This is Belle, aka Bellatrix LeStrangeDog, barn dog extraordinaire. She’s our only truly good dog.

This is Ginny, she’s one of the “Lucky She’s Cute” dogs. She is adorable isn’t she? She’s also a pain in the old lady fanny. She digs cavernous holes, pesters the ponies, barks to hear herself bark and, often escapes the barn so she can come scratch on the windows of the house, at night, when it’s dark, and scare us half to death.

Bedtime, aka Cookie Time, is generally around 10pm. If we dare to watch just one more episode of something, the dachshunds whine all the way through the show and the Kraken Puppy will sit, stare unblinking, and do her best to use The Force. I wish I was kidding.

The drill at night is she has to go outside before bedtime/cookie time. She doesn’t know why she has to do this but it’s the rules, so she runs down the back steps, turns around, runs back up the steps into the house and sits by the cookie box waiting for me to catch up.

Sheldon and Amy, starring in Guardians of the Blanket.

Miss Granger says click here for Mom’s jewelry:

We’ve been working on the Floor part since Thursday. Our “weekends” are my son’s days off which normally fall on Thursdays and Fridays.  I am happy to report that, while there are no real photos to prove it, we have completed the main room. This is an “open floor plan” house and the main room is huge. It is kitchen, dining room, den and entry all in one. It also has become the main section of the Mad Artists Laboratory.  This is where, with the exception of my bed, all the heaviest furniture that rarely gets moved lives.  

Because all that heavy or cumbersome furniture has to get moved to clean under and behind and get those baseboards, it was a good time to tackle one of the side projects on my list. While pulling the large cedar chest away from the wall, I took that opportunity to fill it with my mother’s china.  Our art supplies now have a pretty place to live.

While waiting for the floor to dry and taking a bit of a break from scrubbing, we repaired the broken drawer in the kitchen using wood glue and an improvised clamp made of hay string and a screwdriver.

Today John goes back to work, but I am fully able to vacuum, sweep and mop my bedroom and the two bathrooms. No one is moving that damned bed and I don’t feel the slightest bit guilty about that. No one is going to be hauling the washer and dryer away from the wall to clean under and behind either. Guilt? Not a bit.

The main room looks much fresher and once I de-dog hair and mop my bedroom and bathrooms, they will feel quite fabulous. I really needed to win that lottery so I could hire a maid to come in to dust, vacuum and mop every day. Le sigh.

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As I rolled through the house and made my list this morning what leaps to mind is “Wrecking ball then start from scratch”. Unfortunately, I can’t spend money on so much as a can of paint until after the BIG yearly bills, Homeowners Ins and Property Tax, are paid.  I am thankful my freezer is full.  Over the past 4 years since William passed away, it’s been one huge repair after another and I’m facing at least 3 more of those big repairs this year. I’ll include the big repairs in this list, but for January I can only take care of issues that I already have the supplies for.

We do have a lot of supplies, so I’m grateful for that. When we took over Billiam’s unfinished “To Do” list we needed dry wall compounds, tile, spackling, touch up paint, stain and various tools.  I think, with my son’s help, we can accomplish quite a few tasks while saving bigger things for when I can afford a gallon of paint.

Wheelchairs can take a toll on a house that is not built for wheelchairs. They take up a heckofalot more than 18 inches of space around furniture. Almost everything in this house shows some type of wheelchair damage just because I rather like to turn around on occasion without bashing my knees on something. Also, in William’s final weeks, he was too sick to walk and had to try to learn how to use my power chair.  Learn from my hindsight. If any of you know anyone that uses either a manual or power wheelchair, get lessons in driving them now. There’s a learning curve you do not want to travel in a health crisis. William put several cuts into doors, damaged the bullnose corners between bedroom and bathroom and even poked a doorknob shaped hole in drywall. I’ve done most of the damage on my own over the years just by needing to turn around in tight spots.

Last summer, John and I finally tiled the master bedroom. I’d had to rip up all the carpet in this house when my husband had to have tandem bone marrow transplants in order to have easily sterilized surfaces. The good news was that he never developed any of the infections that plague many people after this procedure. Bad news was that when he recovered, we had to replace flooring.  The master bedroom did not get done before he developed a whole new cancer that took his life.  John and I had never tiled a floor on our own before so this was the scariest project we ever tackled. It took us a good month to complete and was exhausting. The results were terrific, but we did not have the strength and stamina to tile the closets. He’s not going to be thrilled that I’m putting “tile hell” on the list, but he knows it needs to be done.

Mom’s china.  She loved this china. This was the special occasion stuff that was only used at Thanksgiving and Christmas. I inherited it. It’s pretty, I love it, there are lots of memories with it, but it just sits there collecting dust and taking up space that we could currently use for art supplies here in the Mad Artists Laboratory.  I need to store it in my Grandmother’s cedar chest.

Hopefully, this will be the easiest task on the list. For reasons known only to this drawer, the drawer face has come loose on one side.  No, I didn’t run into it with the wheelchair, it’s too high. No clue why this happened, it just did. Further evidence that William was the glue holding the house together.

Other niggling things include straightening up that beautiful patio that has become the playground for the Kraken Puppy, cleaning bird leavings off the front porch and (maybe) finish building the table and chairs I planned to put there, and cleaning out the barn aisle and shed.

Big things on the list that need doing but have to wait include fixing the leaky roof, repainting the great room and kitchen, staining the wood columns (we have the stain so it’s a low cost thing, it’s just really labor intensive and it’s a better project for February or March when we have more time to devote),  building a chest for the chair cushions the Kraken Puppy decided were chew toys, and building wood shelving and work station units in the garage.

There’s a good half a year of work to be done here and I’m tired just thinking about it. Time to hit the Motrin bottle, but I doubt I’ll tackle any of this other than that stupid drawer face today.