Thoughts

It was a day for cutting out hood & mantles. Got four hoods cut out and five linings - yeah, that was strange but it is how the fabric worked out. I might save the extra lining to use on something for ourselves. These are to give as bribes to mercenaries at Pennsic. They are getting four full Viking era outfits; trous, leg wraps, tunics, and hoods. I don't know how many of them are in their household or how they are going to divide their take. My job is just to make the hood & mantles. It took me a while to cut them out. I had to keep taking a break so my back would stop hurting. I really should invest in a tall table for cutting out fabric.

We went to Target today where I picked up a strange little lidded basket to take to Pennsic. I was going to include a link to it but they don't have it up online, probably because it is in their shelves by the front door, those ones where they stock ever changing impulse-buying items. It is a good size for sunscreen, Motrin, and Tylenol - the stuff we want handy to grab but is so unsightly in the "salon" section of our "medieval" tent. It will be experimental. Bringing a basket is fraught with risk of angering the man who is not careful with items to be loaded and unloaded from our truck. And who hates, absolutely, baskets with rigid handles so "basket" is a dirty word even without handles.

KFC shares a parking lot with our Target so I went wild and got a chicken pot pie. I like them. I know it is very plebian of me but I am okay with that.

Arni was up and in the front yard almost as soon as the sun started to show. He sorted out all of the loose branches from our downed tree and put them in separate piles so the city's garbage service will pick them up. They have rules about the dimensions of what they will haul away. Then he re-piled what is left of the now-firewood. We both had posted a "curb alert" about it being there and one guy came out and hauled away about half of what had been stacked up but he made a mess as he sorted what he wanted. Arni cleaned that up and added to it by slicing parts of the huge trunk off with his new chainsaw. It is hard to tell by looking at the trunk that he'd sliced any of it except that the wood pile which had been about half a cord is now closer to a full cord. And we still have a piece of trunk wood about five feet long and a solid three feet in diameter. He managed to get the last edge of it away from the stump sticking out of the ground - there isn't much sticking up, honestly. It seems to have sheared off very close to the ground. I anticipate that more trunk "shaving" will happen over the next few days.

The last two nights I slept, when I slept, sitting upright in my chair in the living room. Sinuses. Sinuses are evil. On Saturday morning, on top of the face pain and migraine-level headache, my ear canal was so badly clogged that I was weeping from the pain. I could not stand to touch anywhere near the ear or back jaw at all. I would swear that I had a knife stuck into my ear. It came on suddenly, too. My blessed spouse figured out what to do and brought me a hot moist washcloth to hold against my ear, cheek, and nose. That did help. I guess something is actually wrong but I have no idea how any doctor would be convinced that it is important enough to try to find out what it is. I'm accustomed to being blown off when it comes to sinus problems. So for now I'm relying on a regime of Motrin, antihistamines, and decongestants (normally I'd be taking a half dose but full doses for now) along with so much fluid intake that my name should be changed to "Mississippi". I hope that a few days of pill and liquid pushing will encourage whatever is clogged to clear itself out.

Bah! Spring is a pain!

Friday I had an eye exam and ordered new glasses and will be getting them in a few weeks. My prescription is "oh-you-are-so-so-blind", so the glasses have to be made in a lab somewhere in Denver. Trifocals, astigmatism, and the beginning of cataracts make lens grinding a challenge. The cataracts are a new development but do not require surgery yet and he says they may not ever. When I was a kid I was told that I read too much and "you will overstrain your eyes and damage them, and you'll go blind when you get older!" But I'd also been raised believing my medical condition would kill me before age 40 so I was pretty flippant about anything having to do with old age. Why worry about what you'll never see, right? I read by moonlight, under blankets with a flashlight, read constantly every day and night for hours and hours on end, especially when trying to get to the end of a story. I refused to wear my glasses (got teased too much for being a girl with glasses), read books with teeny tiny print, and I remember reading for so long that my eyes couldn't focus anymore and would cross so I'd shut one eye so I could see the letters on the page with no blurring. I also stared directly into the sun more than once or twice. These are all mistakes I guarded our children from now that I am a living example of what not to do.

