Monday

It snowed most of the morning yesterday. Was peaceful out the windows while making the banana bread. About halfway during my afternoon nap Mrs. Neighbor called and wanted to drop off some Christmas cookies she made, so I had to get up, haha. She really liked my new nutcracker banners at the front porch. She had the cookies and some hershey's kisses in a really cute little box. I'll have to save the box. It has a lid with a flap that magnets to the side of the box to close.

After the snow got done coming down, dh shoveled out in front of the garage and shop and later in the afternoon did a quick plow of the driveway and street.

I had a chance to review my mortgage escrow statement and the $200/mo increase is correct, as almost half of the increase is due to them already paying out my higher insurance in August and the first half of the higher property tax a few weeks ago, causing an escrow shortage and then them using the new amounts for my payment going forward. I think I may just pull the shortage out of savings and pay that, so my house payment is only up $100. I haven't decided yet. I guess it works out either way, though next year (because our property is only assessed every 2 years, the taxes are usually pretty much the same for the 2 years) I should not have a shortage, so it should go back down by the $100 shortage I was paying to make up.....I think? LOL. They gave a remittance slip to mail in the shortage payment in full, if I chose to do that, but no date when it is due by. It said I could also pay it online, but no date there. My past mortgage companies annual escrow notices were much more informative - showing a date needed by and also if you do pay it, then $XX is what your new monthly payment will be. I guess I'll call and see when it's due by. The new payment amount doesn't start until my Feb 1st payment is due.

One of my plans, for this house when we built, was to have some sort of bookcase(s) along the wide hallway wall that goes upstairs to the bonus room. It was always going to be someone was going to build them for us, or dh was going to build them. 4 1/2 years later and still nothing. I found some wood bookcases online that I showed dh and he was relieved, as he just really does not like building stuff. I have had the bookcase saved on my computer (in my "House" folder) for quite awhile. I just found them about $50 cheaper right now through an online seller. We need 4 of them. Plus I want a "library card catalog cabinet" in between two of the bookcases, in the middle of the wall. A real antique one is super hard to find (I have looked the past few years), nor do I want to pay $2500 for one. I found a replica that will be good enough, so I am getting all this ordered as well. I'm tired of waiting for my "library" I have always wanted. I don't have enough books to fill up that much of bookcases, but at least I'll now have the bookcases and can add to it, as I go. Used books are just fine with me. I want to start getting some of my favorite books to add to the bookcases.  I will also add some knickknack decor on the shelves as well, to take up space. These should be here mid next week. I'm still waiting to hear back on the delivery and installation cost and timeline for the pool table. If I don't hear anything by tomorrow, I'll check back in with the company I ordered it from.

The past 3 or 4 days my computer is starting to run noisy every so often. That's probably not a good sign. Could be the hard drive or the fan? Sounds kind of like a hard drive spinning noise, but I'm not for sure. I got this computer almost 4 years ago (will be 4 years in Feb). Next time I have to talk to one of our IT guys, I will ask them about the noise. It also probably wouldn't hurt for me to open it up and see if any dust needs to be cleaned out. It's doing it a lot more today. At least anything work related would not be lost if it crashes, as my work "desktop" is on the server at work. I just use this to VPN into my work. For all my personal stuff on this computer I do have it all backed up to a cloud back up service, so I would be able to restore it all to a new computer. At least that's how it's supposed to work and what I'm paying $80 a year for! I haven't had to use it yet, but it will be worth it when I do. I have dh's computer backing up to it, as well.