The culling of the flies

(This is a post about killing flies. If vindictively killing flies invading a domicile makes you squeamish, this would be a good post to skip.)

(Don’t look at me like that, not everybody thinks that all flies deserve to die, die RIGHT NOW, immediately, because, EW, FLIES!…and they are usually very good people and deserve to be warned that the rest of us are going to be high-fiving each other about their demise as if our favorite team had just won the Superbowl or something.)

So, we are once again in a Month of Pestilence™ – between living directly behind the folks with the dog rescue (the poop…good gahd, the POOP!) (seriously, do not go into our backyard when they are doing the scoop-duty [doody?] back there…you will be rendered completely unconscious by the stench…and then you will suffocate, possibly to DEATH, because seriously, that smell is just…wow…) and being adjacent to horse-worthy ranchettes, you can probably imagine the kinds of fly problems we have several times a year.

Yessir, luxury livin’ out here. If it isn’t Fly Season, it’s probably either Fertilizer Season or Plowing Season. Take your pick: Flying vermin, fascinating Eu du Cow Poop aromas, or dust, dust, dust, dust, DUST!

ANYWAY – yeah. The bugs, they are a-breedin’ and a-swarmin’ and every single day I must swat two dozen or more flies, and yet they are still everywhere.

I killed every single fly I could find on my lunch break today, which was – totally not lying – over twenty of them. Went back in the kitchen three hours later? => dozens. DOZENS! of them, swarming up and down the windows, waggling their tongues at me, doing intricate line-dances up and down the countertops, rubbing their filthy little hands together like debt collectors eyeballing a particularly ripe mark…argh!!

Just, ew.

I have a real problem with flies. They gross me out way out of proportion to their actual nastiness, you know? I have less of a problem with, say, horse excrement than I do with the flies that like to congregate on it.

Like, I wouldn’t mind picking up the nice clean horse poop with my bare hands, but omg, no, ew-ew-ew-ew, yuck, grossssssssss, there were FLIES on it!!

I do not claim this is particularly rational of me, or even remotely sane of me for that matter, but, that’s just how I am about flies.

Because, ew.

I’ve tried deputizing Denizens to hunt them after school (they get bored and wander off fast).

I’ve tried training the cats (yeah, worked about as well as you’d expect) (Schilling will literally lie there and pat in the general direction of bugs that are all but dancing on her paws – but will seldom actually get up and go after them.) (And Fleur appears to have zero depth perception or something. Seriously. She will line herself up and wriggle her butt and make all forms of Readiness, and then pounce…three inches off from her target. {face-palm})

We just replaced all the windows – ALL THE WINDOWS – and their screens (still getting in, somehow).

I even tried the poisonous window-stickers, even though it made me kind of anxious to have, you know, insecticide ON my windows. Meh, did almost nothing.

I’ve tried spraying the screens with repellent, which added a fantastic scent to the house and made opening the windows pretty much a nonstarter for a while, but which seemed to do exactly nothing to reduce the infestation.

But then a couple nights ago, I was sitting here trying to work on my computer and being swarmed by everything from silverfish to @^&@ing flies (attracted by the glow from my monitor, naturally – and I just happened to be between them and the light source, awesome…I swear, at one point I was starting to wonder if I shouldn’t be a courteous host and set up little frickin’ picnic tables on my shoulders or something for them), and I said to myself, said I, “Self! That’s it. I am going to find something that will work on these @^*@&ing bugs!”

And that’s how I came to order this little baby: INDOOR bug zapper.

…say hallo to mah leetle friend…!

It’s got a UV light in it that attracts them, and then they hit the wires and zot! – or so they claimed. And I was starting to feel as though they were biting me (they weren’t, it was just that ‘I’m so creeped out that my brain is helpfully supplying me with the sensation that I appear to be so determined to feel’ thing kicking in), so, bam, into the cart, ship it, get it here YESTERDAY, please-n-thank-you.

This afternoon, Captain Adventure skidded sideways into my office to announce that the delivery person had left something on the porch, and there it was. We took it into the kitchen (which is currently pretty dark, because meanwhile in other news it is [checks thermostat] 106 degrees outside [!!!!], so I’ve got all the curtains drawn to keep us from dying of either heat stroke or the electricity bill), set it up, plugged it in…and turned it on.

Less than fifteen seconds later…crack!

We both jumped, shrieked, and giggled.

I felt guilty for giggling, because it seems to me that even if we’re talking about my dreaded enemy, the common housefly, there should be some solemnity involved in their passing.

But in my defense, y’all would have to hear this crack! It’s like a mini lightning bolt from $DEITY, reaching out and smiting the wee sinners as they nefariously buzz to pollute some innocent fruit or other with their nastiness. Even when you know it is going to happen, when you’ve been warned that it will be a loud, sharp cracking noise, it’s still…incredibly startling.

And then…I walked across the room.

The air around me moved, and the flies took to their wings and began that cloud-like swarming they do whenever the air moves, and the next thing we knew it was like $DEITY was makin’ popcorn in there.

It had eliminated eighteen of them in the first ten minutes.

eeeeeeeeeeYES!!

I think this may be the start of a beautiful friendship; I can’t wait to set it up in my office tonight and see if it can’t do something about all the little buggers (ha!) that have been crawling and flying out of the woodwork as soon as the sun sets lately…

Colds and Ceilings

I have a cold. A really nasty one, the kind where symptoms just kind of keep piling up on you. Fever, chills, cement-in-sinuses, coughing so hard you’re a little afraid you’re going to throw up, can’t breathe, wait, how can my nose be RUNNING this much when I’m so STUFFED UP?!, and no-medicine-on-earth-seems-to-do-anything-for-me sort of cold.

This has got to be some kind of record: The Denizens have only been in school for about two weeks, and bam. They brought home the bubonic plague for me to catch. Awesome.

Meanwhile, of course, both work and the construction on the Den continue without the slightest pause. Which is also desperately unfair. I mean, really, there ought to be some kind of law which says that when someone is clearly dying, everything around them should just, you know, stop. As a sign of some respect for their increasingly-delicate condition.

Especially things that involve loud banging noises or asking the dying person whether or not something is on-track for deploy on a specific date.

And man, it should be straight-up illegal to ask The Afflicted about items they’re allegedly supposed to be finishing up by a specific – and all-too-quickly approaching – date while there are loud banging noises going on in the background.

But, alas, the world does not work as it should. So work has this completely irrational idea that I’m going to be, you know, working during my shift (feh!), and that I’m going to be getting things done on time (whatever!) and that I will be maintaining “professional behavior” (pfffft!) and stuff like that.

While there has been much hammering, sawing, banging, thumping, and the occasional whoop of “whoa!” going on in the background.

Meanwhile, I opened my home office door (a.k.a., my bedroom door) Tuesday afternoon at the end of my work day and my house looked absolutely surreal.

The whole house seemed to be swathed in this plastic. Floor to ceiling. Taped down, so, um…question…? How do I get into my KITCHEN…?

It was kind of creepy, actually. Like something out of a slasher film. Brrrr.

But, there has been a lot of progress in four short days. On the outside of the house, we have a new office downstairs, and a bedroom upstairs.

My office has a door out to the garden (squee!), and windows on the other walls looking out into it (double squee!). (It also has a door inside the house – I won’t have to, you know, go outside to get into my office or anything.)

It’s a little hard to envision what it will be like when it’s a house instead of…a garage? or a storage shed? which is kind of how it feels right now.

To get access to the upstairs bedroom, well, we needed a new walkway. This was trickier than we expected, naturally, because it couldn’t go where we had sort of thought it should due to code-stuff and clearance-stuff and load-bearing stuff.

So instead, you come up to the top of the stairs and make a u-turn onto the new walkway. But not right now. It’s missing the railings and such. Really kind of asking for trouble, trying to walk across that right now. (This does not, of course, stop the cats. In fact, they were also undaunted when it was just the support beams. What? I’m just out for a little STROLL, clumsy human…)

That walkway leads to a big new loft area, formerly the vaulted ceiling over the dining room…

…and the new upstairs bedroom is on the other side of that lit-up area. Which is a window. Which is going to be torn out of there pretty soon.

Much as we’d like to think we’re “nearly there” given that we have, you know, walls and floors and stuff, the sad truth is: We’re barely getting started. This is actually the “easy” part – the hard parts are still to come.

Like, it’s a little hard to get the perspective from that picture, but the total clearance where the door to the new bedroom will be is, I think, less than four feet.

Clearly not going to work.

So, the whole roof on that side of the house has to be “lifted” up by several feet.

That’s where I’m pretty sure things are going to suddenly start slowing way down; and of course the “finishing” work is extremely frustrating on that front. It’s like, done, buuuuuuuut, now you’re waiting for somebody to show up with paint, and then there’s all this “OK, so, we did our hour of work and now we have to wait X-long for things to dry or set, so, see ya tomorrow, lady!” stuff…

So I’m trying to enjoy this period of easily-measurable progress while it lasts.

Even if it does involve a rather insane amount of hammering, and sawing, and banging, and crashing, and…

Progress is not for the faint of heart

Today was…noisy.

Because they were doing this to my poor Den.

You know those moments when you look at something that is in-progress and you think to yourself, OMG, wait, this can-NOT be right, time out, let’s think about this…!

I had that moment late this morning, when I was on a call and there was this tremendous whump from the construction area and then I heard something crash in the kitchen.

