Things are looking up these days. We're at something like normal now; our bedroom has been de-holed and cleaned and almost doesn't smell like smoke anymore, and we got new sheets on Friday and slept in there again for the first time in days. Life goes on, in its inevitable way.

Still getting the shakes every so often, especially seeing it was only a week ago tonight we were stumbling out through snowdrifts to escape disaster, and it still kind of feels like we beat the devil somehow and don't deserve our good fortune. But, as I'm wont to tell people, nobody really deserves their fortune, good or bad; you just deal with what life throws at you. And Stacy and I are probably closer because of this, and that's a good thing.

As of last night, the kitties are no longer resident here (as they were all week, not being able to go to the hotel with Angie). It was nice to have them here, even though we never really saw them. (They hid in the closet all week while we were awake, the poor scared things. My closest contact was getting scratched and bitten by Spike as I tried to extricate him from the spare-room closet where he'd wandered in sometime in the wee hours of Wednesday night; I sustained some well-deserved wounds from that, which should serve as a warning to anyone thinking of trying some cat-wrestling in your underwear. Not recommended.)

So now we're having a nice Sunday-night relax, and I'm oddly enough not feeling as terrorized as usual at the thought of going back to work tomorrow. Maybe a return to some kind of routine is not such a bad thing now. And even the snow is much less of a pain in the ass than it was a week ago. I feel relieved about a long list of things.

And today is Spyder's birthday; she came into the world on this appropriately Illuminated date way back in dystopian 1984, almost two months after I saw Dune in a cold little theatre in Parkersburg, WV. (The fact that I have a friendship with an adult who was born after the release of Dune is very weird to me, and a little depressing. But anyway.) So go on over to her website, and give la mia sorella some hits and some loooove.

Wooch. What a week. Here's hoping they get better for a while.