So the new glasses are comfortable, half-frames, and designed by Armani. Ohhhhh.... that is about as close to haute ton as I shall ever be. The tops have almost exactly the same curve as my eyebrows. I do like that.

The doc checked out the diabetic risks on my eyes - no problems there at all. Those are more frightening to me than the stuff mentioned above. Glaucoma, retinal myopathy, macular degeneration, blindness due to elevated pressure in the eye - those are all risks for a diabetic. Scary, huh?

I'm working on downsizing our possessions some more. The kitchen is going through changes. We bought new flatware and will be donating away all of the mis-matched spoons, forks, and knives we currently are using. Our new set serves 12 people which should last us for the rest of our lives. And we will be losing our huge collection of plastic lidded containers this week and replacing them with a new matched set of nesting ones. Part of the "plastic problem" comes from sandwich making, odd as that sounds. The better tasting sliced meats come in resealable plastic containers, which we save since they are not recyclable. So we try to use them up until they don't seal any longer. They come in two handy sizes, too. But my man LOVES sandwiches. Loves them. I think he averages two meals a day from them. That means that we go through a lot of meat packages over the course of a year. Even holiday giveaways can't really dent our container collection. I'm going to have to take a good look at what is in the deli section to find a more affordable but earth-friendly supply. It is too bad that buying sliced meats directly from the deli is more expensive than we can manage. We have a ton of Tupperware containers. I started buying them in 1977 so you can imagine what I've stockpiled. But I don't really cook like I once did, and don't store the amount of ingredients that I once relied on. I've held on to the containers because they are Tupperware and Tupperware is expensive. I need to let that attitude go and clean the excess out of our shelves.

After flatware, storage containers, and pots & pans to follow will come - - - mugs and cups. I'm not looking forward to that. That is going to hurt and require patience and resolve. How do we collect so many of them? I think we have three cupboard shelves of "regular" mugs, then another of just Arni's travel mugs, and then yet another shelf of SCA-use cups too!

On Friday I woke up at 6:15 to a grey day - only, well, I didn't know it was 'day'. I had slept so hard that when I woke up to the overcast light I thought the sun was setting and I'd slept all through the day and Bossman had gotten home while I was still abed. I shamefacedly made my way into the kitchen and was sitting at the table glumly contemplating what that meant for the chances of getting any sleep that night when Bossman came into the room and asked me why I was so down. Then he reached for his denture case. I asked him what he was doing, and he replied that he was getting ready for work as he does every morning. Oh dear. He got a huge laugh out of my bewilderment. I shook off my dazzlement enough to quickly dress and drive him to work, giving me the car for the day, then called our youngest to see if he'd worked overnight. And that resulted in a lovely breakfast with my son followed by a trip to the DMV to procure a new ID card for him. He refuses to get a driver's license for some odd reason, even in this city-transportation benighted area, but after he'd been mugged he had no ID at all and had been putting off the (dreaded) trip to the s-l-o-w DMV office ever since. With the presidential election season creeping near his need for one was becoming dire. It turned out to be a quick trip - only around an hour. But with the time it took to find all of his paperwork beforehand it was nearly lunchtime when we walked out and his father, having a short day, was ready to come home. So we fetched him for lunch and then dropped our boy/man off for his bedtime while us older folks drove off for fun.

By which I mean that we gassed up the car and then braved the Sprint store to get a new phone for the Bossman. His was so old they didn't even accept it for a trade-in. Somehow along the way I got a new phone also, thanks to the BOGO deal they had going, and a free Samsung tablet E for the man, too. And we came out of it with our monthly bill lower than it was when we walked in. I'm a little confused about how that all happened - especially since we, the two of us, have a third cell phone line now, but there we go. They used my husband's old phone for the new line's number and handed it back to him. I guess we needed a 'new' line in order to get the BOGO deal. I haven't checked to see how long we have to keep it activated. Both of us are now working on learning the ins and outs of our phones' operating systems. We moved away from Samsung models to the newest LG. It is a big phone and barely fits in my pocket. It does NOT fit in there when I have it in its (also freely given before I could say "I don't want that, actually") waterproof case. Apparently with it in that I can take a bath with the phone or take it swimming and use it as a camera. Okay, sure. So there are two cases for mine now - one for everyday which I bought at the mall (a vivid blue case which looks nothing like my husband's previously matching one) and one water-, earthquake-, drop- proof case for Pennsic use. It will be in a pouch then, tucked inside a knitted bag*. We both went to bed early that night. Evidently the process of phone acquisition is exhausting.

