Okay, I am home and have booked the plumber to install a new pump. The shop vac and I will spend the rest of the afternoon together.

How does my DH manage to be out of town for these things? During the snowstorms, he was in Vienna, and I had a new-ish baby and 100ft of driveway to be shoveled.

ION, our long national world nightmare that is World War One is finally (about to be) over!

First World War officially ends

The First World War will officially end on Sunday, 92 years after the guns fell silent, when Germany pays off the last chunk of reparations imposed on it by the Allies.

The final payment of £59.5 million, writes off the crippling debt that was the price for one world war and laid the foundations for another.

Germany was forced to pay the reparations at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 as compensation to the war-ravaged nations of Belgium and France and to pay the Allies some of the costs of waging what was then the bloodiest conflict in history, leaving nearly ten million soldiers dead.

The initial sum agreed upon for war damages in 1919 was 226 billion Reichsmarks, a sum later reduced to 132 billion, £22 billion at the time.

The bill would have been settled much earlier had Adolf Hitler not reneged on reparations during his reign.

That bastard!

If you were common law and had changed your name, they'd just want to see evidence of the name change.

But yeah, your tale reminds me that I need to get copies of my marriage certificate. I need to make sure I have access to all my docs, being brown in Arizona.

Wow. I had this window open here and neglected a long time.

Seriously, I should take a picture of the dining room table and post it tonight. It is comical, even without a cat in the middle of the chaos. And sad.

I would put my dining room table up against anyone's for sheer untidiness. 4 cardboard boxes from Amazon and Woot, two cameras (one still in box), two boxes of daffodils to be planted, a bag of cosmetics, a resistance exercise band, two handbags (both full), a box of batteries, two boxes of contact lenses, a screwdriver set, two boxes of feminine hygiene products, mailing labels and two padded envelopes, a bra, a pair of fuzzy socks, a box of Kleenex, the smoke alarm I took down from upstairs, an extension cord, a tube of Neosporin, a set of stovetop drip pans, a plastic plate, a plastic cat bowl, two ice cube trays, a bag of coupons, a bag of random crap from the last overnight trip, two manila envelopes of Important Documents, an ice scraper, a catch-all box I took out of the junk drawer to organize two weeks ago, a catch-all basket I took out of the bathroom etc., and an item of clothing that was to be returned but it's probably too late. Under the table, four more cardboard boxes to be mailed out, and a pair of slightly-damp pants hanging over a chair.

Good lord. Doing an inventory of untidiness is a great motivator to clean.

Five foot tall brown penguins? The fuck. They're not supposed to be bigger than some people. Or browner.

Rahm Emanuel to leave the White House to run for Mayor of Chicago.

JESSE!!! [link]

Okay. So. I am doing the great paperwork shuffle, too. And the business stuff is going fine, because I have appropriate places for all that, even if it usually doesn't make it there.

But with the personal stuff...what do you guys do for paper life cycle for like, mail?

If I had the shelf in my entryway, ideally it would run: Mail comes in and goes in a big pile/basked in the entry. Junk mail is sorted out and immediately shredded. Magazines/catalogs go on coffee table shelf until read and recycled after the next one comes in. Personal mail...dunno. Not too much of that. Bills get opened and dealt with and then...what? Filed? Shredded? Work mail goes in the in basket, which then changes over to office flow. Outgoing mail?

I dunno. Right now it all just comes in and sits on the dining room table for months. The SO does the bills, and most of that electronically, so he tends to never open the paper. But the paper says stuff we need to know, sometimes, like, don't pay us any this month. I just don't have a good process flow.

OMG, I'm not sure I even want to save that for when I get home.

JESSE!!!

AHAHAHAHHHAAAHAAA! That. Was. Awesome.