It took pretty much every last ounce of willpower I had to remain calm, stay with the meeting I was in, and not tear off my headset and go flying downstairs to see what on earth had made that ungodly clatter. (<= this is always a mistake – if I set foot out there, it will take a good half hour before I can get back inside, and, well, I really don’t have an endless supply of extra-long-coffee-break periods in an average day that I can burn on Such Things)

Later, I discovered that it was the kitchen knives, falling off their magnetic holders; apparently, having the other side of the wall they are on, you know, ripped off the house was a little too much vibration for them to maintain a good grip on the knives.

I looked at the knives, and I said to myself, “Right…now, where did I put that old knife block…?”

And then I had one of those little walks down memory lane, remembering that phase Captain Adventure went through some years ago as a toddler, where we could not keep his chubby little mitts off the blasted kitchen knives. He was fascinated by them. I tried putting them into a child-“proof” drawer => he’d have them out in under five seconds flat. I tried “hiding” them in a child-“proof” cupboard => hahahahaha, yeah, how’d THAT work out?!

I tried the top of fridge. I tried keeping them in the den. Eventually, I got that magnetic strip, hung it over the stovetop, which is a terrible place to put your good kitchen knives but as much as he looooooooved to play with my knives (!!!), he was afraid of that stovetop. He wouldn’t go within a foot of it.

Voila. He never went after the knives again. Although he did pitch a few huge temper tantrums about their new location; he’d sit on the floor, tilt his head back and just howl about it, occasionally looking at them out of the corner of his eye with undisguised longing and despair.

And would go absolutely pink and purple with fury if I tried to offer him something like, you know, a spatula, or a toy knife instead. You insult my intelligence, woman! Begone, and take your lousy imitation-of-life with you!

But I digress.

According to theory, all of this stuff – and there’s rather a lot of it, let me tell you – is going to magically become walls…and the first story of our two-story addition will be framed.

You guys have no idea, NO IDEA!, how hard it was not to be a smart-arse about this today. They kept going, “Blah blah blah and then this will be framed…” and I so wanted to say something like, “Gasp! Should I start looking for a good lawyer to get it off with maybe just some community service or something? or is this going to be so thorough a frame-job that it’s just hopeless and the best we can hope for is 30 years in Sing-Sing?!” But I did resist. Because I figured either a) they wouldn’t get it or b) they would get it and be all like “HAHAHAHA…like we haven’t heard that one a few hundred times…today…”

Another thing that took an awful lot of effort from me…well, they needed to make room for what-all they’re doing and their supplies and such-like. So they did this.

I KNOW, RIGHT?! I TOO CAN HARDLY STAND THE HORROR OF THIS…oh…you…don’t see it?

Not at all? Nothing jumping out at you? Like maybe a slight difference in, you know, texture, front v. back parts of this pile…?

AW, C’MON. The back of this pile is just dirt. It’s (some of) the just dirt they dug out so they could pour the concrete slab that is currently mocking my ripped-out outer walls with its pristine newness.

But the front pile, the one they so cavalierly hurled atop the just dirt one they made last week…that…is my garden bed soil.

It is not dirt.

It is a magical blend of just dirt and compost and peat moss and you do not want to know how much time and sweat and tears (OK, fine, in the interest of full disclosure, any actual tears in there were probably caused by my sunscreen dripping [or being wiped] into my eyeballs) went into making it into that frothy confection suitable for growing ruler-straight carrots or big, round-globes onions or, you know, whatever.

Of course, it is also garden soil that isn’t going to have a bed to go into for quite some time; even after they get this first story frame up off the ground, the second story is just going to be rush-delivered right into the same spots.

Still. I keep looking at it, every time I go out there. That is some awfully nice soil, right there, I think to myself.

And then I just kind of look around the yard…surely there must be somewhere out of harms way where I could get, you know, a small-ish new bed built, right?

Good dirt is a terrible thing to waste, after all…

This is not exactly how I envisioned it

YA KNOW…I thought that this period of between-contract-ness would be filled with all sorts of practi-creative endeavors.

Things like, I dunno, posting to this blog more than once a month or so?!

Things like…blowing the dust off my poor, neglected rigid heddle loom and cracking through some of my yarn stash. Dyeing up the t-shirt blanks out in the garage. Starting some good hard soaps curing. Filling the house with potted edible plants (it has always bugged me how we don’t have much greenery in here!). Putting up more recent pictures of the Denizens in the frames scattered around the house. Actual Decorating As Such, in other words.

The clean, folded laundry wouldn’t sit on the dining room table for weeks on end. The kitchen would always be clean. Or in the process of getting that way. I would cure the annual ant invasion before it even got started by keeping the crumbs off the floor. (HAHAHAHAHA, good one!) I would apply some oil to the kitchen cupboards. And shampoo the car’s seats so that I no longer had to drape napkins strategically to prevent getting sticky something all over my work clothes. (Sadly, I am totally not lying right now.)

There would be so many things finished by now. I would be a frickin’ Martha Stewart, with a hefty serving of Awesome Mother on the side and also there would be music and pies would be baked and it would be just so gaw-dam-ed PERFECT around here that we would make headlines around the world.

That was the plan, anyway.

Instead, I’ve been spending my days dealing with other stuff. Job searching. Paperwork. Testing for various job positions. Researching companies I’m planning to interview with so I have at least some idea what they actually do. Doing interviews that seemed to last for hours, for positions that ultimately went nowhere – either because they never called back, or I thought I would find them almost as enjoyable as trying to get sand out of my eyes using a toothpick.

I’ve got something lined up now and am in that holding pattern where everything is racked up and ready to go…but we need somebody at the client to actually sign off on it. {twiddles thumbs} Should happen…any time now…

I’d have to say, though, the one thing that is really eating up my time is all around brushing up on the stuff I haven’t been using lately in SQL Server.

I love my whole industry rather madly, but I have to admit: It’s awfully…big. The sheer volume of stuff I should at least be aware of (if not “expert” in using) is massive. And if I ever get to a point where I start thinking, …yeah…I’ve GOT this…, well, they’ll go and release a new version with a thumping huge list of new features. ARGH!

I had 2000 pretty well down. Then they went to 2005, which is what I’ve been working on the last three years at MegaBank. I’ve gotten most of the new analytic and engine features down now…but, the new stuff in 2008 and 2012 are new pages for me. Dammit.

I don’t think I fully realized when I got into this business that I would never, ever be completely out of school, you know? Every day, there’s something new to learn, some new feature, or some new use for an existing one, being published out there.

It’s a double-edged sword, really. On the one hand, if it wasn’t that way, I’m sure I’d get bored and wander off. That’s kind of how I am: If I’ve “mastered” something, I lose interest in it and want to do something else now.

So something that is constantly shifting and changing, adding new things, getting rid of old things, and evolving…is a good fit for my overall temperament.

But at the same time…gee whiz. I’m probably working more hours now getting caught up on whatever-all else has been going on out there in SQL Server Land while I was playing with “just” this set of features in 2005 than I worked while I was trying to finish up my project at MegaBank.

I want to learn it. I want to keep getting better and better at this. And this is one of the ways I’ll do it – by keeping up as best I can with the new stuff as it comes in, and refusing to cling to my old ways of doing things until the last possible second.

I don’t want to end up somebody for whom “twenty years experience” means “I have experienced the same year twenty times.”

That’s lame.

Still.

At times like these…

…I have to admit…

…I do rather wish these young pups would slow down a little, and quit releasing new things into the world every eight seconds that somebody like me then has to read up on, and puzzle through, and figure out if, and where, and how I can apply them to the sorts of things I’m doing.

Because there is a huge stack of folded laundry on the dining room table right now. And seriously, those car seats…they need shampooing.

…sigh…

This is not how I envisioned this “break” between contracts going down.

Oh well. I guess whining about it doesn’t help much either, does it…also, I think I’m going to take a break from NTILE functions and MERGE statements and take care of that car.

Because it is bugging me, something fierce.

I hope everybody else is having a less dry and pragmatic sort of week…I’m starting to suspect my life ranks pretty high on the “most boring person alive” list right now…

December showers

YA KNOW…have you ever had the feeling that somebody (possibly Coyote, or maybe Loki) is just messin’ with ya?

Wouldn’t put it past either of them, either.

Today has been that kind of day. The kind of day where one damned thing after another has just gone improbably wrong.

The van is making a weird squeaky noise whenever I make a right turn while applying the brakes. The light in the closet won’t work. Again. One of the other fixtures has a burnt out bulb. I have a replacement bulb. But I can’t for the life of me get the damned cover off the damned bulb so I can replace it. ARGH.

The Dyson? Has lost suction. Excuse me, but WHAT?! (Probably an overly packed washable filter. But still. WHAT?!)

The cat pooped in the Man Cave, again. (HAHAHAHAHA! Ahem. I mean, wow, what a drag, huh?)

Then the phone rang and it was Danger Mouse asking if I could drop everything and rush over to bring her six dollars for the Secret Santa shop.

I said no.

An hour later, she called back to say her lungs hurt (???) and could I come get her. Only after I picked her up did I realize I’d been played. Call first with something trivial to confirm that mom is indeed home and can pick you up, then invent good symptoms you haven’t tried before but that someone else has had good luck with, and call back. Genius.

Soon Captain Adventure arrived home and, having earned his Wii, got busy building improbably complicated rollercoaster rides for marbles. Eldest got home. Danger Mouse enjoyed a miraculous recovery. Then she wanted to take a shower, and I said, distractedly because I was still working on that last official work email of the day, “Fine, go for it.”

{send!}, and I turned to dealing with the precarious pile of crap on my desk. About half an hour later, Eldest came up and said, “Uh, mommy? Yeah. The, uh, the toilet? It’s bubbling.”

