 6:00 am, and usually when I phone them I'm on hold for more than an hour. Oh joy! 

Family and how they intersect is a hard one for me. My definition of
family is quite fluid and the only stable part is DH and his family
up here in the Frozen Northlands. That's the part of family that I actually
intersect with regularly. But I have other family defined in many
ways in other locations across the globe. It's exhausting. 

The Daily Challenge for today isn't really doing it for me. It's "Family" and the task is to do something visual that encompasses family. I'm left with decisions I'd rather not make when faced with tasks like that. My family is DH and I. My extended family is a lot of nieces and nephews and their assorted kidlings, as well as my cousin in Colorado. My family of the heart is another Coloradan and her hubby and kidlings (the last of which is getting married this month), and my BFF, Sharon. I'm not even counting my family back on the Rez which extends even farther or the newer re-found family on my mother's side back on the East Coast. So my preference for "Family" is just two - DH and I. It's a lot easier than ring, after ring, after intersecting ring, ad infinitum. 

Artist Pauline Galiana maked collages from
shredded paper. I suppose I could have dome
something like that, but it seemed a waste of
quality time. 

Yesterday's Daily Challenge was another that I blew off. It was to write for ten minutes, then destroy what you wrote without reading it. I always start my day with emails and writing my blog. That's writing for more than ten minutes. I'm not going to shred my blog, though, and I'm not going to fracture it into little bits of cyber coding either. So that's two days of Daily Challenge that I'm blowing off. Oh well, it will give me a few more minutes to shovel the driveway without being rushes. Huzzah! 

Here's hoping you have a glorious day and don't have to shovel too much snow. I'm planning on returning tomorrow for my "day off" which, as usual, has a billion things on my "to-do" list.