Psychotomy

Can’t keep this!

…

well, hell, now i feel compelled to find the words to the song and do up at least a verse or two … bah. if i had that kindof followthrough it wouldn’t've been three weeks sincei last posted.

Last weekend was “Massively Cleaning Weekend” Mom in law was up to help me organize/clean. spent friday evening buying stuff, sunday day too. most of saturday, sunday evening, and monday morning were me doing this that and the other fucking thing trying to clean up, clean out, and generally make the basement functionally useful.

mom boxed the books whilst I went through the big room and tried to break things down to get more space to work and piled up boxes to get them out of the middle of the floor. later i put in an overhead garage rack in the unfinished room, and DAMN that wa a pain in the ass. the water drainage pipes run through where i needed to go, the power line to the stove runs through where i was putting in a screw (i stopped a good 1/4″ from electrocuting myself, i think), and i spent most of 4 hours sitting on top of hte freezer in the basement so i could reach the fucking ceiling. ARGH. and then, to top it off, the suitcases didn’t fit as nicely as hoped (the aforementioned pipe). got a decent amount on it, but not as much as i’d've liked

monday was me playing in the attic trying to organize thigns a bit and put down boards to provide “flooring” to put boxes on, at a later date. b/c during that whole stacking of boxes thing earlier? the boxes i knew were going to the attic or such, i put those on the bottom. that way we could get to the rest of them … oops.

The basement bookshelves produced ~20 boxes of books, maybe more since hardbacks pack badly. ~1000 books. Which is actually less than I thought there were :o At this point, 5 boxes are packed for donationware, ~8 boxes are back on the shelves already.

Beyond that, the unfinished room and the big room produced a huge pile of trash. I snapped a few pics before I took it out last night, i’ll try to get one up. To give an idea, it took me an hour to haul it all out for trash last night. That was actually last night’s contribution to cleaning. I took all the crap out :o

tonight was moving the 6 boxes of unsorted books upstairs, and 4 boxes of D&D3e books/etc (and some AD&D stuff) to go to the attic this weekend.

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Yesterday I took the old TV in the basement to Salvation Army. And I took the five (six?) dead computers to the dump’s computer recycling. clears up some of hte basement, with the trash i took too. mostly have the exercise bike to eliminate, now.

Then it’s on to the miscellaneous boxed crap. We processed about a dozen or so a few months back, and now those compacted eight are back in the big room, waiting to figure out where they go to live. There’s another half dozen or so (3 of which are full of D&D books), then random unboxed crap, the butterfly (bowl) chair … then the freezer room has gotten stuffed with more bits as i cleared out the walk down the stairs (now cluttered with the (filled with miscellany) box from the carpet cleaner and the strollers). Need to go through there with a torch again.

And after all of that? Yeah, then comes the really hard part. We get to go through all 2.4 billion books on the shelves around the house, consolidate, collapse, condense. Dispose. Because we want to rearrange the back room, in a way that involves not having those shelves taking up a full wall and holding a plethora of books we browse maybe a couple times a year looking for one in particular (kiir at least goes through a lot of her romances ; me? i have tens of thousands of dollars worth of sci fi and mystery and such that i am unlikely to ever feel inclined to read again :/)

Of course, I’ve been working my way through cleaning since … h … before kiir was pregnant. Noticeably before. It’s been 18-24 months I’ve been working at this crap, although it did pick up a year ago when we found out we were having a baby. I’ve fallen off lately, b/c the time I might’ve been willing to give up spending with Des has to go for K, since he needs walking and exercise and the two of them are too much for one person to take out, especially for winter.

And now my Mother-in-Law has offered to come up and spend a weekend “helping me.” because i dislike having someone clean my stuff their way (kiir doesn’t count, since it’s her stuff too, obviously). So she’ll ‘clean under direction.’ Which I don’t really see how that works, actually, since won’t managing mean i have to spend the time anyway?

The big problem, the BIG problem, is that to me it feels like admitting defeat. Asking for help means saying “I can’t do it.” And that’s where it falls apart. Because, in my head, it also means ‘I can’t take care of my own family’ … So even though everyone agrees that I need the help to clean the house … I still haven’t agreed to it.

Because I suck.

