I didn’t sleep well last night (not unusual), and I expected today to be kind of lousy, as they so often are, for some inexplicable reason, when I’m half asleep all the time.

But it was a good day.

First, deep background. I spent most of last Saturday tinkering with my snowblower, because we’d gotten about 10 inches of dense, heavy snow overnight. I’d planned to do housecleaning that day, to prepare for the upcoming holidays, but clearing the driveway took priority.

I never did get the driveway cleared (fortunately mild weather since then has melted most of it off now). I’m new to snowblowing, and wasn’t aware of the arcane things you have to do to get one of those suckers running again after its summer vacation.

I finally gave up, and decided I’d take it back to Sears for service one night this week. But this was the first night I’d had clear to do that.

But a friend with experience in these things told me what usually works for him (repeated pushing of the primer button, if you must know). I tried it this evening after I got home from work, assuming it wouldn’t do any good. But it did.

Hoopla!

Then I drove up Highway 81 to Office Max, because I needed a new desk chair mat. I’ve been running through about one of those things a year since I moved into this house, due to a fatal combination of thick carpeting and me weighing about as much as a pony.

I used to buy such things at Office Depot, which used to be just up the road in Crystal, but they recently closed that branch. Now the handiest office place is the Office Max in Brooklyn Center (or Brooklyn Park. I’m never sure).

I thought I knew where to find it, based on the map on the Office Max web site. But I was wrong—in a good way. The place turned out to be several miles closer than I thought.

Hoopla hoopla!

Not a big deal, but on top of the snowblower triumph, it made it a good day for me. I celebrated with a Chicken Filet dinner at KFC.

In other news, a Norwegian friend forwarded me this article from Forskning, the same web site that I linked to a while ago in relation to a new archaeological dig at Avaldsnes, Norway. (The link is pro forma. Don’t bother clicking it unless you read Norwegian.)

I’m too tired to do a full translation, but the gist of the thing is that they’ve discovered mitochondrial DNA among Icelanders that seems to derive from Native Americans. The speculation is that the Vikings who sailed to Vinland (most of whom were actually Greenlanders, by the way) may have brought back Native American wives (or, though the article doesn’t say this, slaves).

The question that occurs to me is, aren’t Eskimoes (OK, Inuit; wouldn’t want to offend anybody) related to Native Americans? And haven’t we known for a long time that both the Greenlanders and Icelanders had contact with them?