Housekeeping 10/26/18

(I started this entry on Thursday.)

I don't know where the time goes.  I can't remember much of this week.  B had two appointments in the a.m. and I know I did a fair amount of driving.  But there was nothing really extra.  I did manage to cook dinner most nights but no one is eating it.

Monday morning the paving company came and redid our driveway.  It looks great and no fox poop yet.  We couldn't park on it for 3 days, so that involved parking on the street and walking back and forth which just felt disruptive even though it hardly was.  Hauling groceries that far was a little bit of a task but not too bad.  

We also finally signed the contract with the gardeners who are going to re-landscape the front garden and to put in apple trees and berry bushes and build some raised beds in the back.  I'm so excited about that.  I can't wait until they start.  And I think we are getting our new back fence in 2 weeks as well.

I barely managed to do the bare minimum in any kind of housecleaning this week though.  

I think because the weather turned cold I upped my tea consumption, not really paying attention the fact that I've grown much more sensitive to caffeine.  Now I have two cups of coffee in the a.m. often before 8 a.m. and that's it.  If I drink it any later in the day it effects my sleep.  Well, I found some loose leaf Earl Grey that had gotten lost in the back of the tea cupboard and this week I drank that a couple of times in the afternoon.  Last night I slept horribly.  Woke up at 3 and couldn't get back to sleep.  I felt like a zombie and truly ill.  So I have really taken it easy today.  I asked J to drive B to her math class and he took the dog for a long walk mid-morning.  I did manage to put on a pork roast in the creuset.  I was going to use the slow cooker but it is still holding the remains of a chicken from last week!  I was too tired to clean it.  I did manage to run the dishwasher.  

Pathetic.

B is having a Halloween party tomorrow.  I guess we are going to blitz clean this place tomorrow morning.

Friday:

Got a migraine around 12 midnight, struggled with it all night, was sick as a dog all morning.  However, it finally went away.  So I did help B clean for her Halloween party.  I dejunked a bunch of stuff from the counters.

Having people over is always a good way to get your house cleaned (at least the public portions of it!)

Today is Saturday.  I hope to clean out my mud room today so that I can put a bigger dog crate in it.  Right now we are using Tillie's old crate, but this puppy is growing rapidly and will soon out grow the crate.  He's sort of the on the border of it being too cramped now.  But also he is a jumper.  He jumps on top of the crate and used it to jump over the gate and then tear around the house chewing up as much he could and doing as much damage as possible until we could catch him.  He eats everything so I live in fear that he'll eat some really bad and we'll wind up having to have surgery to free up his blocked intestines.  Yikes!  I don't want that!  He is definitely a high maintenance dog.  So when we get the bigger crate, it needs to live somewhere where he can't also jump on it to get to other things.  The only place I can think of is our mudroom.  It will be a pain to get to that back pantry, but honestly I only use it to store a few things I need a few times a year. 

So on the agenda for today:  clean mudroom and get my hair cut.  I can't stand it anymore.  Now that I'm wearing sweaters with hoods and turtleneck, etc I keep getting huge rat's nests.  Gotta cut it short!

The Moving Finger - Book 39

The Moving Finger is the next Miss Marple mystery by Agatha Christie.  I loved the fact that Miss Marple didn't show up until 70% into the story (by my Kindle's calculation).  I was wondering how Christie was going to continue to knock off people out in the country where Marple lives without things getting too absurd.  This mystery also takes place in the country, but not near where Miss Marple resides.  She gets called in at the end when the vicar's wife in this village decides to contact Miss Marple, who she somehow knows.