Saturday morning started with the uncomfortable awareness that I'd contracted another UTI and off to the Urgent Care clinic I went. I loaded up my sewing equipment before I left the house and after an exam, lab test, and prescription stop I was on my way to a "Sew-appaloosa" at a local library. One of the chatelaines in our barony had reserved the space for the pre-Pennsic panic stitching frenzy. Only about six of us showed up but we got a great deal done and left contented. I worked on creating a groundcloth for our pavilion. There doesn't seem to be a local source for 16x16 canvas tarps but we'd found a 12x16 last year while setting up for service week and made do with it and two 8x8s. Friday morning I bought another 16x12, and that night tore out all of the hemming on both of them, then laid them out on the floor at the library to double-check their measurements. A little cutting and stitching later has gained us a 17x18 groundcloth... yeah, I know, not "16x16" but my beloved husband insists that it be larger than the tent's actual interior footprint. I don't know why. I suspect I'll be making it smaller after we try out his suggested size this year. I've one edge hemmed and tomorrow I'll finish the other three. Today has been 'lazy day' and all we've done is visited Long John Silver's for dinner and then lolled in front of the television to catch up on episodes of the BBC's "Endeavor". And maybe a couple of other shows too; "Houdini & Doyle" and "Royal Pain".

Tomorrow, or rather later today, we'll host a traditional bar-b-que party and cards.


*Why do I need to carry my phone at Pennsic? Because only one of my department heads has a phone assigned to them. We need our phone to communicate with each other. I anticipate that it will feel very weird next year to not need to carry the thing around with me.

Rain. Yes, we've been getting spitting rain with occasional full-out storms for the last 24 hours. Even though there have been moments of breakthrough sunshine too. Today's forecast is for rain all day; and also tomorrow, and then next day, and then on Sunday or Monday Hurricane Joaquin is likely to brush through (or by). If 'through' as predicted, the eye will pass directly over our city. That should be fun. Luckily for us we are not too worried about flooding on our property. We're just high enough that the water has never reached above our porch, so our car can be backed up to the garage door (what, "in the garage"? You jest. That is Bossman's woodworking shop.) and it will be high enough to only get the tires wet. The street will flood well - I've seen neighbors boating on our street during previous storms, and our wonderful willow tree will continue getting pruned by nature. Last night's winds have already knocked down a lot of vulnerable branches. But willows thrive on annual pruning. They must have been designed for stormy areas.

"French Toast Panic" has already set in. Or so I've been told. I haven't gone to the store to witness it myself, being busy doing other things like sewing, driving Uber (ubering?), and working on the reservation list for Atlantia's Coronation. Which event, by the way, our local group is hosting at a Boy Scout reservation... this Saturday. I expect the decision about cancelling or not to be made on Friday. Until then we likely won't have enough information about which way the storm is going to swing.

Administratively this won't be the burden it would normally be as our Exchequer has been on the road for weeks and all of the reservation cheques and cash are in my hands. Or rather, all but about 6 reservations, those being the ones I was able to pass on to him at the first of this month. So should the event be cancelled, most likely the cheques-writers will be zen about me just ripping up their cheques (I can send photos!) while the cash-givers are thankfully local.

But our feast cook is going to need folks to buy up her supplies. And man, that is going to be a circus since she is NOT local to any of us.

In other news, we may be facing putting down our cat, Humilty. Her behavior has grown increasingly erratic and odd, and she has begun to miss the litter box more often than hit it. Scrubbing the bathroom floor twice a day or more often is becoming habitual. This afternoon we added up years and realized that she is a little over 13 years old, which is pretty ancient for a Manx. And after doing an internet search we are beginning to believe that senility has crept in. Otherwise she seems healthy. Barring her refusal to groom herself which is going to necessitate a furball-clipping tomorrow evening. Neither of us are really looking forward to that chore! Humility does not appreciate our grooming attempts. Or anyone else's either. She is a cantankerous loner who does not need physical contact with anyone or thing and is quite clear about it. But every once in a while she will allow us to pet her head and scratch her ears so we've learned to have one person do that while holding her while the other of us gets busy with the scissors and de-matting tools. We generally only can do one side at a time. The other side has to wait until she's forgiven us and forgotten everything except the ear scritches.

