Been gone a long time

Well, I didn't think it was that long! Somewhere in the stumach flu during Thanksgiving break (for which we are grateful, if we had to have sick kids, that it happened when my husband didn't have to go to school and I didn't have to teach), the days seemed to turn into weeks. But clearly I've been neglecting the blog since before that. My sense of passing time doesn't work too well.
My husband took advantage of the break, too, to reinstall our operating systems on the two big computers. This is nice, because this was a dual opporating system machine but the Mandrake part took up seven gigs of the hard drive, and didn't do much of anything else. (He never put on drivers for the ethernet card, so twas pretty well useless.) Now I have the whole (almost) 30 gig hard drive to myself, because the boys have their own machine to fight over. Which they do. For whatever reason the computer likes to reserve a little bit of hard drive from the partition. I am told that all computers do this. Fine. I have plenty of room for my stuff now.
Of course, this means that I have to reinstall all the games. Well, when I feel like playing them again, I will. I don't play most of them very often. My husband's machine has a bigger hard drive, processor, and everything else. That's fine. He uses more of it. He's always trying out this and that and the other.
We had a blizard Saturday, much to my mom's dismay. She likes the crazy sales. I prefer to stay home. Well, she says she got some great bargins on Friday. She's not sharing what all of them were, but she's pretty happy about it, so I'd say Christmas presents. My parents have at least a foot of snow everywhere, as much as three where it drifted. We have some places that are bare dirt, and others (like the driveway) were over two. The snow makes the world look beautiful. We offered to help them with their driveway, it is a longer one, but they are stuborn and proud and insisted on doing it themselves.
I have the windows open in spite of the cold, the house felt so stuffy and I felt like I couldn't breathe. I think this house is a little too weathertight. But, on the bright side, I can crack the windows only when it's sunny out, and not too terribly cold. It's cold out, yes, but not so bad. I wish the boys were big enough to go out skiing and maybe even snowcamping. My husband thinks I'm crazy. Well, duh! Cross-country skiing is what I like better. You can get out into the world and see all sorts of things. I even still have skis. I'm half-Finnish, it's genetic.