A Room of One's Own

...two and a half years later.....

Since last I posted, I went back to work in corporate America, something that I once swore I would never do; Future Vet finished his undergraduate degree, got accepted to vet school, and moved to Cornutopia; and Sports Nut finished his degree and has (so far) failed to find paying work.

There have been a lot of comings and goings and just moving people around to better fit their lives now into the spaces in our house. Which has led to major chaos because the offspring who moved out had STUFF they didn't want to take with them, and the offspring who stayed have STUFF they don't particularly want or need in their new rooms. So all this STUFF got piled up in the living room, which had been my office, and I became a floater. Have laptop, will travel from dining room to family room to bedroom.

I decided I wanted some space of my own again. So this weekend we cleared everything out of the living room.

Except the books, two cat trees, and the printer table.

I won't bother to illustrate the current state of the family room or dining room (or hallways, for that matter) because anyone who has followed this blog or been in our house can picture all too well the piles of boxes and other STUFF.

To summarize, I am back to decrapification. Once a week, probably on Sunday, I will share my progress and the strange and wonderful things I find while going through this latest round of boxes and piles. I already have four big garbage bags full of what seems to be twin-size bedding. We haven't owned a twin-size bed since before we moved to Dodge. (Though, to be fair, most of this was purchased for dormitory beds.) I think we can dispense with the twin bedding at this point.

The short-term goal is to gain a space that, if not exactly private, at least will be my own. The long-term goal is still to get the hell out of Dodge.

Call Me Sisyphus

So many people have hit me upside the head and told me to resume this blog that I guess I'd better....

When last I posted, we were about done with the painting and stuff upstairs and the Wizard and I were about to move back up to our original bedroom. Part of fixing the upstairs bedroom for occupation was doing some tile work in the bathroom. As long as the tile guys were in the house, we thought it might finally be time to install a backsplash in the kitchen. After all, we replaced the kitchen in 2008, before I started this blog. Here's a before picture:

And after:

You'll notice that we had to change the cat to match the new decor. And apparently these two cats have different tastes in liquor. Harley likes a nice white wine (moscato, if I'm not mistaken); Canti goes for the hard stuff -- rum. And maybe a little Sabra.


I also set up the former middle bedroom downstairs as an office. Or as an animal amusement room. It is a room with a view of a bird feeder.

And a comfy couch for watching television or just, y'know, hanging out with friends.

I have to give up this space whenever Future Vet comes in for a visit, but it's still nice to have a room of my own with a door that slams shuts, for a change. Other winter projects were the inevitable New Year's Day spread:

And cloning black cats:

Okay, okay. I know that these two cats are not identical. Puck -- on the left -- has a pointier face and a longer tail. Moony -- on the right -- is a tad more compact as well as having a rounder face. But it's uncanny how much Moony has grown to look like Puck. In some respects, they even behave in a similar way. But if a black cat comes up to sit on my chest and nuzzle my hair, it's always Puck. If a black cat takes one look at a human and runs in the other direction, it's usually Moony.


We also undertook one much less pleasant enterprise. We fostered another litter of kittens and lost them all to the horrible disease of panleukopenia. We loved you for the short time we had you Chaos, Havoc, Mayhem, and Gennie (aka Intransigence) -- the Four Kittens of the Apocalypse.

And now it's back to the grind. I went out to the garage and up to the Wizard's office yesterday and took some pictures.

I feel like I've been here before. Multiple times. I repeat, call me Sisyphus.

For the past week or so, I've been going through boxes and boxes of old snap shots. Looking at pictures taken in our previous house (when the offspring were younger), I am convinced that our decorating style was Early, Middle, and Late Clutter. Except for one rather astonishing picture of the garage at our previous house, in which the garage is neatly arranged and a vast expanse of floor is visible. I'll scan it in and upload it ... just as soon as I find it again ... I know it's here somewhere....

I've been pulling empty cardboard boxes and empty Tidy-Cat litter buckets out of the garage all morning. The Tidy-Cat buckets were listed on Freecycle and will be picked up over the next couple of days. The boxes will be collapsed and either stored or recycled.

And we're back.

Step One Completed, I Guess

This morning the Wizard flew off to do wizardly things, but the Drama Queen and Media Guy didn't have to go in to work today. So I put them to work at home instead. And here's what we did:

We repaired and cleaned bookcases, rolled out the rug, brought in the television set that's been out on the balcony during the wind and rain -- and made sure it worked, brought in the chairs that had also been out on the balcony during the wind and rain and covered them with freshly-washed (and only mildly stained) slipcovers, and so on and so forth. Obviously those bookcases are still missing a few shelves -- not to mention books and other stuff -- but this at least feels like progress.

Another view, with cats:

The cats have been very interested in this entire process, especially now that furniture has made a reappearance. We had 7 or 8 bookcases strewn about the room and the cats decided they were a maze for them to attack each other -- and us -- in and around. The screen behind the chairs has been knocked over several times by curious cats. If that doesn't stop, we may have to rethink the room divider.