That is an over-six foot tall mass of icicle in our holly bush by the front door (if a holly is now over 8 feet tall, but still trimmed into a rectangular shape with a flat top, is it a bush or has it graduated to 'tree'?). There is a corner made by our roof gutters where the short side of our porch roof meets the front of the house, and no matter how clean the gutters are water likes to drip from the cut part of the trimmed-and-merged corner. Which, over the course of this week's snow and daily sun-melt, has created this chunk of ice. It is about three feet thick at its thickest point. We don't dare try to break it away from the plant for fear of damaging the limbs its gotten itself entwined with. If I had a blow-dryer for my hair, I'd try melting the ice but I haven't owned one of those for years.

Hopefully we will remember this and sometime after the spring rains we can use a sealant to coat the line of the merged edges so no more water can drip from it. It's never been a problem in the past, being too far from the front door for the occasional drip to bother us as we come in and out.

My goodness, I'm so far behind on reading LiveJournal that I am currently reading posts from a week ago. I feel a bit silly making comments but I'm going to anyway.

We've had a week of 'house woe'. We had planned on attempting to finish the main bathroom last weekend but budgetary pinching couldn't overcome current bills so the project has been put off. Darn it. That same problem has made it clear that we won't be buying a new tent for Pennsic and will have to use the same three-for-us arrangement as we did in the past. I view this with a jaundiced eye since neither one of us are going to be physically fit enough to set up or tear down without becoming overly hot and winded (exhausted). I fear the teardown the most. And, we now have two 'so-so' tents, since friends helping us tear down at War of the Wings ignored our instructions and managed to rip the canvas of my wall tent right along the ridgepole area. I've mended it - hopefully it won't leak. Arni's 10x14 is so old that we fear ripping each time it goes up. I've been telling myself 'this is the last year' for two years now. So I approach the idea of camping with a touch of dread.

Then inspiration struck. We have friends who are not in the SCA any longer and they want to sell their oval tent. (I think it is an 18' oval, but Bossman believes it is longer.) I contacted them to ask if we could borrow their tent for Pennsic and sell it for them there - the selling of used tents is a looked-for occurrence and most folks understand that the tent will be available at the end of the event. That would work perfectly. They said they love the idea, so we're set. One tent. Yay!

But then house-woes hit again. In small scale, thank goodness. Our garbage disposal developed a leak. Actually, the discharge line came completely off of the unit so that is more than a mere 'leak'. Currently I have our camping dish pan in the sink to use for dishwashing and to stave off any accidental spillage. After a lot of cussing (during attempted repairs) and disagreement (post attempted repair), Bossman has concurred that a replacement unit must be purchased. He begrudges the cost, you see, since medical bills are eating our funds. We have fabulous health and co-pay insurances, but they require that the billing facility (the hospitals and doctor's offices) actually follow the rules and submit correctly. Often they do not and send the bills late to us - usually as unexplained charges with vague dates. For example, I just received a bill for services rendered in October of 2013... just the bill and that date. There is no way for me to reconcile that with our insurance so we're stuck paying it. The downside to our fabulous plan is that it is administered online, for the most part. There is a local 'office' but we cannot call them or make an appointment to see them. I'm not really sure what they are there for, to tell you the truth. Being a government program (for dependants and retirees of the military), we just have to deal with however they choose to set things up. ARG.

I should get back to my housework. Oh! One last thing to write about - last week we found a card in our mailbox that had obviously been placed there by hand (no street addresses on it). It was addressed just to us by first names and the message inside had been carefully typewritten and taped to the card. It said that we had enough to worry about with the health challenges we were facing without having to deal with bills too, and there was a $100 bill folded inside. I have no idea who gave it to us but it was a gift that stunned me. And yeah, I cried a bit. Right now the card is hanging on our refrigerator so we can see it everyday. But I think the cash may be buying a new garbage disposal.

