Oops

Just a quick note from my favorite Wifi spot, Papa's Ice Cream. We had a wee accident at the farm a couple of days ago and my office has no power. No animals or people (which in our house are pretty much animals too) were harmed in the making of this accident.

I'll be online only sporadically for the next few days.

The lair of the garbage monster

Today for our ~fun~ thing to do we cleaned out part of the garage.  I kept Freudian slipping, too.  "Hey kids, let's get our stuff and go out to the garbage, er, I mean garage ..."  "When we're done in the garbage, er, I mean garage, we can temporarily move all the furniture from downstairs in here until the floors are done."  And so on.

We entered the lair, gloved and hatted, and started picking through.  Very scary stuff.  Broken glass.  Piles of cardboard and papers filled with spiders.  Ancient and chewed rugs and mats.  Broken toys.  Deceased furniture.  Weird, rusted items bent beyond recognition.    

One pickup load  dumped at the transfer station.  Tomorrow the stove and refrigerator, if we're strong enough to move them, will also go along with some junkety junk that's accumulated downstairs.  The rule--if no one would buy it at a garage sale even for a nickel, it goes to the dump.  The cool part of this is not only is the house going to be a fabulous haven over the winter all cleaned out and spiffified, but we'll be able to hold a garage sale (soon I hope!) actually inside the garage.  How weird is that?!

My poor kids, slaving away all weekend.  I'm bribing them and salving my guilt in one brilliant move--chocolate for everyone.

Project news:

Anyone who's local who'd like to learn how to lay tile is welcome to come over and help me.  It's messy and time consuming but easy work.  I'm using big tile so it's not as time consuming as, say, 4" or smaller tiles, and there's no pattern so the cutting is just to meet the dimensions of the room, not to make things pretty.  I'm hoping to get started on tiling, and if I'm quick I'll finish tiling, on Monday.  Really rough guesstimate, it looks like about 3-4 hours of work left to do on the floor and probably another 2-3 hours on edging, which is also tile.

I started on a new short story last night.  I don't get short story ideas very often so I had to jump on it before it went away.  It was very different typing on the laptop in the bedroom rather than in my office, different in a good way.  I felt like a hunter stalking my imaginary prey, on my belly with my shoulders hunched.  Not something I'd want to do for a super long time, but it was fun for an hour.

Cleanup

Since I never have enough to do around here, I decided to help Andrea out by steam cleaning her carpet before her dad installed her brand new bed from IKEA (thanks to the generosity of grandma--yay grandma!) If only I'd known. Well, even if I'd known there would be mold growing on the actual furniture, the result would have been the same. It would have to go. But I wasn't prepared to toss out not just her bed, which we suspected was the source of unkempt smell (it wasn't, surprisingly) but her dresser as well. So off I go to the store, where I bought three each of three sizes of white rubbermaid drawers and a clear bin with a blue lid for her storage needs. I thought she'd be put off by the results when she came home, but she was delighted. Thank goodness, because I don't know how these things got moldy in the first place and plastic is not conducive to mold growth. It might have been a problem with the manufacturing, actually, since her bookshelves and computer desk were fine, but I'll never be sure.

It wasn't fun to spend the money but it was fun to get the storage stuff from Elvis, an old man that used to be a woman, a woman who used to be a man, Lucille Ball, a housewife in pjs and curlers, and other riff raff at the store.

Nano is starting in just over an hour. I was going to write today, but cleaning up around here took all the spunk out of me. I don't think I even have any spit or vinegar left. It isn't just bone-weariness. All that dust and mold cleanup done over the last two days left me snuffly and with a sore throat. The boy is snuffly too. Andrea, however, is blissfully asleep in her new bed, and I'm sure she's very happy that she doesn't have to sleep on the futon upstairs like she did last night. I'd love to be asleep too. Maybe I can arrange for that.