A day off!

Yesterday I had a day off! No traveling, no work, nothing planned ahead of time (except breakfast at the Original Pancake House with Chris), and neither Rob nor Rick were home until late.

I cleaned like a madwoman. I always feel so much better when I've cleaned up stuff in the house, regardless of whether it was my mess in the first place. The kitchen, one bathroom, one bedroom, and the living room now look GREAT. I even bleached the cloth shower curtain. The family room is improved, too.

I interrupted the work on the family room to run over to Home Depot for lumber. I want to build a couple of shelves for paperback books. 1x6 boards are the perfect size for such a thing. Paperback books are just a few inches deep. The nice folks at HD cut the boards to length for me.

Later that evening I cleaned a sodden mass of leaves out of the hot tub, too. Have to do some experimenting: I now get lots of hives from sitting in there. Truly annoying. So my final accomplishment was a side-by-side test of Caladryl and Sarna for anti-itch. Result: both will take care of these hives, but Caladryl makes clothing and sheets turn pink and Sarna smells bad. Jackie once hissed at me and fled, after sniffing my Sarna-greased fingertips. ;-)

If I had a hammer

Got the lumber for bookshelves yesterday. Now I just have to find a hammer. It is the oddest thing: we can't find diddlysquat in this house these days.

Rob's nice 30" level is missing

Rob's hammer is missing and when he was going to borrow mine I couldn't find mine either

I got sick of looking for my useful-sized Tupperware bowls and finally replaced them

A largish handful of CDs (including most of my Enya, my Carmina Burana, and my Peer Gynt Suites) have migrated to parts unknown

Frustrating. I don't think all of this is just because we're disorganized. Part of it is probably that we've had a lot of work done in the house over the past two years: new roof, new plumbing, new heating, just this week a new garage door. Stuff gets shoved aside rapidly at times like that. Lots of stuff in the garage got displaced when the roof came off! And generic items like hammers could walk away purely by mistake.

Still, some of my need to clean up is driven by a feeling that I just might find a whole lot of this crap some day. I have a mental image of a small nest of CDs awaiting rescue.

Wonder how long I should hold out before I just go buy another @#$! hammer. Probably not long. I really need that bookshelf.