NOW…I’m picturing, you know, a couple big bubbles. I start to say something like, “Why are you bugging me about bubbles in the toilet?” Because, really?

But she heads me off.

“No, mommy? It’s really bubbling. Like, foaming?”

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!

So I charge off down there and sure enough, the toilet is rabid. It is foaming. It is overflowing. The bubbles, they are legion. It is the single most weird thing I have ever seen a toilet do.

And.
I.
Can’t.
Make.
It.
STOP.

I try the plunger. I turn off the water supply. What the hell did these kids…wait. The…it’s…it’s coming from…wait…now, that just can’t be…

I glanced over into the bathtub beside it.

Foam is surging up out of its drain as well.

Oh…now…that can’t be good…

Now, I am no plumber. But I’m looking at this and I’m thinking that clearly, this isn’t a case of somebody dropping a bath bomb into the toilet. It’s more like…like…somebody is draining a bathtub, and it’s getting down but not out and then it…wait…shower, @*^&@ing SHOWER…!!!!!

So I abandoned the sinking ship downstairs, ran upstairs like I was twenty years younger, and started banging on the bathroom door screaming, “GET OUTTA THE SHOWER! TURN THE WATER OFF, TURN THE DAMNED WATER OFF AND GET OUTTA THAT SHOWER, NOW!!!!!”

Because I am cool and calm and collected at times like these, you see. (Well, and also because Danger Mouse is going, “Whaaaaaat?” in that little reedy-dreamy voice of hers, and the water IS STILL RUNNING!)

Then the bathroom door opens, emitting a tremendous cloud of steam, and I find myself staring at…well.

This is one of those moments where you find yourself really wondering about your offspring.

Because…pee in the toilet.

Sinks slowly, ever-so-slowly, draining an unctuous mixture of mud and silt and debris back down the pipe (awesome, I’m sure that’s helpful).

One of the sinks…had…a…towel…in it…? (what the @*^&@?!)

And, in the tub she was just standing in, a fairly disgusting swirl of thick mud all over the bottom of it. (Eeeeeyeah. I’m thinking it’s a blocked sewer line too. Joy!)

I point all this disaster area out to her, my otherwise intelligent child, and she’s all like, “Oh. Wow. Didn’t notice that. Or that. Or that. Or that either.”

And of course, it was Not Me that did all of it. If I ever catch that little gremlin, I’m gonna string him up, I swear I am…

And then, as I’m just sort of standing there embracing the moment…I realize that it’s almost 7:00, and if I don’t move it I’m going to be late picking up Boo Bug. (Oh yeah…thought there was something missing…)

Naturally, there was some Big Event going on at the school. And I didn’t grab my jacket on my way out the door because I was late and eh, it’s, like, three feet from the van to the center.

Unless of course there’s an Event going on at the school. In that case, you have to park five miles and hoof it in…in the pouring rain…without a jacket…

Ah, December showers. Lovely, icy-cold December showers…they’re so…bracing, aren’t they?!

(I’d ask “what next,” but…I’m scared to…)

Sorry, I’m fresh out of SHAZAM…

I’ve got the “so much to do I just can’t deal so I’m going to sit down and do nothing instead” blues going today. So far today I have cleaned about four square feet of the Den (OK, I’m being modest…it was a small area, sure, but it was a very thorough cleaning that included washing the walls for Pete’s sake, which is not something that is generally on my list of “Must Do” cleaning except that I have these little varmints running around called children and they do things that cause you to suddenly stop in your tracks, peer at the wall like you’ve just seen the image of Christ [or probably Satan, actually, given the kind of reaction one has to what one thinks one is seeing on that wall] on it or something, start to ask, “Whaaaaaaaaat…?” then realize you really do NOT want to know the answer to the question you were about to ask and go find your Murphy’s Oil which has somehow migrated out of the cupboard where it belongs to some random place like under the master bathroom sink – you know, the one room in the house where you would never, ever in a hundred years find yourself needing Murphy’s Oil to clean anything), pulled a few dozen weeds, bought 3 gallons of milk, one bell pepper, a couple packages of lunchmeat that were on extreme sale, five pounds of onions…and a package of onion seeds, a package of bak choy seeds, and a huge amount of dirt.

Which is kind of funny, because part of what I really need to do today is to remove a huge amount of dirt from inside the Den. It’s a fairly impressive disaster zone in here right now.

Bet if I just dumped the contents of the vacuum cleaner cannister into the pots, I could totally plant potatoes with what I’ve already got here in the house.

Oh. And I made this…hmm. What to call it. It’s not a curry, exactly, but it’s kind of…well shoot. It’s…

3 pounds stewing beef, cubed into bite-sized morsels
3 large onions, diced
2 tablespoons minced garlic
2 teaspoons minced ginger
2 tablespoons ground coriander
2 teaspoons ground turmeric
2 bay leaves
1 jalapeno, diced
3 cups coconut milk
2 cups beef stock

And then you sear the meat and dump it into a crockpot, and then you sauté the onions and garlic until they’re nice and sweet, and then you add the ginger, coriander, bay leaves, jalapeno and turmeric and sauté until it’s all aromatic and your husband suddenly finds he has all kinds of stuff he needs to do in the kitchen, then you put that in with the beef, add the coconut milk and beef stock, stir, turn the crockpot on “high” for about four hours or so if it’s a newer one that actually boils stuff, longer if it’s an older one that doesn’t run quite so hot, and then you serve it over rice.

Not very well liked by the kids due to being “too spicy”…which could be remedied by leaving out the jalapeno or substituting a milder chili or even just plain black pepper…but the husband and I are pretty fond of it as is so the kids can just eat some boring old rice or something and serves them right for being such picky eaters.

So there. Nyah.

I still have about 95% of the Den to clean.

And I just really don’t wanna.

I don’t wanna so thoroughly that I can almost work myself up to not caring about the state of things – which are cluttered, dirty, sticky in places, slick in others, dusty in still others, with a solid inch and a half of cat hair on everything (Dharma is shedding big time right now as our temperatures are doing their usual thing where one minute we’re shivering and there’s ice on the rooftops and the next we’re in the 80s by 10:15 in the morning inside the house) and really…kind of disgusting, actually.

And I almost don’t care.

Almost.

So…close…

Oh well. Guess I’d better slouch down there and get busy. If I can just get four more areas cleaned, I’ll have half the Den done…and then I can feel all self-righteous and smug when I refuse to do even one.more.thing all night long.

(Plus I won’t be all pissy about the house being in such a state. I hate doing housework, but I hate having a dirty house even more. It upsets my delicate little nerves something terrible.) (Oh.My.GAH, I have definitely become my own mother…sigh…oh well, there are worse things, I suppose…although I’m still not as put-together as The Lady My Mother always is, and am more regularly seen without makeup than with and tend to color my hair in ways that amuse me rather than ways that necessarily look good, which I think actually causes her physical pain but she’s too classy to say anything…)

Only partly domesticated

I just spent four hours, y’all, cleaning The Middle Twain’s room. (Yeah, I was going to cook today. Didn’t get the all the shopping for it done, realized I had a better chance of being elected Empress of San Francisco than getting both the rest of the shopping and the cooking done, moved on to cleaning instead.) (Besides, next weekend is a three-day for us. MegaBank is taking the Monday off. Usually I hate that, because for me it’s an unpaid day off…but I don’t think I’ll be complaining much this time.)

Anyway, back to the room…daaaaaaaaaang.

SEE, the thing is, cleaning their rooms is actually a Denizen chore. They are expected to keep their debris picked up, the markers off the wall, the dust to a reasonable level, blah blah blah.

And they…well, they sorta…well. Mostly what they do is cram everything into the nearest drawer or bin and call it a day.

Occasionally we go in there and pitch a fit and they make a brief effort to actually clean. The dust flies, a broom is applied, the toys are neatly put away where they belong crammed into the nearest available space and then they proudly yell “DONE!” and get on with their little lives.

But there comes a time – oh yes, there comes a time – when the (alleged) adult(s) need to take a firm hand.

I find this time generally comes when something truly horrible is discovered, like it was this morning when I walked into their room and started squawking about the mess and the trash and the ohmyGAH, is that BIRD SEED?! and the dust and the cat hair and the boogers on the wall and the…wait…is that…mold…?

This was followed by me uttered the most dreaded words heard around here: Go downstairs, get me a BIG trash bag, a Magic Eraser, and my Cleaning Kit…then get OUT.

The kids usually hate it when I clean their room for them, because generally when I’m doing it, it’s because I’ve warned them the requisite three (3) times that if they do not get in there and make a good effort at it, I’m going to do it my way – which involves a shovel, a large trash bag, and Goodwill.

That’s right. I’m that kind of Evil Overlord. If I’ve told you three times to get your crap off the floor, if I’ve given you the fair warning that you’ve got X minutes and if it ain’t done, I’m-a-gonna-do-it-fer-ya…your stuff is gone.

Because obviously, you don’t actually care about it, right? You had (usually) more than an hour to protect the things you wanted to keep – you didn’t bother to do it.

I’m not sure what bothers me more, that they don’t do it, or that they really don’t care when their stuff gets jettisoned. I’d’ve cried for days if my mother had done the kind of purging I do somewhat regularly with these kids.

So when I issued forth the “Bring forth the Royal Cleaning Implements!” commands…the Twain were bothered. They hadn’t been warned! They hadn’t had a chance (which is not true because arguably they are supposed to keep their room neat and tidy at all times)! And! Their room looked like a bomb had gone off in it, with papers and dolls and doll clothes and new Christmas presents and their clothes and hats and who-knew what-all else…and they know how their mother operates.