The story is told from the point of view of Jerry Burton, a young pilot who survived a terrible plane wreck.  He's out of danger now and just needs six months in a quiet village to convalesce.  So he and his sister, Joanna, rent a cottage in the little village of Lymstock.  Just as they are getting to know their new neighbors, they receive a curious letter, cut from pieces of words from a book.  It says some obscene things that startle them, but then they write it off as some crazy, but probably harmless eccentric in the village.  As they continue to socialize with the villagers though they come to realize that many people are getting these frightening letters.  The tension builds.  Then the wife of the local lawyer is found dead in what is believed to be suicide.  A letter was sent to her claiming the couple's second son was fathered by someone else.  The plot thickens when a week later, the maid in the household is found dead.

There's a lot of personalities and a couple of romantic story lines going on as well.  Miss Marple comes in and cleverly saves the day.

A very satisfying read.  For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks. 

Housekeeping 10/19/18

Sunday, B did a deep clean of the porch.  She must have spent 2.5 hours on it.  She swept, vacuumed, cleaned every bit of pet hair off the couch out there with a lint brush and tape.  She washed down all the surfaces.  She got rid of a lot of odds and ends and junky stuff that had accumulated there.  It looks great!  We still need to really scrub the floor out there.  Huge kudos to B for her hard work!

Monday while I was out, V wiped down all the kitchen counters and vacuumed the family room/kitchen area.  I noticed she also threw away the huge pile of lint on the dryer.  For some reason the little trash can in there disappeared and so people just kept putting the lint on top of the dryer.

Tuesday - nothing!

Wednesday - I vacuumed the stairs (they were in dire, dire need!), the upstairs hall, the boys' bathroom, my master bedroom and my bathroom.

Thursday - All I managed to do wash scrub some sinks and toilets, 3 sinks to be precise, and two toilets. 

I have managed to cook dinner every night this week.  However, people are now so out of the habit of eating here and our evening meals have been so disrupted by evening classes and other evening obligations, that I wound up eating much of the food for dinner and lunch myself.   Monday I defrosted some steaks from the CSA (1 big one and two small).  But only a couple people ate dinner.  Luckily, I realized that as I was frying the steak up, so I only cooked the big one.  The next night I cooked up one of the smaller steaks for R, and the other I also cooked up but I made a stew with it.  I cut it up into bite size pieces and added it to the homemade chicken broth I managed to make from our last chicken meal (can't remember when that was).  I added in a big sweet potato, carrots, celery, onion.  It was delicious but I think I am the only one who actually ate it.  I had it for lunch two days in a row.  Wednesday - I cooked up some CSA ground beef with some sprouted quinoa that I had cooked up also in more chicken broth.  I and B and D enjoyed it.  Thursday I slow cooked a whole chicken in two cans of chopped tomatoes with garlic and roasted peppers.  It was excellent.  I also almost but not quite used up the last of the chicken broth.  Again, myself, B and D ate it.  There's tons left over but usually on Friday I try to go meatless.  So it might be Saturday's lunch.  I'm planning on maybe getting a Tuna sub from Jersey Mike's for dinner (gluten free sub rolls!).  B and I are going to Mount Saint Mary's University for a college visit this afternoon and I predict I will not be up for making any dinner.  R has been in Austin, TX since Wednesday.  Not sure what time he is expected back today, maybe not until night.

Friday housekeeping:  R and my laundry; also napkins, dish rags and towels.  That's all I have planned.  Of course, cleaning the kitchen is an on going task. 

The Body in the Library - Book 38

I've switched from Hercule Poirot to Miss Marple in my quest to read more Agatha Christie.  I like Miss Marple better for some reason.  I didn't think this one, The Body in the Library, was quite as good as Murder in the Vicarage, but it was very good still.   Christie wrote so well and makes everything seem plausible.  Of course, I can never guess who the murderer is.   My husband can figure it out within the first couple of chapters.  He's so smart. 

I won't bother to go into the story line. You probably already know it!

