October 4 through 6

[chochiyo_sama]

Monday, October 4

 As soon as I got up this morning, I started working on clutter.  I think if I could just get the clutter under control, the house would not be quite so embarrassing. I folded the last load of laundry, dragged it into the bedroom, and cleaned off all the clutter on the little table next to my recliner.  I also vacuumed the area around the recliner.  It had a lot of cat hair, bits and pieces of random debris, and dead fly carcasses surrounding it.  There are dead flies everywhere.  Ugh.

I called the cable company and asked them to cancel HBO.  It costs me close to $20 a month, and it is nothing that I cannot live without.  They play the same old movies over and over and over again—stuff from the 80s and 90s, mostly—hardly ever something recent.  $20 isn’t a ton of money, but it is better left in my checking account for doll shoes than it is flushed into the abyss for something I almost never watch.

After that I called Jim and Dude’s Plumbing and Heating and asked them for an appointment to winterize my furnace.  I like to have them come every fall before the snow sets in so that I do not have to worry about the furnace going out in the middle of a blizzard—as it has in the past.  The kitchen sink has been draining really slowly too, but the furnace guy does not handle plumbing things.  I also want a guy to come and talk to me about putting a bathtub into the bathroom.  I hate showers.  I prefer a nice long soak in a very hot tub of water.  I do not want those jet things as I think they are kind of gross—sucking the dirty water in and blowing it out again—all I can think of is all the dead skin and other debris that is probably sucked in never to leave again.  Gross.

The appraisal people called me this morning—actually ONE appraisal person called me—to tell me that they would not be coming today.  They will send someone on the 12^th to appraise the house.  This made me happy as it gives me more time to work on getting the house clean and clutter free.  The lady I talked to told me that they do not inspect the level of house work—just the value of the home itself—but I know a clean and neat house makes a better impression.  The breezeway is good right now.  The floor is scrubbed, the litterboxes are clean, and the plants are watered and look good.

Arlen, the contractor stopped today.  He took the downspout that was laying across the concrete patio area off and moved it to the other side of that area.  He agreed that it was not at all acceptable to have that thing blocking the walk way, putting people at risk of tripping and slipping on ice in the winter as well as blocking my garbage and recycling bins from being rolled out to the curb.    So, it will be put back to how it was before—on the wall of the living room at an angle which will end up going under the ramp and draining into the grass.

I talked to him about extending the deck, but he says it is as far out into the lawn as the city will allow because it is apparently all easement from the end of the deck to the street.  In fact, the deck is slightly over into the easement as it is.  This is disappointing, but there is not much I can do about it. 

He did put strips of something on the deck to give it traction so that people will not slip on the ramp when it is wet or snow-covered or icy.  He gave me the final bill for the siding and deck.  It is about $2,000 more than the original estimate due to adding the ramp, leaf guard gutters, and new door bells, house numbers, and light fixtures by the front door, breezeway door, and back door.

It was another gorgeous fall day.  I guess it was foggy early this morning, but the fog had burned off before I got up and got dressed.  All I saw was blue skies and sunshine.

If my house appraises for a significant amount, I am considering borrowing enough to put in the tub and painting the entire inside of my house.  I absolutely despise some of the colors on the inside of my house.  Some are tolerable but I am not crazy about them.  I also plan to get new curtains in the bedroom and the kitchen.  The diarrhea brown curtains made from old shower curtains in the bedroom make me want to hurl every time I go in there—and the old man urine yellow paint in the bedroom (and in the bathroom) do not help the matter either.  I want to put horizontal blinds and lace curtains in the bedroom.  I love lace curtains—especially in a bedroom.  Every room in my house in West Concord had lace curtains in the windows except the bathroom which had white curtains that were embroidered with flowers.  I loved those curtains.  I want to get sometime like that for my kitchen curtains.

 

Tuesday, October 5

Cora is feeling better today.  She quit her job at Casey’s.  I am glad.  She was a dedicated, hard working employee, and they have jerked her around and screwed her over since she started there.  The final straw was when she was so sick and wanted to go home, and the bitch manager yelled at her that she was GOING TO FINISH HER SHIFT and she DIDN’T CARE if she was so dizzy she could barely stand up.  And then, it turned out she was infected with Covid!  So the stupid manager was putting every customer in the place at risk for not letting a visibly very ill employee go home.  I feel like driving over there and slapping the shit out of that asshole.