It’s like I have a sort of seizure and I start tossing things and…well. It’s rarely a happy thing. (I do tend to spare the Really Special Dolls and Blankies, but everything else, no matter how expensive it was, is subject to at least a lengthy time out in the garage, followed by being put not back into their rooms, but into the Mommy Store. You want it back? Fine. Save up your hard-earned Den Dollars and buy it back. And maybe next time you’ll take better care of it blah blah blah something about responsibility whatever and by the way what’s for dinner because we’re staaaaaaaarving….) (It is a bit depressing sometimes, knowing that as I stand around flapping my gums providing Life Lessons for my offspring, what they’re doing is just waiting for me to shut up so they can ask about food.)

But today, my primary focus wasn’t on punishing them for bad tidying habits – it was the mold on their windowsill. It happens every winter, yet every winter it shocks me when this white stuff starts splotching all over the sills. Ew.

Of course, this also means (to me) that the whole room probably could use a really thorough cleaning. In order to do that, it needs a really thorough tidying.

And if I want that done before the mold is walking, talking and asking me for snacks – I’d better just do it myself.

So I got started, and quickly realized that the way things were organized in general was part of the problem. The wrong things were in the wrong places – stuff they used all the time in hard to reach places (hence they would work at it to get them down, but not bother putting them away again) and so forth.

Sooooooooooooooo…I hauled everything out of where it was, did a quick belongs / doesn’t belong / trash / treasure sort, then had sets of completely empty shelves and bins and closets to start over.

Four. Hours. Later…

It’s a very clean room. Everything from the door frames to the floorboards have been not merely dusted, but sanitized. (No. More. Mold. Thank. You.) Furniture has been rearranged. Big desk = gone. Cute small table hand-painted by their extremely talent Auntie = repurposed into there. Corkboard planned. Shoe cubby planned. New organization scheme discussed. Hugs from grateful offspring received. Giggling overheard. Dancing ongoing. (There’s room in there now, you see.)

…back throbbing…irritable attitude setting in…knowledge that I’ve just totally shoveled a walkway in the middle of a massive blizzard refusing to go away…

…temptation to throw myself on the couch in front of the Wii with a beer for the rest of my sorry life getting stronger…

Domestication, I think, is really only skin-deep for me. I’m not exactly Martha Stewart, you know? (I’m not exactly even in the same species as Martha. In point of fact, I think Martha Stewart might actually have a heart attack and die if she ever saw this place. Between our [ahem] eclectic décor and our haphazard cleaning and let us not even mention how seasons come and go around here without much more than an ‘oh look, I think it’s Easter!’, we are probably what she sees in her mind whenever she ponders what hell must look like.)

But at least I can say this: Mold is not permitted to grow on anything in the Den at will.

That’s right. The minute I get around to noticing it, it is gone, baby!

…all sixteen windowsills worth…

SO over it now…

But alas, it is not over me.

Well. Actually, it is over me. Hanging over me. Like the sword of Damocles.

The housework.

The dreaded, flippin’-flamin’ housework.

The laundry, the ironing, the cleaning and scrubbing, the weeding and vacuuming, the dusting (lord, the dusting)…the floors so filthy that the water turns black before I’ve gotten three square feet mopped…

Gah.

Ya know, I’m, like, an artist and some junk?

Uh…housework messes up my chi?

I’m too…transcendent?...for vacuuming?

Sigh.

Y’all know what’s really eating me, right? That’s right. I have had NO time for knitting for, like, THREE DAYS!

Except that I did finish this.



It’s a Christmas stocking! Only Halloween-y!

I know. I’m not sure why either. Except that it tickled me, and also it kept me busy at the fair last weekend – which kept me from getting too antsy about how not-busy I was.

I think my favorite part is this i-cord braid around the top.



I saw something similar someplace on something (I know, I am soooooo specific), and as the whole project I kind of made up as I went along – well, I sort of made up a way to do this i-cord as well: One row of K2tog, yo…second row plain knit…third row K2tog, yo.

Then, make two i-cord braids long enough to lace all the way around the band. Put it through the top one, skip to the kitty-corner bottom one, and back up to the top – skip one hole, put it through the next one. Then do the same thing with the alternate color. Ta-da!

The only thing I’d do differently another time would be to use three colors for this band – so that there’s more contrast between background and braid.

Unfortunately, finishing this didn’t mean I actually had time to sit down and knit anything – I was all done except for grafting the toe, running in ends, and braiding the i-cord through the holes. Which took all of fifteen minutes, and it aggravates me how hard it was to get that fifteen minutes together.

I hate housework. I hate it so much. And I rather resent the way it just keeps needing to be done, no matter how many times you’ve done it in the past. Also the way it punishes you for not doing it by taking three times as long if you’ve given it a miss for a week or two.

Right! Glad we had this little chat! And now, I have to go finish (by which I mean start) cleaning the front room. The husband is having his quartet come here for rehearsal tonight, even though the whole of the Den is pretty much a shameful sight that should be kept completely secret from the world.

GAH!!!!

Like a sign from above

In my mailbox yesterday: “Please fill a bag for a vet!” Your pick-up date is: April 28, 2009.

Which would be next week.

Which would be after the weekend.

Which would be one of those rarest of creatures, a weekend upon which there is nothing already planned.

MWA-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…

I feel a purge coming on…

For those who live around a Meijer

I got a note from Ecostore USA that the founder of the outfit is going to be hanging out at some Meijer stores to talk about their products and hand out free t-shirts to the first twenty-five folks with inquiring minds, and they say there will be ‘entertainment for the kids.’

Cool beans…specifically, he will be here:

4/13 Chicago - McHenry (5-7 PM)
4/18 Detroit - Wixom (5-7 PM)
4/20 Fort Wayne - Illinois Road (5-7 PM)
4/21 Indianapolis - Carmel (5-7 PM)
4/22 Cincinnati - Harrison Road (4-6 PM)
4/23 Grand Rapids - Cascade (2-4 PM)
California – eh, sorry, not on the list (DARN!)

If you haven’t tried their stuff yet…I can personally vouch for their Laundry Liquid and their Pure Oxygen Whitener (think OxyClean).

It might come as a complete surprise that a place called “Ecostore” is all about the ecological responsibility thing. I know! You’d think they come up with something that implied that for a name! But oh well, it is what it is. ANYWAY. Their slogan is “No Nasty Chemicals,” and their products are designed to be easy on your skin and the planet.

Which, of course, means that we all go, “Uhhhhhhhh-huh. Great. Yeah. But, can it get grass stains out of The Boy’s jeans?”

I have to say it has worked just fine on the grass stains and all but the really nasty stains that honestly – I suspect bleach couldn’t budge. Not that I’d use bleach on Captain Adventure’s jeans anyway because duh, that would solve the problem exactly like cutting off your nose will solve a pimple problem.

The second thing most of us will say is, “Fine, but eleven bucks [plus shipping] for slightly less than 34 ounces of detergent? Please. I only pay eight bucks (seven with coupon!) for my super-concentrated All Small & Mighty!”

Hokay…but honestly, this stuff has also passed the economy test. That one $11 bottle is at this point slightly over half used, and has done not only four weeks of my usual ten-to-fourteen super-sized loads of laundry, but has also handled a fair number of off-label trials involving skeins of rotgut yarn and mesh bags. The laundry liquid is really concentrated. I’ve been using roughly two-to-three tablespoons for one of my Super Extra Large Ginormous Front Loader of Doom loads of clothes. A bit less than the label recommends, but then all hard-core cheapskates know about that.

If you don’t know about that – however much detergent you’re using in your dishwasher or washing machine? It’s probably way more than you actually need to use. Invest in a little experimentation to find the point of Just Right - start at a fourth the recommended amount and, if it doesn’t seem to be getting the job done, edge it up until you find the sweet spot. For me, it seems to be about half whatever the label recommends.

But I digress. What I really like about this stuff is the scent: It’s a clear, sharp eucalyptus, brought to you courtesy of pure eucalyptus oil. I haven’t found that the scent lasts all the way through to the dryer (drat!) or my closet (double drat!) (that place could use some freshening up, believe me), but I really like the way that sharp oh my gosh, it just smells so CLEAN in here scent fills the house on laundry day.

The oxygen whitener is just like OxyClean, only without the hype (thank you, Ecostore, for not hiring good old Billy to hawk this stuff for you). I mostly use it with the lights and whites, and to soak the “ruined” clothes before I wash them. It works well on things like food and grass stains, and doesn’t harm the colors as long as you “use as directed.” (Huh? What? Why are you all looking at me like that? I always follow the label instructions…)

Speaking of always following the label instructions, I didn’t do that and also used that regular laundry liquid on my hand-wash clothes and skeins of rotgut yarn. That stuff that I was complaining about a while back, that is way on the rough-n-scratchy side? I’d been washing it in Woolite and vinegar, and then I thought I’d give this stuff a try with it. I’d put about twelve skeins into mesh bags, add about two tablespoons of the laundry liquid and a quarter cup of vinegar in the softener dispenser.

Worked a treat. It came out softer than with the Woolite and vinegar, and for bonus points it smelled a lot less “sheepy.” (This stuff kind of reeks, when it’s right off the cone. I say this as a person who can call picking [ahem] vegetable matter out of a raw fleece “an afternoon pleasantly spent” – this stuff, it hath A Certain Pungency.) (If it didn’t take dye so well, I’d deep six it. But man, does it ever color up purty. Sigh.)

They do have a wool wash, but, well, I didn’t get that. And furthermore, it doesn’t have the eucalyptus oil in it, and it is my firm, emotionally biased, and completely unscientific belief that it is the eucalyptus oil that is helping with the de-stinking and softening process here.