Two thumbs up!  For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

Brunelleschi's Dome - Book 37

I got this book out of the library as an audio to listen to in the car.  A couple weeks ago, one day when I wasn't feeling well, I wound up binge watching this excellent BBC series called Secrets of the Castle.  I highly recommend watching it.  Three academics go to a site in France where they are building a castle using the same techniques from the 12th century.  Very cool.  Even though I am not mechanically minded at all, I found it fascinating to see how they lived back then and how they came up with ways to build such awesome, enormous structures like castles.  A day or two later I was in the library looking for something to listen to while I drive all over kingdom come.  It's so boring to be a chauffeur (for my teens)!  When I saw this book, I thought aha!  It looked like it is along the same lines as Secrets of the Castle.

Well, it was.  It is a well written account of Fillipo Brunelleschi's building of the dome of the great cathedral of Florence.  It gives great glimpses of his character, that of his rivals, and how Florentine Renaissance society worked.   Fascinating stuff!  This kind of book though isn't really a good one to listen to  because so much of it is visual.  I really missed seeing diagrams of what Brunelleschi was designing, etc.  I found myself googling images of ox-hoists and the like.  Also, because I was busy driving while listening sometimes I'd get distracted for a minute or two and I wouldn't be follow what was being said.  It really is a kind of book that deserves attention to detail.

A model of an ox-hoist.

Even though the narrator had a very proper British accent, it grated on my nerves because he read so very dryly and in almost a condescending tone, which I found hard to listen to for long chunks of time.  Usually, I love British readers, but this voice, not so much. 

A worthwhile book!  For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

Children of Monsters - Book 36

I don't know why I suddenly wanted to read this book.  I had been very carefully cocooning myself against all the horrors of the world by reading six D. E. Stevenson books in a row.  But I had seen a review of the book back when it came out and then somehow it popped up on my radar again.  I do sometimes go to National Review to read commentary, though I haven't been going nearly as much as I used to.  I never got into reading Jay Nordlinger who is a contributor there and the author of this book.  Usually I read Jonah Goldberg (who I often agree with or just appreciate his views, but sometimes I think he's completely missed the boat) and David French, who I like a lot except he is way too hawkish on foreign/military stuff.  Anyhoo, I did download this book on my kindle.  I read it in a few days.  It's a weird book.

First of all, Jay Nordlinger writes in a friendly, casual style that really hit me at times as just not the right voice for this kind of material.  Secondly, I found that summarizing the lives of 20 brutal dictators' children was just too big a scope for what the book wanted to be.  I think he could have gone more in depth if he had limited himself.   Trying to follow the different lives of scores and scores of children would have been less confusing and redundant if he'd just picked two, for example, from each region of the globe.  The truth is that brutal dictators, whether they come from the right or the left, act pretty much the same and tend to have the same sorts of issues with their children, or rather their children must grapple with the same sorts of issues.  Most of the children join their fathers in their lives of privilege and oppression.  If they don't out and out join, they at least become apologists for him.  A very few try to distance themselves, Stalin's daughter Svetlana, Castro's daughter, Alina, and Idi Amin's son Jaffer, are the three that stand out as those who realized how evil their father was and tried to live better lives out of his shadow.  I really found these three the most interesting.  If Nordlinger wanted to do more than a superficial survey of the 'children of monsters' he could have taken these three and then contrasted them with three children who completely embraced their father's regime.  I think that would have been a deeper, more interesting and more psychologically illuminating way to approach this subject matter.  He does compare and contrast some, but I kept forgetting who was who in the large glossary of names.

One weird effect this book had was making me slightly less upset at Trump.  Even though I find him repugnant and wish he was not president, even though I hate what he is doing to immigrants, he still is no where in the league of these horrible brutal, power-hungry, bloodthirsty dictators.  If you read the news from day to day on the internet, you can (or at least I can!) get so worked up about everything that it all seems so hopeless and depressing.  This book put things into perspective for me in two ways:  1) we've still got it really good here, in spite of hitting a nadir in political life and 2) diabolical evil is real.  I knew that.  But I live in my own little bubble and so it all seems unreal to me most of the time.  But it isn't.