I texted Cora to see how she was doing, and she replied that she felt better—just very achy and tired with a headache and sore throat.  She thanked me for checking in on her, and I told her to let me know if there was anything she needed or wanted.

Speaking of Covid, my mother got a letter from the clinic telling her that she was on the list for the booster shot at this time.  So, she called in and scheduled an appointment for October 18.  That works for me as I do not have anything scheduled for the 18^th. 

While I was sitting in my recliner today, I had a visitor on my deck—a plump, cheeky squirrel came creeping along the railing, checking everything out.  He was carrying a walnut in his mouth.  I suspect he was looking for a good place to stash it for winter.  He came right up to the picture window, pressed his little paws against the glass, and peered in at me.  I am going to have to see if Lerberg’s carries peanuts in-the-shell, preferably unsalted, so I can leave some out there for him and his friends.

My greatest efforts today went into my bathroom.  I cleaned it within an inch of its life.  I scrubbed every inch of the toilet, vacuumed up all the dead flies and other debris on the floor, scrubbed the bowl of the sink, polished the mirrors on the medicine cabinet, polished the wood on the sink cabinet, put the extra packs of toilet paper into the metal rack that holds the extra supplies and towels and wash clothes, scrubbed the floor, laid out the new rugs, and even scrubbed the toilet brush and plunger receptacles with bleach wipes.  There was an excessive amount of cat hair stuck to those things.  The only thing I did not scrub thoroughly was the shower.  I will do that after my next shower. 

It looks and smells fabulous in there.  Every inch of the bathroom is shining with cleanliness.  Well.  Except the shower.  But the shower curtain hides that.  I need someone who can reach the rings and stand up long enough to take the curtains down to do that for me so I can wash the shower curtain and its liner.  It needs freshening up.

I want to paint the bathroom a pale lilac color.  I think that would be much prettier than the ugly urine yellow they are now.  I also need someone to repair the towel bar which has pulled out of the wall.  I need someone who knows how to do that kind of thing to fix it.  It has been like that since I bought the house nearly five years ago and looks trashy.

 

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

My shoulder and knees hurt throughout the night last night—probably due to all the scrubbing I did in the bathroom yesterday.  So, I took the extra strength arthritis formula Tylenol in the early morning hours and fell back to sleep.  I was totally conked out when my phone rang.  It was Dave from Jim and Dude’s Plumbing and Heating, come to winterize my furnace.  He was in his truck in my driveway.  We did NOT have an appointment.  He just showed up. 

So, I groggily told him I needed ten minutes or so to get dressed.  He said he would run over to Steve’s Meat Market, a local award winning butcher shop which is famous for delicious smoked meats in this area.  I had enough time to get up, test my blood, get dressed, open the breezeway door, and start working in the kitchen.  I had two packages of New York strip steak and a pound of hamburger in the fridge, so I cut up a couple of onions and put them and the steak in the roaster and popped that in the oven.  Then I chopped up another onion and friend the hamburger with it.  I turned the hamburger into a pot of chili.  Dave showed up when I was chopping the onion to bake with the steak.

Dave is a very nice guy.  When I was recovering from the appendix issues, he would hang around for an extra 30-45 minutes and just visit.  He has a very unhealthy daughter who has some sort of lung problems and a hearing impaired three year old granddaughter who was born without one ear drum and the one she does have is about ½ the size it should be.  He loves those two beyond measure and always spends about fifteen minutes showing me pictures of them. 

He had lots of people to deal with today, so he left pretty quickly.  He told me three of the people he works with are out with Covid.  It is hitting this area pretty hard right now.  On that topic—Jack’s Covid test came back negative, so that’s a relief.  Apparently three people at Tammy’s horse barn have the stuff now too.  Most of those idiots up there are trumpers and anti-vaxxers.  One of them brought her covid positive spawn to the horse barn and let him hang out in the lounge area where MY FUTURE CATS are.  I am sure the little bastard probably touched my cats and played with them, and cats CAN get covid.  If he has killed my cats, I will be pissed.  The mother is obviously an idiot.  Why on earth would you bring your spawn to a place where many people gather every day to ride their horses? 