I've a sewing project just started. I shouldn't have it as I've got two already entrain but the need is there. Currently our newest day-trip cooler is naked - naked I tell you - with no wardrobe. Bright plastic blue naked. I've cut out a short cover of lovely-patterned gold, rust, and black upholstery fabric to drape slightly over the top with a lighter-weight solid gold brocade skirting. We hit JoAnn's Fabrics for upholstery braiding to cover the edge of the top... oh my. The twisted rope for edging the braid wasn't too expensive but the tassels to hang from the bottom! $29.99 a yard! Which we didn't notice until they were ringing up my two yards. I nearly swooned. For a cooler-cover! The salesclerk used her discount card to bring the price down a bit. Or rather, a lot. We'll be treasuring that cover, I can tell you. The braided tassel trim, btw, looks like the trim seen here: http://foreverdecorating.blogspot.com/2011/10/little-toile-stool-funny-ad.html . As you'd guess, knowing me, there will be no plaid involved in our project. But it should look very luxurious hanging across the gold skirting with the Ottoman patterned top spread above it. Maybe I should take a picture of our 'little boudoir stool" when I'm done with it. (That is what it will look like. Or a Victorian's interpretation of a 'medieval' table skirted so one is not forced to view the table's "limbs".)

There is a cleaning service for cancer patients that has agreed to come to the house and clean once a month for four months. They should be contacting me in a few days to make the actual arrangements. I am so relieved. Physically I am too weak to keep things up as I ought and right now so is Bossman. The dust level is growing. If all they do is simply vacuum and dust, I will rain blessings upon them. I can keep sinks and other porcelain facilities clean - I bought the 'make it easy' tools for those - but it would be sweet to have the shower really scrubbed rather than just rubbed down with a scrubbing bubbles and the long-handled hard sponge thingy I have. That works 'okay' but not 'great'. Mostly, though, I really, really, want the bookshelves (four walls worth, from floor to ceiling, in two rooms and the hallway) dusted. Clean.

In related news, my oncologist has taken me off of the Gleevec earlier than we had planned. It is only seven weeks early but I'm so grateful for it. I should be sleeping better in a few days and able to stand for longer periods shortly after that. And the nausea is due to stop, oh, tomorrow, probably. Maybe the next day. By Friday when Bossman goes in for his second chemo, I should be better rested and less emotionally fragile. The stress has been building too much for me to cope with, stupidly. Tears come too easily over minor things.

( I'm such a wuss. )

Yesterday my husband spontaneously mentioned how much he loves the thickness of the limbs/leaves of our willow tree. This storm season, with its dearth of storms (knock wood!) has allowed the willow to just be peerlessly beautiful. I can't believe it is ten years old now. The trunk is fatter than I am.

Over Pennsic, our Youngest transplanted my little violet plant (Viola odorata rosina <-see what they did there?) because it was dying. I had to walk him through the process over the phone, at near midnight when he was at the house. He sheltered the newly-resituated plant against the willow tree's truck, where it would be safe from the winds and get 'just enough' sunlight in the summer heat. It has bounced back beautifully. But I am still somewhat wistful about it - it has never bloomed, ever, in the four years or so I've had it. It now is darkly green and healthy but still... no flowers.

My days (and nights) have been given over to rolling lumpia, washing dishes from rolling lumpia, shopping for more supplies for rolling lumpia, or chopping ingredients for lumpia. We've hosted two 'rolling parties', with another one tonight and two more to come, and then, I swear, I shall be done with that until after Atlantia Coronation (Oct 5th), which is where we shall be serving all of it. I hope. It is a fundraiser lunch for our barony so we can get a new pavilion. Originally, I was only going to serve freshly-fried ones of four different kinds of meat, but after mentioning a remark made in my journal by loosecanon, the Sunday Rolling Party started riffing on "other ways we can play with fillings". Since we're not even trying to pretend like this is a medievally correct food, the floodgates opened. We tried bananas (not impressed, too bland), then apples. Oh, the apples were a success, especially with a nice (okay, it was based on a medieval recipe) blend of spices which even included a pinch of white pepper. Those were marvellous! After that we had to try other additives, so now we've got apple & raisin, and apple w/raisins & walnuts, as well as apples with caramel chips - those made two people with wildly differing preferences in desserts actually crossed their eyes as they ate them. And then we took peaches (too bland by themselves) and added walnuts to them, which now tastes as though we used a lokim recipe for the filling. We are planning on trying some frozen (fresh) mixed berries with white chocolate, and one of the RollerBabes bought all the ingredients to attempt 'pizza' lumpia, which idea does not thrill me but what the heck, she'll have fun and someone will surely eat them.


