Fall Housecleaning

I have saved up enough money to do essential house repairs like getting it re-wired and finishing off the plumbing I started 8 years and $4,000.00 ago.

Since I began saving to do these repairs, my children have grown up, left home, come back, left again, and one has returned for, apparently, the long haul.  The other has decided I am a free storage unit and shipping receiver while he’s in Iraq.  And with my Mother dying and me storing all of her former belongings that didn’t sell in the estate sale (or that I wanted to keep), my small 900 sf house is packed.

I made my daughter (whose roosting with me) rent a storage unit so we can haul all of this stuff out of here to give us a chance to clean up the whole house and let the contractors in for the repair work.

Once that’s done, we can judiciously bring all of the things back into the house and put them in some sort of order.

To effect this, first we must haul everything out.  My daughter sleeps until 4:00 p.m. – and no, she doesn’t work at night and is in bed well before 2:00 a.m., so one could reasonably expect her to get up to do housework at some reasonable hour like noon.  But no – she has to sleep 14 hours before she even bestirs herself.  With rain predicted for this evening, how much work do you think we’ll actually get done?

While she slept I:  bought her a laundry basket so all her (presumably clean) clothes can be picked up off the floor of 4 rooms, bought a new trash can, bought a dolly to haul the stuff out with, washed dishes, picked up 3 large contractor sized bags of her trash, fed and walked dogs, did some grocery shopping, mowed front and back, edged the front, read and responded to all my email, wrote 2 chapters on my next book, cooked lunch, organized my spice cabinet, let the dogs out to sun for a while, harvested the tomatoes, squash, peppers, onions, potatoes, lettuces, radishes, spinach, beets, strawberries, raspberries, chives, parsley, dill, sage, rosemary, carrots, peas, and cucumbers, put up the veggies, pickled the cukes, beets, and peppers, ran the anti-virus scan on the computer, ordered the updates for Ubuntu, packed up 10 boxes of books, sorted some of the boxes out in the library, cleaned out my car, and baked a strawberry pie.

She is just now looking for something to wear.

Gahhhh!