She was so entitled that she brought the plague rat to the barn so she could RIDE HER HORSE.  Never mind that she could infect everyone there.  I do not know if horses can get the virus, but I imagine they can since house cats and various zoo animals are susceptible to it. I am so fucking sick of these loony entitled idiots who care only about themselves and their fun times.

I worked in my kitchen for a good share of the day. I thoroughly swept the kitchen floor and rearranged the water jugs so I could get the waste basket back where it belongs.  There were more dead flies than I could count in the nooks and crannies of the kitchen.  I scrubbed the table down with a bleach wipe to get rid of all the germs from the fly carcasses and moved some canned goods from the table to the lazy susan.  I did a big sink full of dishes, including the roaster from the steaks and the frying pan and dutch oven from the chili. 

I gathered a lot of garbage and recycling and put that in the appropriate places, and I wiped down the root beer and 7-Up bottles and restocked the pop fridge I the kitchen.  The kitchen got really hot due to the oven and two burners on the stove all going.  I was so hot that I was literally dripping sweat.

I put the steak and chili in containers and put them in the fridge.  I ate a little bit of the steak and onions for my lunch with the ready made potato salad that I had bought on Friday from Lerbergs, then I made sure everything was off and headed into the living room to eat a piece of the coffee cake Lily had dropped off for me on Monday.  I intended to go back to the kitchen to clean off and wipe down the counters and scrub the floor, but Lily called and talked for over an hour.  She told me that the insides of her ears were really dry and flaky, so she had put hand lotion in her ears to moisten them up.  I told her that did not sound like a good idea to me—but she had already done it, so who knows. 

Shortly after I hung up from her, my mother called and talked for closer to 2 hours about mostly nothing.  She told me Jack had tested negative for covid, then told me that Joni had been to the clinic in Rochester today—her husband had called out from his school bus driving job to take her because he wanted to go to the store in Rochester…He will end up getting fired from this job too.  School hasn’t even been going two full months and he has already called in several times.  He’s such an idiot.

The doctors discovered that she has three nodules on her thyroid gland that they want to look into.  My mother had to have about half of her thyroid removed several years ago.  I don’t remember why, but it was not cancer.  So now Joni has something going on with her thyroid.  Ugh.

Two of the 10 puppies have been rehomed, but there are still 8 left without homes.  Joni intends to keep “Frankie” who wants to be a house dog.  He is quick to slip in every chance he gets so he can sprawl out on the sofa with the three other house dogs.  So that leaves 7 who desperately need homes before winter.

Tammy and Bert are headed up to the cabin tomorrow to close it up for the winter.  Tammy wants to let the people who keep an eye on it do the closing up, but OCD Bert will not allow it.  He will have to check every window and door 27 times to be sure everything is secure.  Sigh.  They will be coming back either Saturday or Sunday early in the morning. 

My shoulder is killing me right now.  I took a second dose of the super duper Tylenol, but it isn’t touching it.  (I did wait the full 8 hours after the first dose, so I am not killing my liver with it.)  I hope I can sleep tonight.  Even if it is really bad tomorrow, I am still going to scrub the kitchen floor and clean the countertops and, I hope, straighten the contents of the lazy susans.

I’d also like to at least sweep or vacuum the living room and office and pick up a lot of the clutter.  I am planning to be in bed before 11 pm in hopes of getting a good night’s rest. 

Comments

[the_godiva]

LOL. My house is nothing but clutter. I have piles of stuff, piles going up to the attic, piles to sell, and piles of recycling that still have to go out to the bin. Trouble is they only empty the bin every two weeks so getting rid of it is a slow process.

I read the first chapter of the e-book and one of the things mentioned was paper clutter. Like bills and receipts and stuff. That is a big part of my loss of control. I have piles and totes of it that I just pick up and put in them to sort through later but later never seems to come. I don't trust paperless because it is difficult to go back more than a year on some sites. I want the history of my water, electricity and gas bills. I will not throw away any bank statements or credit card bills. Or the mortgage. Not the ATT either. More than once I have had to go back months or every more than a year to find some error or discrepency. The only thing I will toss is the insurance bills. Like the taxes I will keep seven years but I'm sure I have more than that and I need to start going back and shredding the old files to make room for the newer ones.

