around the house
Nomad
Our cat, the youngest, likes to drag her bed here and there.
Cleaning
It's been entirely too long. Our kitchen floor is a complete mess, and I'm itching to rip it out and replace it with anything at all. But I'm also itching to rip out the cabinets and basically everything else in the whole room and redo it all, so for now, I wait.
And we scrub it in a serious way every now and then.
Work and Play
No Power
No power yesterday just as we were getting ready to head out...
Guest
He was hanging in a web spun between the handrails on our deck, an enormous guest whose body was probably two inches long, the span of his legs much longer still. He was impressive size, impressive color — and probably impressive eater as well. I didn’t know what kind of spider it was; I doubted it was dangerous, for only black widows and brown recluses are spiders of venomous note around here, and this fellow clearly wasn’t either. Still, a bite would probably be painful, especially for a child. So I did the logical: I gently knocked the web down, then pushed it off the deck.
Will he return tomorrow?
The Girl’s New Room
It's been over a month in the making, this project. The Boy got his own room, using left-overs from L's room, but the Girl got new everything. New paint, new furniture, new decor. New everything. And now, it's finally -- finally -- finished.
Flood 2014
The Boy woke up this morning at four. Well, that's what time it was when I finally looked at the clock. We finally got him calmed back down, we were back in bed, and the thought occurred to me: "It's still raining." It had gushed all day, with enough of a deluge in the morning that the drainage creek at the back of our backyard had overrun its banks again. Not nearly as badly as last year, but still a substantial amount of water.
"There goes our mulch," I said, but it miraculously survived.
The basement was another story. It has flooded before, but K and I were hopeful, with all the dry weather we'd been having, that we wouldn't have that problem. At four, I thought, "Better go check the basement."
Probably three inches of water in the storage room. The crawl space was worse.
Lowes opens at six; I was there shortly after six. By around six forty, the newly-purchased pump, which pumps up to twenty-six gallons a minute, was at work.
Two hours later, it was still sending water gushing out.
Another hour later, it was a trickle but still going. So if we had an average of ten gallons of water a minute (a very conservative estimate, I think), that would be 600 gallons of water an hour. At three hours, that would be close to two thousand gallons. Is that possible? Two thousand gallons in the crawl space alone? It doesn't seem possible.
But after looking at what happened in Amherstburg, Ontario, I realize how fortunate we were.
Waiting Surprise
A silly idea I had, probably born of exhaustion and paint fumes. I did it after L went to bed, and K and I have decided not to say a word about it. We’ll just see when she notices it.
Transformations
The Girl likes blue. When we told her that we would be moving her into the computer room, which is just a touch smaller than her room, she was distraught — until we told her we would repaint it and she could choose the color.
Monday we worked on the trim. Yesterday, I roughed in the walls, painting the edges so I could attack it today with just a roller.
Of course there was a temptation, and I did succumb to said temptation…