Sappy Saturday

Some more snow came in this afternoon. Worse, from my perspective, cold sores arrived along with it -- two on my upper lip and one on my lower. I am using Abreva -- which I find very good at keeping it from turning into a nasty fullblown outbreak, but it hardly makes them just go away. It's like keeping a pan of water a bit below simmer. Also, it is waaaaay over-priced. I pay more for one little -- and I do mean little tube of this stuff -- than I do for a month's supply of most of my prescriptions combined. I suspect if I can get my doctor to give me a prescription for a generic version (assuming one exists), it would cost one fourth what Abreva costs. Seriously.

Anyway, this makes eating, drinking and talking less than fun, and I have been grouchy all day as a result. Tom and the cats have been giving me lots of space.

Dave and Mary had invited us over to a dinner party for a few railroad people at their house tonight, and I finally backed out because it would involve the three not-so-fun things of drinking, talking and eating. Tom baked some gingerbread cookies, used his new train cookie cutters and then tried to decorate them. That effort ended after one attempt, so he took some tasty but simple train-shaped cookies to the party, along with a small hostess gift for Mary. I stayed home to keep the cats company and read.

Besides reading, I have been listening to a series of talks about Benjamin Franklin by a former history professor at Texas A&M, H.W. Brands. (He is now at UT, but he was still at A&M when he did these lectures.) Very interesting stuff, so I may listen to some more of that tonight if there is nothing on television.

We recently upgraded slightly for our DirecTV service. The original bare-bones plan we have had since moving up here is no longer available, so Tom took the next step up. It provides us with more options, but as you can imagine, there is still nothing on you want to watch most of the time. Since I subscribe to Netflix, we don't take any of the premium movie channels anyway.

We get lots of channels, but it seems that most of them show the same thing over and over and over and over. So there may be an interesting program on the Mayan empire, but it will show up a couple of times every day for a couple of weeks. So it is the only good thing to see on that channel, but once you've seen it, you've seen it.

See how groughcy I am? Just be glad you aren't here having to put up with me.

And don't get me started on the six more inches of snow and the predicted windchills of 25 below!