In other news, my leg is healing. It still looks incredibly nasty and feels like I've melting plastic stuck to my shin, but it is obvious from our once-a-day pictures that the wound is beginning to close and the areas around the wound are becoming less and less inflamed. Tomorrow I go in for more prednisone shots. Ugh.

Countdown: 217 days to a Gleevec-free life.

4:30 in the morning.
I should be working on heraldry stuff but my reaction to the GD'ed Fracking Cat who sprayed our doors and house corners last night is still causing me trouble. I have a very strong reaction to the smell, very close to one needing an epi pen. I took meds for it and even managed to go outside and sprayed down the areas with some handy 'animal odour remover' stuff so I just have to wait the reaction out. My eyes sting like Hades, though.

But for now I'm too miserable to think. What I should do is colour in more of the submissions. On Wednesday I travelled south to a group in North Carolina, met up with Bambi there, and we did an extensive heraldic intervention for the group... lots of submissions were hammered out and their baron and baroness can start to rest easier about the awards they've been giving. But it was a long night and only one page of each submission was coloured in, and three of them weren't even drawn up. They're approved by the group, though, and of the ones that were drawn up, each had one page coloured so I could scan them in for OSCAR when I got home.

That is, until I got home and realised that the Letter of Intent wasn't done, the April 1 letter hadn't been started because none of the 'submissions' were actually sent to me (I found them in the archives of the discussion group) and it needed to be finished too... so I've been a tad busy. That works out very nicely for the two heralds who sent me late submissions that would normally be waiting for next month's letter. Can you say, "squeak"? I knew you could.

I learned from Bambi-conversation that I have been an 'interim' submission herald and that it is expected that I won't seek a second gig at the job. Damn. I was having fun, especially now that I'm catching on to it all well enough to not drown. (Not to mention that my approval rate on submissions has been about 85%, which puts me squarely in a "B" grade - not great, but certainly not bad!) Luckily my boss called me this evening and I asked her about it. She was surprised - she doesn't want me to step aside when my warrant runs out. Good. As long as Laurel doesn't have a problem with me, I'm staying in. We need a couple more years of training and practise before there is going to be another herald willing and able to take over the job (I'm excepting Bambi, who could do the job but really shouldn't.) We need to create a solid pool of qualified heralds in the Kingdom. And besides that, it is my firm belief that one of the foremost duties of an office-holder is to train at least one replacement - and I haven't quite achieved that yet. Although I have a few likely candidates in mind if I can give them another year or so to get comfortable with their knowledge base.

I'm getting the kingdom files this weekend. Can you imagine? I have been doing this job for about a year and a half and now I'm getting the records... I expect that part of this month will be spent reshuffling the folders I have in temporary storage into their permanent home, and toting up how many binders I wasted as duplicates. Hopefully I can flip those inside out and reuse them.

We had to get rid of three bookcases to make room for the files... Bossman and I sorted through books and offloaded about 200 titles to Goodwill. Wow. Most of them were things that no one will really have any use for; two sets of encyclopaedias (our Britannicas were over 35 years old!), Time-Life sets on home repair and other subjects (remember the era of "pay $14.95 monthly for each book in the set"?)... predominately subjects too easily found on the Internet nowadays. And a huge load of hardback novels that we both have in electronic form now. And boy, did I rediscover my Craft library. ("Craft" as in "Wiccan/Pagan and comparative religion studies.) Some of the titles made me smile - "Magical Rites from the Crystal Well", "Drawing Down the Moon" (which had photos in it of people I later recognised from my SCA kingdom, once I became a member, which made me grin), the writings of Marion Weinstein, and a book by the firebrand Leo Martello - who most modern Wiccans have never heard of. As well as a couple of books that I bought just because their authors cited me in their work. Ah, the old days, when we had to sneak into little side bookstores and buy our books by special order, delivered wrapped in brown paper so the titles would not shock the other customers or get us lynched. How things have changed. I'd forgotten about them in amongst the more recent titles.