So there you are. A news brief about free t-shirts and kid entertainment, turned into a two page soliloquy about laundry detergent. C’mon! Where else are you going to find that level of entertainment, folks?!

And oh my gawd, would you believe I knew how to spell ‘soliloquy’? I am amazed. I had to look up eucalyptus twice, but soliloquy just flowed right on out.

My brain, she is a strange place.

And now, I must return to the laundry…which multiplies in the dark corners of the Den, growing like the national debt and with just as much likelihood of ever being actually dealt with…

Making it work

I wake up each morning to a to do list that looks like a copy of War and Peace, written long and narrow on a 4x9” pad.

Naturally, I go to bed each night keenly aware that I did not get through “enough” of my list. I spend a lot of time reassuring myself that hey – it is what it is.

You can do what you can do. Rome wasn’t built in a day. It’ll all still be there tomorrow.

And the next day, and the next day, and the next day…

I frequently find myself overwhelmed, in spite of my good intentions to let it be and go with the flow. I find myself angry about my own inability to keep my house clean, my car sparkling, my files organized, my kids neat and tidy (ha! yeah, that right there would probably take three full-time nannies…), my stock portfolio balanced (and makin’ money wouldn’t suck, either) and so forth and so on and on and on.

I’m not a Perfectionist (lord knows), but I do have Standards and I am not happy when I do not keep at least within spitting distance of them.

And I’m not. I’m not at all. I’m going through my days lately feeling as though, every minute of the day, I’m choosing which fingers I’m going to cut off.

It’s not a very fun way to live, you know? And I’m getting preeeeeety stressed out and upset about it. I keep trying to be at peace with It All, and failing, and then getting upset because I’m not able to not be upset, because I can’t find my hakuna matata, because I’m supposed to be more zen than this…ARGH! Why can’t I just Do It All?!

The DailyOm smacked me upside the head today with some observations in Life As It Is: Making Life Work For You : Like the president of a large organization, we must first realize that we cannot do every job ourselves. The first step to sanity is learning how to delegate some of the responsibility to other people, whether by paying someone to clean our house or trading childcare duties with another parent.

Now, there’s nothing here I haven’t read before. Shoot, there’s nothing here I haven’t preached before.

It’s just that, somehow, I don’t expect them to apply to me.

I have some weird notion that I am better, stronger, faster. I’m Fantasy Super Mom, ta-dun-DAH! Watch as I effortlessly go through my day, cape streaming in the breeze! I make it look easy, don’t I?!

Honestly, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m the first to tell anybody else that they need to go easy on themselves, and delegate, get themselves some help, for Pete’s sake!

You can only do what you can do (I tell everybody else). And if you can’t do it, but it needs to be done…you either need to let something else go, or you need help (I go on, wisely).

You need to delegate (I enunciate clearly, possibly tapping a finger meaningfully on the table with each syllable: del{tap}-uh{tap}-gate{tap}).

But for me? Ooooooooh no. Impossible. Quite out of the question. I can totally handle it. I just need to try harder.

Sigh. I really am not that bright, you know?

There is simply no way I can handle all the things I think I can handle. I’d need two, possibly three of me to take care of all the various things I have on my plate.

I need to del{tap}-uh{tap}-gate{tap}.

I’ve been thinking about hiring a maid service for a while now. Whenever I find myself thinking that I need to do something about All This, that’s the one thing that jumps out at me as being the thing that would give me the most bang for my buck. If I could scratch sanitizing three bathrooms, vacuuming five bedrooms, three common areas and a flight of stairs, then washing the five bedrooms floors AND two of those three common areas, and keeping the surface dust under control off my list…well.

I think I might just have a prayer with all that other stuff.

Of course, every time I start thinking about maybe actually picking up the phone and calling around for some quotes, Fantasy Super Mom yells, “NO! We can handle it! You’re being reckless and stupid! Waste of money! If you weren’t so lazy, we could get it all done! LESS BITCHING, MORE DOING!” And she bullies me into taking my hand away from the phone.

So I take one for the team and keep on trying and things fall to the floor and smash into a million pieces but, undaunted!, I keep trying and trying and trying…and failing, and failing, and failing…and getting more and more and more stressed out…more and more and more unhappy…less and less and less at peace with my life…

I keep thinking that something’s gotta give, but refusing to recognize that what has to give is me.

I’ve taken on too damned much, and it is up to me to let some stuff go.

Funny how sometimes, a random email from a service I can’t even remember signing up for will hit you right in the gut and make you sit down and focus on your breathing for a minute.

I’ve got to give up something. I’ve gone over my impossible list a dozen times, arguing with myself about the pros and cons of various options. Fantasy Super Mom keeps insisting that we can do it all! while Dark Me is half-hoping we just go to bed tonight and never wake up because this is hopeless…logic says giving up the fruits of a measly two hours of work each week to a maid service surely trumps giving up ten hours of billable time to clean it ourselves…emotion says that a good wife and mother could so totally make this work, somehow, without having to give up anything…

…but obviously, I can’t make it work and can’t do Everything myself, this is why we’re having this conversation with ourselves, and by the way it is getting creepy the way we’re calling ourselves ‘we’…

From the article again: Accepting the adjustments needed to make our lives work is an essential ingredient to being at peace with our situation.

Hello, is that a Clue Gun you’re holding? :POW!: Right in the kisser!

I don’t have to like it…but I do have to do it. I have to make adjustments, adjustments that will let me feel at peace with the life I’m living. If I don’t…I suspect I’m going to be on the news one of these nights. “Crazy woman runs into oncoming traffic stark-nekkid and screaming, ‘So…much…DUSTING!!!!!!’, film at eleven!”

Once I get over myself and make the adjustment, things will be better.

I just have to let go. Accept that I am not Fantasy Super Mom, and I can’t do Everything.

…admit that I need help…

…paid help…

…to take care of some of the most basic aspects of running a household…

…sigh…

Right. OK. This is me, getting over myself so that I can get back to being myself. I don’t like giving up my delusions of super-hero-ness, but hey. I also don’t like being a stressed out bundle of Crazy.

It’s time to start calling for house cleaning quotes, delegate that vast and unpleasant time-sink off my plate and see if it doesn’t give me some sanity back.

…I wonder if they could start, you know, tonight…

Possibly taking “Organizing” a tad too far

My DailyOM horoscope this morning added to my paranoia about hidden cameras in my house or telepaths eavesdropping on my brain (ha! I can only imagine the damage listening in to my brainwaves would do to a sane person!) by waxing philosophical about me having a need to get my stuff together today.

You may feel driven to spend a portion of your time putting your affairs in order today. This newly developed need to be organized may be a result of recent frustrations surrounding your inability to find the tools or resources you needed to effectively address your obligations. Or you may simply be in a logical mood that enables you to take pleasure in the structured beauty of an uncluttered space, orderly account, or a rationally arranged plan.

There are three muscular, talented carpenter-types in my house today tearing out walls and junk.

Yeah. That’s right. More home improvements.

So. In case you were wondering how well the LBYMs thing has been going? Well enough to have, in the last six months…

…paid off the bathroom remodeling loan
…paid off the car and Homer the Odyssey
…packed away a safety buffer in cash
…lost our minds completely and taken on Yet! Another! remodeling project

The first two things (car and bathroom remodeling loan) were wiped away by our tax refund. Not rebate – refund. Poor accounting on my part led to a pretty massive refund this year. Um, yay?

I am actually more than a little bit annoyed with myself about that. I tend to overwithhold from my W2 jobs to balance out my 1099 miscellaneous and stock market income (such as it is) (no danger THIS year, I fear). Last year, I had adjusted my husband’s withholdings up because we were in AMT territory and also I was making some cash on the side.

Then, I suddenly stopped working in April. Aaaaaaad I never got around to adjusting the withholdings on his paycheck. Sooooo we were paying way too much toward taxes. When I stopped working, we had actually already paid more than we should have paid for the year on our new, not-improved income.

Idiot. I could have really used that money last year, instead of giving Uncle Sam an interest-free loan so we can continue not funding issues here at home while we pour billions into “saving” nations that on the whole would really rather we didn’t. But I’m not bitter…I just digress. Frequently, and rantingly.

ANYWAY.

We were already making really good headway just by paying attention to what we spent on what things and cutting where appropriate (wine? not cutting that budget…Gameboy games the kids play one (1) time and then lose under the bed? Ask Grandma, sweetheart…).

Then we got the rebate and got busy on the e-fund. Then we got another large windfall that I used to pay off Homer the Odyssey and create an Insta-Emergency Fund.

Then right after I got back to work, we got a call from this contractor saying, “Hey, I still have this estimate on my desk – you guys wanna do that, or what?”

We wanna do it. So, here we go. I’m not taking out any new loans for this one (as long as they don’t find that our walls are coated in ectoplasm or that a family of rabid chipmunks has been chewing on the roof support beams for the last eighteen years or something), but I am stealing shamelessly from my emergency fund – not the brightest move in the current economy, but since my current pay will have the money back in there in about six weeks, eh. I’ll take the risk.

(And then a swarm of locusts descended on the Central Valley and ate everything in sight until a bout of insect dysentery caused by their shameless destruction of the remaining tomato crops caused a freak tsunami to swarm up the sloughs and wash away all the levees, resulting in the Entire! Central! Valley! being flooded to a depth of eighteen feet! Who, the public demands, is responsible…?! IT WAS TAMA! Who said, What could possibly go wrong? and drained her emergency fund to within only a few weeks worth of cash!, hence ensuring not only that BOTH of the vehicles they own immediately developed major mechanical issues not covered by warranty BUT ALSO that her water heater would immediately implode AND major physical disaster be wrought upon the entire middle slice of the state of California! LET’S GET HER!!!)

