The sky is falling!

 

At least that's how the locals see it. They've been fretting over a paralyzing snowstorm for nearly a week and the flakes finally started falling around mid-morning.

As of 5 p.m., we have maybe 2 inches on the ground - a non-event in Indiana, but  a major crisis in Northeast Arkansas where both of the county snowplows are poised to spring into action. Maria was supposed to make a presentation tomorrow at a high school journalism program on the ASU campus, but it has been called off. Of course. The local TV station was listing school and other closings this morning before the first trace of snow.

There's no wind to speak of, so there won't be any drifting. And with a forecast high of 51 on Sunday, it should all be gone within 48 hours.

Pete and Ruthie are frolicking in the snowy back yard and probably wishing for the chin-high (for dogs) snows of yesteryear in Indiana.

Last weekend's assault on the pile-o-stuff in the garage has resulted in a couple of improvements in our quality of life, even if the garage still won't accommodate a car.

I found and assembled our home theatre sound system, linking it with our new Sharp Aquos 42" LCD TV with an 8' fiber optic cable. I haven't figured out a suitable way to run wires under the carpet or around the walls for the two rear speakers, so at present it's running with the subwoofer, center, right and left channels. Even so, it sounds a helluva lot better than the stereo speakers on the TV and significantly improves the experience.

Our other deficit involved telephones and a decent answering system.

The AT&T package we got does not include voicemail. However, I finally located the base station for a two-phone Panasonic system that we'd used in Thorntown. I found the satellite phone early on, but it was useless without the base station. The base station also has an answering machine built in - a feature I'd forgotten about because we never used it in Thorntown. That's because our phone service there included voicemail, which we sometimes forgot to check for days on end. That shouldn't be a problem now, since the base station and the two handsets have lights that blink when there are pending messages.

So now we have the base station in the living room next to the couch and the satellite unit on Maria's bedside table. A stand-alone phone Maria bought when she lived in an apartment from mid-September to mid-October lives in a guest room and my headset is on my desk in the upstairs office.

So now it's practically impossible to miss the telephone solicitation calls that we haven't been able to block. I get at least two calls a day from automated calling systems trying to sell me an extended warranty for our cars or offering low-interest mortgages. I also get at least a half-dozen calls a week from people trying to reach the folks who had our phone number before it was assigned to us. I stopped being polite weeks ago, especially when it's clear that it's a business calling.

We were spoiled in Indiana because our home state had an excellent no-call system that shielded us from telephone solicitation to the point that we forgot what an annoyance it is.

So with a decent TV sound system and our phones properly deployed for the first time since we moved in nearly five months ago, I feel a little less off-balance and more settled.

In the meantime, I've been selling stuff on Ebay to do what I can to turn unwanted clutter into cash. I sold a half-dozen items from my bloated stein collection this week and plan to list more stuff in the next day or two.