I really need to just quit sitting on the sofa on weekend mornings, and start cleaning when des is still sleeping in the morning :/

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So

tuesday night we noticed the house was hella hot. when i checked, there was no airflow. Further investigation revealed that the air filter was soaked and holding water :o

We freaked a bit, but wednesday it turned out to be just condensation. Spent a bunch getting a guy out to check it out. He looked, blew out the drain to be sure, and after looking at the filter we decided it had been more than 3 weeks since i changed it. based on how dirty, he’s guessing closer to 3mo :o that restricted the airflow enough that the coils were getting too hot, which meant there was more condensation, which meant it started dripping more, which meant the drainage pan overflowed, which poured it onto the filter, which reduced airflow …

until it reached the point where i found it at ~0 flow :o

we had shut it off tuesday night to be safe (my first thought was the upstairs shower draining into the ducts :o) . wednesday morning we turned it on, since we would be home and awake if anything happened. guy was there around noon. it was still 78 wednesday night. But i think it did a wonderful job maintaining, since it was 100+ outside :o by thursday evening it had shut itself off in it’s normal manner b/c the house was cool finally!

i need to start replacing the filter every month. Or maybe more.

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The birds appear to be OK.

Well, technically, I couldn’t really look at them. Mama Mockingbird was in the nest, and papa was on the fence other side of the yard. I felt it was ill advised to show too much interest, or get too close :o

But since mama’s there, I presume babies are OK with mama home

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so, i think i may have kindof killed a bunch of baby birds yesterday. not really killed them, but kindof

I was cutting out the bushes and tree-things in the backyard, and took most of it out when i noticed a nest in the branch i was about to lop. I pulled back the obscuring bit a bit, and there’s 3 or 4 baby birds in there mouths up and open, hoping i’m mama with dinner :( I’m hoping i left enough bush for them to be protected, and that i wasn’t too close to contaminate them with my scent and mama WILL come back with dinner :/

I’ll find out friday when I haul stuff out, I’ll check on them again. If they’re there and happy, I leave the bush b/c mama obviously came back. so I’ll have this one bush thing sitting around until mid-summer when they’re old enough to fly away. otherwise, I’m going to feel like crap for driving mama off/leaving them open to predators :(

*sigh* bad attriel, no cookie!

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couple weeks ago I started working on the front yard. spent an hour or two diggign out the azalea roots (they were dead last year and i cut them out), the tree stump, most of the forsythia, and whatever that stump that’s been out front since we moved in is from :o

basically i did the minimum start :o sprayed the backyard with weed-killer (that took almost another hour) and most of it’s withered now. well, the stuff on top :o

hopefully next week when i’m home by myself i can dig out the backyard (digging out the weed roots, then digging out hte random bushes and the “butterfly bush” which has turned into more of a tree …) and some of hte front for replanting

unfortunately azalea’s are out of season, so i can’t plant any more in the front for now except the one i got kiir for mother’s day :o

but, of course, all of this is based around me actually getting anything really done. but hopefully if I do, the back’ll become usable for sunning the cloth diapers, and maybe even for us to go out and sit back on the patio or something … right after i like put in some kind of function patio and maybe a table and chairs :o

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My mother in law has been breaking my house for nearly two weeks now. she’s been cleaning, organizing, MOVING things.

My silverware drawer. How hard is this? it has little trays, right? somehow she totally futzed the drawer up, none of my silvers in the right place. I know it’s small and piddling, but it’s just one example. The glasses, carefully organized. Three times THIS WEEK i’ve had to move things BACK to being organized.

And WTF blocks in the drinking glasses with multiple measuring cups? wtf? no. just no. she’s “cleaning up the counters so you can cook” by making it impossible to use the DISHES! We have 3 sizes of plates (large dinner, “salad”, and snack). They were in two piles: large and salad, and snack separate b/c we have a bunc hof them (and we didn’t used to have the salad). I go to get a plate last night, and the salads are on top of SOME of the snacks, and snacks are in two other places (that i’ve found so far). differently shaped bowls are stacked willy-nilly.

and she’s only been in the kitchen for yesterday??? before that, when we were at the hospital, she was painting. one of K’s leashes went AWOL over a week ago. The one I use, no less :o She swears she hasn’t thrown [b][i]anything[/i][/b] away … which begs the question of “oh? then what was the 10 bags of trash you generated when we weren’t home????” :o

