There's other little things getting back to normal, incidentally. One of them is at work: the office's main secretary had been out since mid-November for cancer treatments, and while she was expected to make a full recovery it did leave her sidelined for, well, the whole of winter. She got back this past week, finally, and says she's feeling quite good. (She did have to miss a half-day for follow-up screenings, but that will happen.)
If anyone did have to miss a winter this was the one to miss. She mentioned Wednesday she was already shocked by how much gas she was going through after such a long time of needing barely any. And the getting up early in the morning to go to work has been a pain too. As far as I can tell nobody in the office likes the office hours, including the owner; unfortunately, those hours are set by clients who insist on starting around 8 am, possibly because nobody's talked openly about hating starting work at that hour.
Anyway, besides the generally good news about a pleasant person being back to reasonable health, there's the extra good news that this softens the workload of the other secretarial and support people. One of them, nominally the boss's secretary, has been doing not just much of the office-secretary work but also has been the de facto office manager whenever the owner is unavailable, which is a strikingly high fraction of the time. So this is giving everybody who has to actually do stuff a big relief on their stress loads.
Trivia: Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson had their first successful voice telephone communication in the attic of Bell's home at 5 Exeter Place, Boston. Source: Telephone: The First Hundred Years, John Brooks.
Currently Reading: Mythematics: Solving The 12 Labors Of Hercules, Michael Huber.