I did make a start to filing the recipes I've torn from magazines or printed.

I feel like I need life to just slow down a bit to let me get a start but it always seems something comes up. Now that the refrigerator is taken care of it was the Dr., then the IRS. Now it's more Dr shit.

And of course I've signed up for the art class.

The dogs need some exercise and training. I haven't done much in training. The dog park is an afternoon.

But I have made progress. I've spent several evenings consolidating, sorting and organizing the watercolor supplies. (Only now I can't find my main brush case. I just saw it and now I can't find it.) I'm almost ready to start the first exercise. Three weeks late.

I got Freyja's papers in protectors in her designated binder. I think there are more and some I haven't printed. There is one AKC that is still floating around in an envelope.

I need to find the envelope with the letter from the Mortgage company so I can finish the Trust and Will.

I feel like I am drowning in paper.

I'm also wasting time backtracking on stuff ordered by not delivered, stuff delivered that is wrong or damaged, stuff the post office lost, just one thing after another. I spend hours on this crap because other people fuck up.

I still have to send photos of damage for a book to vendor, am waiting for the replacement sz 3 side bags for Diana's harness and the Wisdom Panel kit still has not been scanned by USPS. I mailed it on FRIDAY. Still waiting for shipping info from AKC and a back ordered brush from Ryan's Pets.

I feel like the fast I try to go the farther behind I get.

$2,000 MORE and the deck is LESS than you wanted, and in the wrong place. This is what happens when you don't supervise every day and stop them when they start to deviate from what was agreed upon. It's easier to stop it before it's done wrong than the change it after the fact. And contractor's count on that. The process wears people down and at the end if it's wrong, they count on people just giving up and living with it. And paying more than the original estimate.

You do know that moving the downspout isn't enough. The slope of the gutters has to be reversed to go toward the downspout. Otherwise water will still drain to that corner and then just build up a big ice damn. Then you'll have to pay to have it fixed later.

All of my rooms have mini-blinds with curtains over them because I need black out but don't want heavy drapes. Mini blinds are the easiest way to have light in the day and dark at night. I do have some roller shades as well. Not sure what I'll do when they go as the place I used to get them is no longer there.

You should tell the local paper where Casey's is located how the manager exposed the public to Covid by forcing Cora to finish her shift when she was sick with Covid. Let the bad publicity tank their bottom line.

You should see if you can get a booster as well. When will you be eligible? Or did you get Moderna?

It sounds like the towel bar might have been used as a handicapped grab bar and was pulled out. If they can find the stud, they can move it and anchor it into a stud, then patch the hole. If you're going to paint anyway, best to do that first. Maybe ask when you get the estimate for the tub.

I know cats can get Covid but I don't think any have died from it. Whether they can pass it back to humans, I don't know.

That's like the bitch in our dance group at the Old Globe who brought her infectious daughter one night because she couldn't get a sitter because her daughter was highly infectious with chicken pox. She had to come and dance instead of stay home with her brat like a responsible parent. "I hope everyone has had chicken pox." Well two of us got it, me being one of them and this time around I got scars on my back. People don't understand how dangerous measles and chicken pox can be to an adult.

I don't think the lotion will hurt her but her problem is dried ear wax. She would do better to use ear cleaning fluid. There are kits you can get at the drug store.

Joni's husband probably figures there is such a shortage of everyone that they won't fire him because they need him. He's simply using up all of his sick leave for the year. If it's like here he gets 5 or 10 days per year.

Glad at least Frankie and two of the puppies will have good homes. Well, homes. I still fear for the other seven. I hope Asshole doesn't shoot them. At least take them to a shelter or surrender them to a rescue to give them a chance.

I think you need to learn to scrub left handed for a while.

I still have to bring in the mail, then look for my brush case, then transfer the first exercise to watercolor paper so when I actually find my brush case, I can do the exercise.

[the_godiva]

I found my brush case. In a bag. A few more watercolor things to put in the bins I've organized.