I’m sorry, where was I? Oh yeah. Yet More Remodeling. We are doing two things. In the office, we are tearing out a walk-in closet and replacing it with a custom-built work station. It should almost double the usable space in that room, which is getting more and more important as we are shifting more and more of our working-for-a-living from client sites to our own home office. We’re also customizing the wiring to better suit our needs – we are not your average “oh I have a cute little laptop, it’s GREEN!” users. We need big data channels and room for multiple machines running at once, decent fans to keep it cool and better handling of wires. Not a big job, and I doubt the contractor would have even given us the time of day without the upstairs project.

Up there, we’re replacing a “decorator feature” with something, I dunno, useful.

We have a big old ledge right by the front door. You’re supposed to put fake plants and statues and stuff on it. You know. “Decorator Feature.” I believe they add $20,000 to the cost of your home, on account of because they are Trendy and Some Junk.

What we’ve actually done with it is…{chirp, chirp, chirp}.

Yeah. Nothing. We had my spinning wheel on it for a while to keep it out of the kids’ reach, and we also put this…thing…my husband produced in art class about fifty million years ago on it…and also there was…dust, lots of powdery dust, welcome to the California Delta…and the kids would occasionally hurl toys onto it, and I’ve have to climb over the conflabbed railing to fetch them back and the kids would shriek, “OH MOMMY, BE CAREFUL!” at me and I would get all vertigo-y while simultaneously resisting the urge to jump off the ledge because oddly, I get that urge when I’m up high.

I worry about me sometimes, I really do. I have to assume that normal people do not peer over the railings of bridges and find themselves saying, “Ooooooh! I bet it would feel so awesome to jump off this thing!” and they’re envisioning the wind-in-hair part and the free-falling feeling and it just sounds so awesome, let’s DO IT!!!

Yeah, that first part might be great. It would be the !!!SPLAT!!! at the end that sucks. I’m not into bungee jumping, but parachuting might be in my future someday. Or hang gliding. Oh yeah, I could get into that, I just know I could. If I just had money I was willing to light on fire. If I had money I was willing to just light on fire, well shoot. I could hand it to the hang-glide dude and he could totally like teach me and some junk instead! Burning money would be bad for the environment anyway, right? Toxic fumes released into the air and all…

ANYWAY. (Adderall. Perhaps I needs it.)

In the hallway upstairs, on the other side of the wall behind the ledge, we had built-in cupboards. These cupboards were Where Stuff Went To Die. Pictures, ancient cleaning supplies, a bunch of lightbulbs for fixtures we no longer own. I did use about half of the bottom cupboard frequently – I kept the kids bedding in there. The other half was taken up with other bedding, old sheets I couldn’t bear to throw away and table linens I never use and stuff like that. Feather pillows we can’t use because of allergies, stuff like that.

The burly men are tearing out the cupboards and the walls. They are going to push the wall out to the edge of the ledge, adding about, oh, thirty-forty square feet or so of usable space.

California Closets is going to come back to my house (oh joy!) and custom build a student center there. It’s somewhat of an odd shape, so we’ll need someone who can custom-cut their stuff to fit. There will be cubbies and drawers for art and school supplies, a computer work station, a fairly good-sized indestructible drafting table thing for them to do their gluing and whatnot, and a small entertainment island with a small television for the gaming system I haven’t bought yet because I am cheap an old fuddy-duddy don’t really know if I believe in gaming systems am such a good parent that I would never, ever encourage my child to sit in front of an electronic babysitter for ten @*^&@ing minutes so I can finish just one @*^&@ing email.

Oh, that is so not true. I bribe them with video games all the time, but I pretend it is their idea and that I am just ever so reluctant to let them have it…well, OK…I guess if your room is absolutely spotless and you’ve eaten your carrots…wellllllllll…but just for thirty minutes, and I’m setting the timer right now… {Mommy rushes into the other room and sinks into a chair with a long sigh of r-e-l-i-e-f as the children huddle around the computer managing a pet spa or something equally foo-foo for thirty glorious minutes. Each. BWAHAHAHAHAHA.}

There will also be a largish (well, kid-size-large, anyway) drafting-style table for them to do artwork on, and a computer workstation for homework purposes. Eldest is getting her very own (ancient but functioning) laptop in her room soon, along with a new loft bed – she’ll have her own private quarters for writing and drawing. Because she is a very private person, and also is going to be a Famous Author someday. Famous Authors need peace and quiet and also privacy.

I know how it is, because when I was ten I was also going to be a Famous Author. Or a doctor. Or a veterinarian. Or a white water rafting guide. Or perhaps a fireperson. Not the President of the United States, his job is b-o-r-i-n-g. But maybe I might be in Congress, just for a little while.

Where was I going with this…

Oh yeah. So, I have been on a major organizing bender lately. (Scroll way back up there. It was my horoscope about a need to get my affairs in order that set me off.) Even this latest home improvement spasm is really about organizing. The kids do their artwork on the kitchen table (or floor), and their homework sprawled in chairs all over the house. We’re always wrestling over the computer, with Eldest having reached the point in her school career where papers must be “typed” and researched. Their supplies are all over the house, and we’re constantly tripping over them wherever they’ve decided to set up.

I have been pulling everything out of every nook and cranny of the Den. I have been assessing each thing carefully – sometimes leaving it out for days on end while I ponder whether it Stays or Goes, and where it belongs if it is staying – before putting it away.

My bedroom looks like a storage shed barfed on it. Clothes, linens, crusty bottles of silver polish…it’s whacked.

I have been doing this in a strange kind of mindset, too. I’ve been living like I was dying a lot lately – which I’m not, before anybody gets all concerned. But I just have this feeling like I need to have everything optimized, so that if I weren’t around the Denizens could figure out the systems around here.

Maybe it’s just that whole Getting Back To Work thing. Because let’s face it: Even working from home part-time (yeah, let’s see how long THAT lasts!), I still will have considerably less time to collect scattered things together for their entertainment and edification. I’ll need to be able to put my hands on it immediately – or better yet, be able to tell them how to put their hands on it. No intervention from Mommy required.

Maybe it’s the phase of the moon or some kind of Aquarian biorhythm thing.

I don’t really know. I do know that I need to wrap it up quick – my house really does reflect my brain. With the house in a state of Extreme Muddle, I have even more trouble than usual (Adderall, I’m not kidding, I think I need it) staying focused on anything, and it is killing damn near everything I do.

But of course today…I’m banished from the upstairs while they are creating plumes of toxic dust. Insulation, possibly with rabid chipmunk spit on it, is being pulled out of interior walls – along with eighteen years worth of Valley dust and grime. Ew. OK, I just totally grossed myself out.

So I guess for today I’m going to focus on getting ready for a Big Cooking Day – I want to put about fourteen quick meals into the freezer to cover me on the increasingly-frequent days that I’m just way beyond the whole concept of making dinner by the time the Denizens are demanding same.

Onward and upward, dear friends…

Lest my home be peaceful…

Any time there is any threat to the peace and quiet, the Denizens are happy to go the extra mile to ensure that there shall be no peace, no quiet, no full nights of sleep and absolutely under no circumstances a clean home.

This week, they have saved me from the horrors listed above by getting sick.

It started with Eldest, who woke up in the wee hours of Tuesday morning crying due to a sore throat and mild fever. Motrin was administered, and she spent the next half hour constantly asking me when, exactly it was going to start working.

Then yesterday afternoon, Boo Bug began to complain her throat hurt. She too had a mild fever, and also some stuffed up nose issues. Drat.

This morning, after having gotten up at the usual hour to make breakfast and everything else, I decided to grill Danger Mouse on her overall condition. Of all my children, she is the toughest little cookie, and the one least likely to actually complain if she doesn’t feel well.

“How are you feeling today, honey?” I asked as she brushed her hair. “You OK?”

“Oh, yeah,” she replied. “Except that my throat really hurts when I swallow.” And then she sniffed loudly. Stuffy nose, mild fever, sore throat – yup. She’s staying home from school today, too.

Meanwhile, all week Captain Adventure has been in a marginal state where you look at him hard and wonder…Hmm…is he being a pill because he needs one, or is he just being a pill in general? His speech delay makes this really hard. Most almost-four-year-old children will tell you their woes. “Mommy, my {head, throat, mouth, nose, left big toe} hurts!”

But not Captain Adventure. He just transforms into the Destroyer of Worlds, a state ordinarily only seen when a trip to bed or a ten minute Time Out is appropriate (if I want to punish the boy, all I need to do is put him into his room by himself).

But while in Destroyer of Worlds mode, he does not ‘use his words’ – he just runs, and I do mean runs, from Sin to Sin. Tipping over the piano bench, yanking the runner (and anything on the runner) from the sofa table, pulling all the napkins out of the napkin drawer and doing his impression of a Morris dancer on Beltaine, hitting sisters with toys, refusing to eat anything except plain noodles with butter…oh yes.

He’s a real joy right now.

I take my eyes off him at my gravest peril. (Right now, he is sitting right beside me attempting to disassemble a rather complicated toy. He alternates actually trying to do it intelligently with BANGING IT LOUDLY ON THE FLOOR while singing ‘The Wheels on the Bus’. How’s the work coming? The portfolio rebalancing, the writing, the job proposal and scope of work sitting on my desk waiting to be turned in? JUST FINE THANKS!)

