I blame the book I’m currently involved with for me getting locked out of the car at work the other day. I realize “the other day” for me can be anywhere from yesterday back to 1986, but this was literally the other day.
Everybody kept saying that I’d caught something, that I had some kind of ick. But I didn’t have an ick. I had a bout with my allergies and asthma. If I stay away from the things that trigger my asthma, like smoke, mold and mildew, and dust, I do pretty well.
We’ve literally had plumbing issues at my house for years. It started gradually with the kitchen sink not draining well. The shower drained, but very slowly and only after allowing the water to get almost to the top of the rim. And eventually, I abandoned the washer altogether after having water pumped out all over the floor for the LAST time.
Our house has almost literally been turned inside out lately. Since the plumber came and made a lot of our dreams come true, we’ve had our utility room as empty as we could get it. Cupboards that were supposed to be mounted on the walls, but never got that far, now sit on the back porch. They’re joined by nearly everything else we had stashed in hidey-holes. I haven’t been able to find anything in months.
The new floor in the kitchen came out so good we decided to do the hallway, too. This meant the shoe closet had to be emptied. We haven’t kept shoes in the closet since the days when our beloved Dukie spent long hours napping in there, but still kept the name. Everything had to come out, clothes included, but to go where?
So I found myself between jobs — I always thought that was a euphemism for unemployed and planning to stay that way. But no, I was literally between jobs. I no longer worked at my former position and had a week off before my new one started. I would rather have had time off in July so Dave and I would have a full 9 nine days at our camper, but hey, time off is time off — even in February.
I did the best I could to use my time off between jobs wisely; I tried to get to all those things that there just never seems to be enough time to do. Of course, I didn’t get to all of them, but I did knock one big one off the list — I painted the living room.
So I was in the upstairs bathroom, which is kind of under construction at the moment. There is a slight leak in the roof that the roofer has heretofore been unable to fix because of the weather. Nobody told Mother Nature it’s spring and we need to be sunny and 75 right now.
Since Dave and I moved to this house 27 years ago, we’ve tried to replace any trees that we took down or that came down on their own. I don’t want to mow around a forest, but we don’t want to desecrate the land, either.
I saw the telltale scraps of grass and straw on the back porch, along with a feather. Oh no, not another nest! But then I didn’t see anything else for a few days, so I assumed the birds had found a better location.
Dave and I ran into a little car trouble lately. We affectionately refer to our 2010 Ford Escape as the “Jitney” because we had a Jeep for about 10 years. It took like eight of those years to get out of the habit of referring to every vehicle in the driveway as the truck, because mostly they were.
Just like everyone else in Northeastern Ohio, we got caught up in the storms a few weeks ago. Dave and I and our Beagle Boy Cletus went downstairs and waited out the storm watching DVR because, of course, the cable was out. We kept tabs on the storm’s progress on our phones and when it had pretty well played itself out, we went back to bed.