Beth’s birthday was this past Monday, and she didn’t have to go to work since it’s also MLK Day. I took everyone out for sushi on her birthday, and also got er a new Keurig (the old one has died recently) with some new k-pods and a pressure cooker cookbook….I brought the van in to the shop again on Monday, since it’s still been making those clunking noises up front. They found a bad CV axle on the right front, but didn’t have the part, so it took until Tuesday to get it back. It only set me back about $320…Wednesday, school was cancelled again, so no FCC Kids again, then school was cancelled on Friday again. Alex was supposed to have a robotics meet this Saturday, but it was cancelled, which was a bummer also because he got a day off work to be able to go to it…. Saturday I wanted to go visit Mom before the roads got bad and I couldn’t, and everyone (including a friend of Nat’s) went with as far as Fort Wayne (I dropped them off at the mall). I visited her for a couple hours, by which I mean I sat at a table with her and tried to talk to her but she was mostly non-responsive. She looked around and occasionally laughed at one of the other old ladies there, and said a few words here and there. She did seem to recognize a picture of the cross-stitched wall hanging that her great-grandmother made (“I’ve seen seen seen seen seen that”) but I got nothing else out of her. She finally got a haircut last week, first one in months and months, so she looks a bit more like herself now. Afterwards, I picked everyone up at the mall and we had dinner at Red Robin before heading back. The roads were getting kind of slippery.