Naturally, because anything else would not be peaceful and/or calming and/or otherwise OK with me, the nice autism specialist is coming to the house TONIGHT to observe him.

TONIGHT. He called last night, to say he was coming…TONIGHT.

“Well, actually, he has a nasty cold right now,” I hedged. Hot carp livers on buttered toast, that’s just not a good time. Did I mention that I too am developing a slight fever and sore throat? Have I? Or that I have not slept more than two hours at a stretch since I got back from Salt Lake due to assorted Noises and Crises in the night?

“That’s OK,” he replied cheerfully. “That won’t impact my testing.”

I hesitated. On the one hand, it really isn’t a good time for Captain Adventure. Or me, for that matter – the house is a shambles and I’ve got a ton of stuff to deal with today, none of it ‘making the house presentable for visitors’. On the other, well. We’ve been waiting FIVE MONTHS to get on this guy’s dance card.

I don’t want to risk having to wait another month.

I don’t want him to see our boy at his worst, and yet, I kind of do. In a perfect world, they would see him at both his best and worst…but this isn’t a perfect world so we have to make do with having professionals witness one or two hour slices of his life and extrapolate whether or not the rest of his life is within however many +/- factors of ‘normal’.

Whatever ‘normal’ may be.

“Wellllll,” I said finally put forth. “See, here’s the thing. On the one hand, you will see his absolute most autistic-like behavior if you come evaluate him right now. When he’s sick or very tired, he does display a lot of the symptoms that made me worry in the first place. But on the other hand, I’m afraid you might not get any of what he can do. I mean, we were playing the Color Game this morning? And he said a blue ball was purple? And I said noooo, it’s BLUE, and then? He threw it at my head. And fell on the ground. And screamed and cried and kicked at me when I tried to comfort him.” {pause} “Which is not really what he’s like, you know? I mean, sometimes, but…uh, well, he’s actually a very sweet, very smart boy, very affectionate and…it’s just, well, he’s sick right now? So he isn’t using his words, and he’s kind of aggressive, and…”

My wise inner voice got back from its potty break and said, That will do, dear. You’d better stop talking now.

Thanks. Thanks a lot.

“I see,” he said. He has that ‘doctor’ voice down pat. ‘…that you are almost undoubtedly completely crazy’ was definitely hanging in the air after his ‘I see’.

In the background as we talked, three girls were screaming at once because one of them had changed the channel without going through proper diplomatic channels. The occasional outburst is perfectly normal. Right now, with all of them a bit under the weather, the outbursts are incessant and particularly loud and shrill.

“Excuse me a second,” I said sweetly. Then I put my thumb over the speak on the phone (the low-tech mute button) and yelled, “KNOCK THAT OFF, I AM ON THE !!!!!!PHONE!!!!!! Eldest! Put it BACK on Spongebob this INSTANT!”

Captain Adventure was running back and forth in the kitchen shaking his head wildly as he went, slamming into the cupboards on one end of the journey, giggling wildly, pausing to wave and shout, “HI MOMMY! CAPTAIN ADVENTURE IS RUNNING!!” before galloping back into the playroom, where he would jump onto the coffee table and wait for someone (all three sisters are Mini Mes on this front) to say, “Be careful, Captain Adventure! Don’t fall!” before jumping off for the return trip.

Ah yes. The joys of Tylenol Flu and Cold medicine. He is completely soused and lovin’ the ride at this point. T-Minus sixty minutes to bedtime, and definitely counting.

“So,” the man probably wondering why he went into this business in the first place said gently. “Tell you what. I’ll be over at five o’clock, OK? If we feel that his cold is interfering with my tests, well, we can reschedule for another time. And I’ll give you my phone number, so if you think he’s just way too sick you can call and cancel. OK? How’s that?”

“Yeah, OK. Great. Thanks. I’m sure it will be fine.”

Something heavy hit the floor. A little voice piped out, “I’m OK!” Captain Adventure began shrieking with laughter. Boo Bug cried out, “It isn’t funny, Captain Adventure!” and he replied, “Oh, DAT FUNNY!” “NO!” “DAT FUNNY!” “NO!” “DAT FUNNY!”

MOMMMMMEEEEEEEEEEE…

T-minus 56 minutes and counting. I hung up the phone (I think I said a polite closure first, but I’m not really sure) and put a bag of popcorn into the microwave. Four little noses began sniffing the air. Dinner being all of ten minutes ago, they were naturally starved. For popcorn.

The still-warm asparagus and pasta? Not so much.

They ate popcorn. I polished off the asparagus. Did you know asparagus is a natural diuretic? Yes, it surely is.

Which is why I had to get up, twice, last night…in spite of all Denizens being tucked snug in their little beds, fast asleep, all night long…

Apparently it is a trend

Stop copying/nagging me, Daily OM!

But we can make certain that our homes truly feel like our sanctuaries by taking the time to tend to them like gardens, which need care in order to offer us the beauty of their blooms. When we take the time to treat our homes like beloved treasures, we can shift their energy from being merely places to being wellsprings for the replenishment of our energy…Organizing and cleaning is a no-cost way to remove chaos from our homes and introduce more calm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m on it, I’m on it…geesh…

Rockin’ along

Well, the living room furniture is ordered and will arrive at some point in the not really near future – the cool thing about custom furniture is that you can pick exactly what fabric and wood and trim and whatnot you want. The downside is, they then have to make it. And they aren’t sitting around reading trashy novels and longing for someone to please order something so they can get to work. You have to get in line and wait your turn.

So, it will probably be February-ish before the new furniture arrives. At which point we will have actual seating in our living room for the first time since the cats ensured the early demise of the furniture we had gotten from my mother-in-law six years ago.

They never came closer to being declawed. I am actually extremely against declawing (the very idea makes me go all squirmy and also makes my toes curl up in empathetic pain), but people – I came within inches of throwing both of those confounded animals into carriers, dragging them to the vet and screaming, “I WANT THOSE CLAWS GONE, DO YOU HEAR ME?! GONE!!!!”

Having hundreds of dollars worth of upholstery ruined by animals who are expressing their displeasure with you for $DEITY only knows what (pissy little brats!) will do that to you. And then they get into your lap and get all snuggly and purr-y and make with the kneading you with the slow-eye-squeeze-of-adoration all lovey-dovey and…I forget, what was I ranting about…?

Stupid cats.

I miss them so much.

In other news, I have just this morning saved myself some furniture-money, which makes me very happy.

The chair I had wanted for our bedroom turned out to be too big for the space (even though I had thought it was about the most petite chair I’d seen in the ‘comfy chair’ category – I mean, if you want to talk glorified dining room chair, well shoot, you’ve got smaller options), for which I was secretly glad. I had begun thinking to myself that while I did really love the chair, I didn’t think I eighteen HUNDRED dollars loved the chair.

I might have $900 loved the chair (which was the price on the chair I sat in) (which was apparently upholstered in plastic supermarket bags or something, because any fabric she showed me added at least $600 to the price and she never did seem able to find something that was comparable to the $900 price on the floor model) (GO FIGURE)…but $1,800 was giving me a severe case of squinchy-up-face.

I mean, it would in any case. That’s a lot of money for a place to put your butt. But, as we are skidding sideways into the end of the project, hey! I bet you guys have never heard this before from somebody who is remodeling any part of their house, even a linen cupboard! It is costing more than we had budgeted!

The kids’ bathroom absolutely killed us dead. That $8,000 is literally $7,500 more than I had budgeted for that space (tile, and paint, that was the extent of it before mold and dry rot happened). New refrigerator? Later. New range? Later. Kitchen island? WAY later. Backyard landscaping? Oh crap. Uh…well, how does…LATER sound?!

We’re in the phase now where every single “oh, and…” item is setting me off like a firehouse bell. My clothes iron broke last week, and the way I flipped out you would have thought it was a $12,000, diamond-encrusted thing of beauty. I have wished an early demise on that iron for years because I want something lighter and with better heat / steam control – but once it actually died (in a glorious deluge of water, from a cracked water tank) and I could honorably go out and buy the $100 model I’ve been wanting…OH, THE DRAMA! THE ANGST! I DON’T WANNA SPENT A HUNNERD BUCKS ON THAT STUPID THING RIGHT NOW!!!

Even things like “honey, I’ve got to go get $40 in brackets for the shelves” can make me start ranting and raving – so when we measured the space and said, ‘Oh, uh, that chair would totally block the bathroom door…’ I said, “OH! DARN THE LUCK! OK, so, thanks for stopping by, we’ll think about this and call you OK! Buh-bye now, buh-bye!”, shoved her out the door and locked it behind her.

Privately, I was thinking that I could simply keep cruising the consignment, thrift and even antique stores until I stumbled across something ‘shabby chic’ to stuff into that corner. And I dragged this old rocking chair of mine up from the playroom purely to see how a chair, any chair, would actually work in this corner and then I decided that, you know what?



I like this chair. I like this chair, in this corner, right here. It is comfy. Oh, maybe someday I’ll buy myself a new glide rocker that “matches”, but for now…it makes me happy. Granted, I’m going to need to do something about a table in here (that folding tray is actually a bit unsteady and awkward to use), but I don’t think I need a new (or new-to-me) chair.

This one will do nicely.

And it isn’t costing me a dime.

It just doesn’t get more perfect than that.

Toilet seat issues

OMG. OK, first, you guys, if you haven’t seen it, go read Stephanie’s account of their new toilet seat.

Go. Go on. I’ll wait…I’ve got four more rows on that Irish Diamond Shawl, I can be kept busy for hours here…

Wow, back so soon? OK, first of all, I about laughed myself out of my chair.

