We are in Carlsbad, NM and we have SNOW! WOW.
I woke up this morning and looked outside just to be surprised by it being all white, with snow still falling. It looks like it’s going to snow for some time yet, but then it will warm up later in the day, and we should not see these lower temps anymore starting tomorrow. For today, the forecast is for a high of 31 and a low of 16, so I’m hoping we don’t get crazy winds and we should be ok.
Thankfully, we got the heated water hose, I left a minimal drip in the bathroom , and we have anti freeze in the tanks. I got the water running this morning, made my coffee and am sitting here with my “fixed” computer… I’ll try to get caught up in writing and will post something today since the internet here is very good. Oh, and did I mention I’m happy to have my computer back? :).
I knew it’d be colder here today, but didn’t expect this much snow. We got a good few inches on the ground, and it was pretty cold all day. In the end, we decided to stay in and get caught up on things, rather than be out and run into slick roads and cold.
Bia had a good morning, she woke up and got going as usual, and was all done by mid morning. The wifi here is awesome, everyone is on it, doing live streaming and it’s keeping up.
Bella woke up on her own earlier than her school time, she was up by 6:30am, and got going as well. She didn’t have a lot of work to do, and said she’d be done quick, and she was… she was all done almost at the same time as Bia, actually a bit earlier, I think it was around 10. Bella did have a mini melt down at one point. She got 9 answers wrong out of 20 in her math topic test and was really upset, saying she hated math. I reviewed them with her and helped her understand fractions etc. She’s still not great but I think she’s getting the idea. After that one on one review she got better and continued well with her day.
I got the girls going in the morning, fixed their breakfast and didn’t get much done until around 7 when they were both doing school. I was able to get some writing don after that, and spent pretty much of the morning writing to get caught up. I also did some writing in the afternoon, and am almost all caught up, I think I have one day to finish in the backlog. In the afternoon I also worked on posting on the website, got one posted and another one queued for tomorrow. I got updated on bills as well, took care of some paperwork, and did a bit more work on the new computer setup. For some reason, this new setup with the external SSD drive makes the computer case pretty hot, so I did a bit of research and all I found was that it is due to the new macOS Big Sur, and for some days it will be like that while it does a bunch of stuff in the background. We will see… for now, I installed an app called iStats Menus so I can keep an eye on the sensors temperatures, so far I don’t get any reds, but the body of the laptop, especially above the keys and next to the screen is very hot. Alex went to my house today to do some laundry, and we talked for a while as he was getting some things done for me. My Nest doorbell devices had low batteries, so he removed the batteries and left them charging. He also tried to get my new Nest Protect smoke alarm connected to the network and such, but that one was not working. We tried for a while and it just didn’t work. Oh well. I almost asked him to setup my bitcoin miners again for me, since bitcoin price is so high now, but that would be a bit more involved only because the machines create so much heat that you need to make sure there is not a bunch of stuff in front of them or behind them, as whatever is there may get sucked in.
Carol read her book a lot today, put a lot of work on the website and her computer. She needed to backup her computer, so first she moved a bunch of files from one drive to another, then backed up to that first drive, and those things took hours. In the meantime, aside from reading, she also painted, made lunch and dinner, washed the dishes (and I dried and put them away) and got some activities going. Oh, and she put some product in her hair before she took the girls to shower at the campground facility… hahaha…. We all showered at their facility just so we don’t have to deal with the tanks until it warms up more, that way we can keep water going here and not worry about tanks.
In the afternoon, the girls updated our “next national parks sign” to Big Bend NP, which is in Terlingua, TX. We go there on Sunday (assuming everything is good in TX). We also finally started scratching off our scratch off poster with all the states we’ve been to on this trip. That was actually fun, and it was nice that the girls actually remember most of the states in order.
The girls spent most of their day on their electronics, but we did require a few breaks here and there. They were supposed to catch up with friends, but I’m not sure they did much of that.
Around the middle of the afternoon, I emptied the grey tank and poured a good amount of antifreeze right after. I had to warm up the valve again as it was not moving, so I wanted to make sure we had it fresh and plenty of anti freeze for the upcoming night, which will be very cold.
After dinner, we tried to play some cards, and we played for about 30 minutes or so, but the girls were not very patient today to learn new games, especially slower ones. So, we played a hand and then moved on to movies.
We got a movie going, and the girls were sitting by the dinette. I was by my computer on the couch, and Carol was working on website stuff in our bedroom. That’s pretty much how the night ended, I went to bed around 10 and the ladies stayed up for some more time.
We had a stay in snow day today, and took the opportunity to get caught up on some things.