It's back to the old comfortable get up at 5:45, make coffee, shower, get the family up, welcome Porsche-kids, pack lunches, off to work, come home, cooking and washing and bed at 11:15 grind, and it's okay with me, I need some time to unwind from the holidays and catch up on my Tolkien (I'm right before Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas meet the Riders of Rohan). This may be the last year for that grind.

The kids' charter school only goes to sixth grade, which leaves us wondering what to do for seventh, as ten year old is in fifth. Moving to the suburbs is out without a massive windfall, so we're stuck with various city schools or Mrs. Ha getting a good job and working to pay tuition at a private school. There is one that seems to be a good fit, School of the Arts, we shall have to see how easy it is to get in there. From what we've heard, our school has a good reputation. Regardless, she'll be splitting off from some good friends, specifically newspaper-girl and Porsche-girl.

I think I'm going to stop my 401k contributions for a while. It sucks, but my corp only matches half my contribution, and things are a bit too tight for my liking. There's no sense in retiring with a big 401k if my cc debt is bigger. Mrs. Ha is starting to look for things outside the phlebotomy world, so this may change.

It doesn't help that we've been going to Buffalo 1-2 times a week for a few months (on average), which costs us about $20 each time in gas. Mrs. Ha is going there again today to pick up her mom, we're really hoping to get someone else to drive her back Sunday. When she has to go and get her, and then we bring her back it really adds up.

The latest Cycle World has a nice review of the Ural sidecar combo. I hear the two wheel model has excellent traction, and if you're planning on riding in icy/snowy conditions, a hack makes a lot of sense. At one point I wanted one so I could keep riding through the winter, but the review says they really don't like going over 55, and I tend to do 60-65 on my commute.

OTOH, with there being little snow this winter, I could have been riding most days, if I had more lights on my bike and my oil leak was fixed. Maybe I'll work on that this weekend, get away from all the estrogen in the house.

I really only had to change school districts once growing up, we moved from a little hamlet south of Buffalo to a suburb of Rochester the summer after 7th grade. It was a bit hard, it took a year or two to find my niche of role playing geek friends (one of whom's band just made the cover of the local alternative mag). What grades did you change?