With good reason and after years of bitter experience, I almost wrote today off before it really got started. When I get up in the morning and immediately learn I have no running water in the house, I can't be blamed for thinking the best thing I can do is crawl back into bed and stay there.

But I called the landlord, and it turns out his house had no water either. (We draw from the same well, as I'm sure you'll recall.) Since the wild grasses outside my door were still crystal white from the overnight freeze, it was obvious where the problem originated. The North Bay Cold Snap of 2013 had struck.

But since this is the North Bay and not the Yukon, by the time the landlord took a torch to the pipes, the water had already started to flow through them. By 9:30 am I had full function. That's early enough for me on almost any day.

Next time I'll probably just wait for the thaw instead of panicking. If I could ever know when it was going to freeze, I'd leave the water in the sink trickling away through the night. But it doesn't happen often, and in fact the forecast for the next few days indicates a warming trend, both overnight and during the daytime.

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By the end of the day, I almost wished I'd stayed in bed after all. Working with the new software is frustrating, not because there's anything wrong with it, but because I tend to try to do too much too soon, with too little information to go on. I keep forgetting that there are ways to find out how to perform tasks, without trying to do them on my own.

It's not that I'm discouraged, exactly, but I'm tired of how tired it makes me to do this much extra work, knowing that it's only necessary because someone else might have to do it one day. Nobody can adapt to my old system, so I have to adapt to the system my replacement will use. The incentive to do that is kind of illusory, you know?