Today was just another standard housewifey-day. I'm fighting off a cold (again, or probably 'still') so it was taken up by a large amount of sleeping - and stoking the fires, I swear! I ate around 2300 calories of food in 24 hours, about 1000 more than I normally would. And right now, at 2:00am, I am fighting the urge to go find something to eat.

Weird, that.

Our attic-bound heating unit has been making an odd noise since it was turned on last week, an intermittant low growling when the motor is running. Last week was the coldest of the season, so we put off calling a repairman until today, when the weather is wonderfully mild and the repair guy wouldn't be freezing off his fingertips up there. He arrived this morning as I was yawning my way through a fight with Morpheus (I won! I lasted until the guy left!) and Bossman had already cleared a space in the garage to reach the attic hatch. (Someday we're going to do something about that very inconvienient hatch opening. Like install a pull-down ladder-hatch in our hallway or something.) It appears that the motor was fine. He suggested that we might want to watch the capacitor, as it was testing out less strong than it should but was still within specs. Barely. As it is at least as old as our mortgage (over 20 years), I asked him to replace it. The weird thrumming noise? A metal cover whose screws had come slightly loose next to the air intake. Three twists of his wrist and the noise was gone. The whole system got a thumb's up from him and he nixed my idea of maybe having a vent cleaning - said it didn't look bad at all, barely dirty, and would be a waste of our money unless we were highly allergic or something. Pretty cool, that. Who knew? In a house of books, books, books, craft projects, pets, and camping equipment being brought in and out, I had expected more dirt in our vents. He attributed the cleanliness to the "top line filters you've been using in the air intake'. The only downer of the visit was the cost - but it had a silver lining too, as a normal one-shot visit costs about the same as a yearly maintanance contract and they'd thought that when I had said, "It's probably normal upkeep stuff", the receptionist marked the visit as a maintanance one. I was happy to agree to that idea! So next sping, when we're getting ready for hot weather again, they'll come out 'for free' and recharge the coolant system and all of that. Plus, they offer discounts on replacement equipment to their contract-holders (which was handy for the capacitor purchase.) Nonetheless, it was no an inexpensive call... which I had not budgeted for.

I found a wonderful flooring company nearby and am actually excited about dragging Bossman there to shop for the new bathroom floors. That, we have budgeted for, and I am really looking forward to getting the two rooms back into shape. The next step is to replace wallboard - I won't be much use to the Bossman for that, but I can do the spackling afterwards and help with the sanding. Once that is done, the floors go in and then it is paint time & followed by 'install the new fixtures' time. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. YAY!

Well now, was that boring enough for you? And here you thought LiveJournal was more interesting than FaceBook!

We're not going to make it to Holiday Faire this weekend (see heater-repair story above). That does give us a weekend to work on the house, though. Assuming that Bossman agrees, since he's stuck doing most of the heavy work.

The untimely demise of my Nook has been driving me crazy. I'm currently re-reading old series of paperback novels, but doncha know, each story brings to mind a scene from a book that is lodged in my Nook. ARG! I really hope that I get a replacement one for my birthday. Really hope. Really. I want this one: Nook 6 Simple Touch eReader with Glowlight 2GB. I prefer my magizines to be paper ones and don't surf the web on my ereader - I'd rather be able to read it while in strong sunlight, to tell you the truth, than to have all the fancy bells and whistles yet not be able to use it except in dim (relatively) light. And this new model has a built-in lighting bar, which I highly approve of! The only concern I have is getting some of the stories not purchased via Barnes and Noble transferred to the new e-reader. I don't know how to do that since they are not currently in my home computer's Nook storage area. It didn't occur to me when I was turning them into pdf's and transferring them to the Nook that I ought to ensure that a copy of them stayed in my computer, too. "Copy", not "transfer". Lesson learned.

In health news - results of my latest blood test indicate that my LDL levels is well within normal and glucose levels are pretty darned good too. (6.0 acl, and an average of 124g) so if I keep up the weight loss and figure out a way to exercise daily, I should be kicking auxillary meds to the side by next year.