And then I realized that I too have a toilet seat story. It is so profoundly lame and embarrassing that I naturally feel the need to share it right immediately now, with the entire Internet.

Our downstairs bathroom toilet seat developed some marks some years ago. Like, about five years ago. These marks were nasty looking (uh, they looked like poo) and they were in a place you just couldn’t help seeing, right down front.

I put up with them for five years, suffering in silence because, well, I don’t really know why. Perhaps because every time I want something fixed around here, it ends up costing $300 or more.

ANYWAY. I was in Home Depot (not usually a place I hang out much) getting a bunch of other remodeling-related things and I happened to wander past the toilet seats and my eye was caught by the price on the standard toilet seat: $4.97.

Five bucks? FIVE BUCKS?! I have been putting up with not-poo-but-could-play-it-on-TV marks for FIVE YEARS, when I could have spent FIVE BUCKS and made it go away?!?!

Well, we didn’t have that kind of standard toilet seat, we had the longer (but still standard) one which cost a whopping $8.97.

{sarcasm} Ya. Sticker shock. {/sarcasm}

So needless to say I bought the toilet seat and I brought it home and we installed it (by which I mean, I handed it to my husband and said, “Downstairs toilet. Immediately, please.”) and I was thrilled with it.

So thrilled, in fact (LAME ALERT!), that I insisted on not only telling people about it, but showing them the new toilet seat. That’s right! People came to my house for a party, and got the deluxe Toilet Seat Tour, complete with descriptions of the poo-ish-marks and the $3 drama of ‘standard’ v. ‘extra-long’. With four part harmony and extra chorus repeats.

That this was profoundly lame and/or inappropriate behavior did not strike me until long after my victims guests had fled left.

I.
Am.
Such.
A.
Dork.

But! At least I don’t have faux poo on my toilet seats…

Even on Satanday, good things can happen

Well, Satanday was going about as usual, which is to say, badly. I’m picking up the Denizens and damn it, Danger Mouse is AWOL. So I got looking for her, and can’t find her, and now I’m getting worried, so I’m charging around looking for her, and I break a nail on a heavy bathroom door when a hyperactive third grader kicked it open from inside as I was reaching for the door handle.

I have acrylic nails, so breaking one is not as simple as breaking real ones. It takes a lot more to break one, but boy howdy, when you do?

Owies.

So when I got home I went In Search Of…nail clippers. You laugh, but we are still mid-project and something like nail clippers can rank right up there with Atlantis on the findability scale.

While digging in a likely looking backpack, I found…THE CAMERA!!!!

{Happy dance}

SO! The following picture-heavy post is brought to you by Satan, who was trying to ruin my life but failed due to the power of Serendipity.

Now, I have to say right up front: We’re still in progress. It looks like a clutter nightmare right now…more than half of what is currently on these shelves is coming down over the next few days weeks to be replaced with actual books.

That said, here’s the bookcase!



But wait…there’s more! (Note that the bedroom door is actually standing all the way open!)



And my desk:



Oh looky! The Carpet Formerly Known As White is gone! And now we have this!!



Oh, why did the bathroom fixtures need replacing?



And what did we put in? (At ridiculous expense, I might add – turns out that the folks who built this bathroom assumed that their brass-plated fixtures would never in a million years need replacing – we had to cut a hole in the synthetic marble to get at them!) (Also, these “roman style” tub faucets are just plain expensive – ouch!)



Now, this might be a little hard to see…we had the synthetic marble “painted” white. It isn’t paint-paint, but it isn’t anything much hardier either. If you’re sensing a certain level of “eh”, you’re right – I’m not really feeling the love for this refinishing. It feels kind of sub-level to me. But then, we paid about 20% of what we would have paid to replace it soooooo…you get what you pay for. We figure we’ll leave it alone for now and replace it “eventually”. Which may rhyme with “never”, because sometimes I feel like that is how long it will take to pay all this off.



Yes. We’re painting those oak cabinets. I put the unpainted drawers in for contrast – you can see why we’re painting them?! Or maybe not…well, if you were actually standing in front of them, you’d see it. Scarred up, faded in random streaks, the gloss gone in most spots but alas not ALL of them (either way would be fine, but partly one and partly the other was not good).

We replaced the carpet in the bathroom with this tile; I always hated that carpet, and when we pulled it up and found mold under it I felt vindicated for years worth of snarking about it.



I am loving all this; even more, I am loving how it is starting to all come together. Every day, even on the days when it doesn’t feel like it, we’re making progress on All This. This weekend, I finally got my filing system put together, and the stuff that has been needing filing put away.

Where it goes. Where I’ll have a chance (however remote) of finding it again when I need it.

Every day one more box gets unloaded, the contents put not ‘wherever they will fit’ but ‘where they belong’. Soon, the space currently known as The Future Home of a Knitting / Reading / Spinning nook will actually be…home.



I can’t wait.

(p.s., that is not a basket of intestines - it is the crap sliver, which I am using to make yarn-like substance, like this:

Serendipity and Interior Design

I went furniture shopping this weekend. I have now been to so many furniture stores my mind boggles just thinking about it. I have been to stores new, used, consignment, cheap, expensive, going out of business and just starting into business.

My last two stops of the day were a consignment store, and Ethan Allen.

In the consignment store, I found no furniture – but! I did find something else.

So there I was, poking around in search of club chairs and a sofa. And there it was, forlorn in the back of the store, shoved unceremoniously on top of a truly hideous end table.

An antique skein winder.

Have you ever had the feeling that Hands Unseen were guiding you?

Two weekends ago, I took a spinning class at Meridian Jacobs farm. See, twenty years ago I used to spin with a drop spindle…but I never learned to use a wheel. My husband bought me one way back when, and it has been a lovely decorative feature in our various homes since then – but it has never produced actual yarn.

Until a couple weekends ago, when Robin taught me what all those knobs and springs were for, and showed me how to turn sliver into actual yarn.

I think it is a tribute to her skills that I was producing actual yarn by the end of our time together. She is a seriously good teacher, and also a Darned Good Person©. Her weaving is seriously beautiful, too, and now I want to learn to weave.

Where I think I could put a floor loom is beyond me, and also beside the point. I want to make things like the things Robin was producing on her looms, and that’s all the logic I need. I am currently holding myself back only by the thought that really, one new obsession at a time is all I can handle. I’ve got a couple bags of crap sliver to learn with, and then one bag of gorgeous sliver to perfect with, and then I’ve got a few Hefty bags of raw fleece in the garage, which was what drove me to the spinning lessons in the first place. Long story, for another time, but I’m determined to actually make something with that fleece.

ANYWAY.

There it was, a beautiful old skein winder. It measures out to a rather odd 79.5” around (two yards would be 72”, two and a half 90”…I don’t get this, but as I’m not a commercial spinner I’m not going to worry about it), and the clicker gives out a loud and cheerful :click!: every forty revolutions.

It had a tag on it which said: “Spinning Wheel: $99.00 $79.00 $65.00 $45.00”

After I got done snickering about the ‘spinning wheel’ part, I grabbed it, lugged it up to the front, set it down and bellowed, “SOLD!” as I shoved money at the nice lady.

She then got a touch irritated, because after being in her shop for over a year without anybody giving it so much as a single curious glance, almost a dozen people crowded around it while she was filling out the sales receipt going, “Oh, what’s that? A which? What’s it for? You mean it actually DOES something? Isn’t it cute! Oh, how awesome! Do you have any more? Do you get a lot of them? Eek shriek giggle envy oh I just love it!”

After that triumph, I walked next door to Ethan Allen, waving my sock (closest thing to a white flag I could find at the time), shoved my Amex at them and said, “Want sit-on-thingees. You send in truck, charge Amex. Ugh. Wah. OK. Bye bye.”

OK, the conversation was slightly more high level than that, but not by much. Basically, I walked in, looked around, picked out the chair I wanted for my bedroom, and then sobbed hysterically about the insane requirements my husband has for the club chairs downstairs. Leather club chairs, tall ones with robust wings. Built for Mr. 6’4”.

I defy you to find this at IKEA. Or Macy’s. Or Sue’s Furniture Loft. ANYWHERE. We are talking about some very old-school ‘gentleman’s club’ style wing chairs. They just don’t make them like that anymore – everything is very ‘sleek and modern’ right now, and my husband wants a very, extremely, almost down to the precise measurements in centimeters style of chair.

I have looked. I did not find. Until I walked into Ethan Allen, where they said, “Oh yes, certainly we have those, right here! Now, here are approximately 11,000 different kinds of leather – which would you like? With or without nail trim? Do you like lion foot, or plain? And for the sofa, do you want fabric or leather? Reaaaalllllly? Are you suuuuuure? {shaking head at me to indicate correct answer would be ‘no, I’ve changed my mind, please take me by my interior-design-impaired hand and lead me’}”

I have given up, people. I am paying about $500 over my already inflated, “OK, but this is as high as I go and I really mean it!” budget for this furniture – and it is worth it to me. My ‘personal decorator’ Lisa is coming out here week after next to measure the room and check out our (so-called) décor and help us choose fabric and whatnot and to advise us on tables and then she is going to order our furniture and it will be delivered and I will sign the charge slip possibly without even looking at it and next year?

SO going to be a Living Below Your Means: Full Body Contact Sport kind of year.

But that’s OK. I can be frugal in my new bedroom, and hold coupon clipping sessions in my very grown-up living room, and if I want to read a nice book as an alternative to going out on an expensive jaunt to the mall, I can pick one from my own library upstairs.

If I’m not too busy spinning and skeining, anyway.