I love her, don’t get me wrong. And I appreciate that she’s helping. And I really appreciate that she throws money at her daughter and grandchild like it’s red bills and tomorrow we switch to blue again or something. But what’s wrong with leaving my house to me? “you’re not going to have any time to clean [ever again]” … funny, you did when you had 4 kids, and I only have 1 …

And K’s suddenly fallen from being “such a smart puppy” who she takes on walks whenever she’s here to “he’s just a dog, he’s not that bright, he’ll forget all about whatever and get food from the baby” … in a year … yeah …

and lets not get into how “surprisingly” well i’m doing taking care of the baby

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well, the month-s long tirade of cleaning is ending soon. b/c the baby’s coming soon and time will be more limited :o

but this weekend was, basically, the last giant push. started off b/c my sister in law is coming up and we volunteered the futon as a bed. the futon is in the back room. the back room has been the dumping point for everything else in the house (and it bears noting that everything but the kitchen has been done, and the kitchen has too but it has more temporary clutter than entrenched mess) … 9 months of stuff getting shoved in. plus the reflooring of the living room pushed a bunch more in.

and saturday evening i took my life in my hands and went in :o about an hour in, K tried to come see what i was doing. came running up and … stopped. looked at the mess, then went back to kiir with a look like ‘mommy, daddy’s dead isn’t he?’ :o took me about 4 hours before i went around and worked my way clear again. and 3 big bags of trash. putting 4 boxes of books out of boxes and stacked on shelves (completely unusably) cleared up some space.

then sunday i decided to get under the stairs and organize that closet so i could put some stuff in there from the back. except that closet is filled with various comptuer bits (everything but the sun’s and the sun monitor joined the trash brigade) and lawn stuff .. crap. then i started working on the unfinished room to clear out some near the furnace (where the most recent clutter is) so i could put in the lawn stuff …

took me a lot of the weekend, but the basement is navigable and the futon is near-usable (there’s a tv on it, but i can move that ok). a lot more work to be done, but reasonably started. probably work on it more tonight and tomorrow. it may also be kindof a thing to do to get away some. after everyone GOES HOME in two weeks!!!

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we’ve been planning (since last fall) to get a HDD camcorder when the time comes. baby being under a month away, I guess the time is here ;)

went yesterday to check out the Sony DCR-SR80 60G HDD model at Ritz … asked what others they had, and he told us they usually have teh 30G (SR60) model. But not today. (i thought he said the SR60, kiir thinks he might have been babbling on about hte SR40). the SR80 says it does 16:9 recording, inherent widescreen handy. the SR60 (40, whatever) doesn’t say anything. so he goes online.

it turns out the 40, 60 and 80 are being phased out. like RIGHT NOW. b/c the new line (42?, 62, 82) are shipping the 17th or 19th (sony said 19th, guy said 17th) … the new 30G does 16:9 (and after much searching at home i finally established the old one seems to too). and it’s expected to be identical in cost to the current 30G. likewise the new 60G will be the same as the current 60G, but better optical zoom and some other bits.

So we decided to wait, we can pick it up in two weeks instead. Either the current 60 will come down in price, or more likely we’ll just get the new 30 or 60. the 60 does like 40 hours of video, so the 30 should be like 20, which oughta be sufficient, yaknow? but we might get the 60 anyway, just to be sure when we’re on vacation. b/c the laptop drive fills up fast with my itunes TV shows :o

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got the border up in baby’s room this afternoon. took a while, but i tacked it up, then checked it, tweaked, repeat. when it was good i started at one end and took out hte tacks as i peeled out the backing and smoothed to the wall. not 100% level, but i’m not convinced the floors, walls, or ceiling are 100% level anyway :p

then we worked on cleaning the room some for hte furniture delivery friday. unfortunately, that kinda included dumping some stuff into K’s room. poor K, he gets so put upon in this whole baby mess. kiir doesn’t take him on walks, i’m spending ltos of time trying to get ready, and his room keeps getting usurped with all the crap that used to be in the third bedroom since we didn’t use it anyway :/

oh well. hopefully getting lots of camp (more than we can afford, technically, i suppose) will make him feel better about the whole sordid affair :o

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