The lighting inspectors also made a thorough examination:

The Work Continues

Sports Nut and I are almost done painting upstairs. This is a Good Thing because the Wizard returns home tomorrow night and has expressed a desire an interest in painting the trim. Better him than me, that's all I can say. We've done one round of touch-up and I'll do another tonight. Tomorrow will be devoted to clean-up so that the Wizard can work over the weekend. Also so that my brother, who thoughtfully called me today to remind me that he's going to spend some time with us this weekend since he's in Dodge for a conference, will have a place to sleep.

So here's the state of things as of the end of the day yesterday. It doesn't look significantly different today, so why bother with two sets of shots?

View 1 -- The closet doors, seen lying on the floor and leaning against a door, are also painted.

View 2 -- More of the same.

View 3 -- Nothing much to see, apart from the tail end of a cat.

View 4 -- Sports Nuts paints inside the closet.

And today, a bonus view!

The bathroom painting in progress.

Thanks to the painting project, little else has happened this week. Though an odd thing did take place the other night while I was watching television.

Yuki decided to join Hershey in his bed. As you can see, Hershey wasn't too sure about this. Not that sharing the dog beds isn't a common occurrence in this household.

Kaylee and Harley sharing Yuki's old bed.

Canti and Sweet-pea sharing Hershey's old bed.

The cats also like to consider the dog crates their territory.

Occasionally, they do share with the dogs.

But the dogs sharing a crate or a bed is pretty unusual. Looking around the living room, we quickly discovered the cause.

As the cat showed no inclination to cede Yuki's bed to her, Yuki decided to join Hershey in his big new bed. Despite Hershey's initial reluctance, the two of them eventually settled down.

Though it looks like Yuki, who is about half Hershey's size, is taking up way more than her fair share of Hershey's bed.

Something to Fill The Time

So much has happened since I was keeping up with this blog more regularly. First, Media Guy graduated from college and moved back into the house. Then the young friend for whom I made the Chocolate Dinner because she was Moving to Delaware (and thus getting out of Dodge), decided to move back to Dodge and needed a temporary place to stay -- as did her guy, her daughter, their cats, their dogs, and their ferret. So all of them moved into the house. Then Future Vet rescued a litter of feral kittens and couldn't keep them in the house he is renting while at school, so -- of course -- they moved into the house.Trust me, you do NOT want to know what the creature count was in our house over the summer.

Considering that the Wizard has been spending most of his time on the road and that my knees have been hurting quite a lot and that there is a lot more room in the master bedroom upstairs, we did a room shuffle which put the Wizard and me into the downstairs master bedroom and our house guests (family of 3 and assorted beasties) into the master bedroom upstairs. Now that our guests have found employment and moved into a house of their own, we had to make a decision about moving back upstairs.

As usual, I was happy with the idea of another round of Musical Bedrooms and staying downstairs. We would have gained the small bedroom that connects to the downstairs master, but ended up with considerably less space overall. So I agreed to move back upstairs.

After three months of occupancy by 3 people, 2 cats, 2 dogs, and a ferret, the upstairs master needed some major cleaning. And once we moved everything out of the room so that we could clean the carpet, we took a good look at the walls and decided that maybe we should paint them. And while we were doing that, we could finally paint the upstairs bathroom that we had redone in oh, 2009.

Today we got started on the painting. Four views, before and after:

Well, no, we aren't done yet. But we got a fair amount of painting done today and since Sports Nuts is out of school this semester, we have lots of time this week to finish up. We're painting the walls green because green is the Wizard's favorite color. But he's not here to make a decision on the bathroom colors, so I can go wild there.

We stopped and cleaned up because tonight is Halloween and Sports Nut and I decided that we would turn off the outside lights and hide in the back of the house tonight.

Twenty Months

The Wizard is still commuting to the Sunshine State every week -- and while we're at it, how does Florida rate the moniker "Sunshine State" when the National Solar Observatory (supposedly the sunniest place on earth) is in the same state as Dodge? But I digress....Although the Wizard is commuting, he was home for four whole consecutive days this weekend and we had a chance to talk about -- you guessed it! -- getting out of Dodge.

We think we have come up with a solution that involves spending approximately 20 more months here in Dodge. That will give Sports Nut time to finish his degree at Yet Another University (don't ask) and will also coincide with the time that Future Vet should finish his undergraduate studies. In other words, May 2013 or thereabouts.

It's good to have an end point. Now all I need to do is figure out how to fill those 20 months.

Time to Stop Sulking?

It's been about 3 months now since the Wizard and I found out that we would lose a significant amount of money if we sell our house. And the Wizard is on yet another long-term gig that involves flying to the East Coast each week. He's exhausted from the travel. I'm somewhat lonely, despite having a house chock-full of young adults and animals (and one 3-year-old).

We are thinking that we may just have to bite the bullet and move anyway.

Over the next week or so, I plan to figure out what getting out of Dodge will mean. In the meantime, Future Vet brought home three feral kittens who are coming along nicely.

More on all of this later today. Or tomorrow.