Even so, while I found the book interesting and a quick read, I also found it fundamentally unsatisfying.

For more book reviews, go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

Housekeeping 10/12/18

Over the summer, I read that Konmari book.  I never ever got off the ground with it at all, except it did inspire me to organize my clothes.  That's as far as I got.  This has proved to be very helpful now that I get up and first thing have to get dressed to take the puppy out.  I really like having my clothes organized.  I don't even turn the lights on.  For the first time in my life, I fold my clothes when I put them in the drawers!  Never say never!  Today I went thrifting for more fall clothes which was fun. But I have to make sure I have places for the new clothes.

I've been so waylaid by pet happenings, my dog and one of the cats dying this summer.  Then dealing with mental health issues and vacation and getting into the new school groove and Skipper the puppy is a complete handful.  But I really want my house to be decluttered.  I can't seem to do it though.  I'm always spinning my wheels.  I never seem to accomplish much.  I'm just going to have to do it like the tortoise instead of the hare.  I have to bit by bit, when I have the opportunity and the energy, de-junk my home.

So, I am starting a new feature where every Friday I'm going to list what I accomplished no matter how little I might have gotten done that week.  Right now my fall schedule is super busy Monday-Wednesday, less so on Thursday and fairly free on Fridays.  That means I think I should grocery shop and do meal planning mostly on Fridays, along with some housework.  Thursday and Saturday can also be housework focus days as well. 

This week:

• I cleaned out the pantry a bit.  Wasn't huge but I did tidy it up and reorganize it a bit.
• I went through a huge stack of old mail and put lots in recycling.  Still have another big box of papers/mail, etc under my desk that needs going through.
• I decluttered a bit of the mantle and top of the old ice box.  We've been putting everything UP out of the puppy's reach which means everything was piled up in those places to the point where they were in danger of creating a landslide.  
• I cleaned up the porch a bit.  Still needs more.  The puppy got into all the gardening stuff and old cat stuff, plus the porch just needs a good scrub down.
• Got a new fridge!  It looks all nice and shiny clean! 
• This fridge is actually a little smaller than the broken one.  I used to have an old earthen jug up on the top which doesn't fit there anymore (the big salad bowl that won't fit in any cabinet has first dibs on that spot), so I am now putting it on top of the old fashioned ice box and am going to use it to hide all the dog toys are all scattered around the family room all the time.  They didn't have a place to live before.
• Got all the cardboard recycling that was building up in my room (from gifts) and in the garage and J took it all to the dump for recycling.  That was a big chore that J, B and S all helped with.  J filled the entire back of his CR-V with it.

The Four Graces - Book 35

The Four Graces is the last in the loosely connected quartet of novels that began with Miss Buncle's Book.  Miss Buncle, now Mrs. Abbott, doesn't even figure in this book.  Instead, while there are a few overlapping characters from the third book, The Two Mrs. Abbotts, we enter the lives of a completely new to us family.  The vicar, Mr. Grace, and his four daughters.  The family is a close-knit and loving one.  But now the four sisters are in their early to mid twenties.  Abbie has already moved to London to work in some sort of secretarial job.  Liz works on the nearby manor farm, owned by Archie Chevis-Cobbe, producing food on the homefront.  Tilly plays the organ for the church services and Sal is the homemaker.  This novel chronicles three people that come into their lives one summer, a soldier, a husband-hunting, manipulative aunt, and an archaeologist professor getting started on a dig of an old Roman fort.

The war is in the background all the time; the times have been hard, but the ordinary, every day lives in the little village go on, having to deal with obnoxious people, jealousy, familial changes, romance and growing up.

I've really been on a D.E. Stevenson jag.  I'm glad she was recommended to me.  She's just the gentle escape I've needed lately. I might take a break from her now for a bit and move on to heavier stuff.  I feel stronger now! 

For more book reviews go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.