Busy Saturday

Joyce is downstairs carefully cleaning every nook and cranny. First she organizes and picks up the worst of the mess. Then she goes back through and "cleans" everything. Then she goes through AGAIN and "polishes" it. (Those are her words.) Amazing.

In anticipation of her coming to clean, though, I actually got busy this morning and sorted out the clothes in my closet and filled two of those enormous leaf bags with clothes for Here Today Gone Tomorrow. AND I cleaned out the pots and pans under the cooktop -- we generally just shove clean pots under there wherever they will fit and hope nothing falls back out. AND I cleaned out the pantry shelves and threw away all the old open partial packages of stuff. AND I at least started to sort out the junk in my bathroom cabinets and drawers. Made enough room to at least stash all the crap that was sitting around on the counters so that Joyce will be able to clean the place anyway. Maybe tomorrow I'll pull it all back out and sort it and put it back in some semblance of order. Got to be careful, though. If I get too carried away with all the organization, I'll have to make sure I'm home when Mark comes back in. Otherwise he might just look around and decide he's in the wrong place and leave again! Poor guy hasn't seen a truly clean house in about 3 years! (Since I let the last maid go.)

But the worst room in the entire house for clutter is this office. We have SO much electronic "stuff" that seemed like a great idea but that we haven't managed to hook up. Maybe I need to get someone from that "geek squad" or some such place to come and deal with it all. Hmm. I think I'll look into that.

Made reservations to fly up to Ohio again when Mark gets back in. We want to actually DRIVE up there together in the spring -- IF we can find someone who will come and stay in the house with the critters while we're gone (maybe that'll be easier now that it's tidy!). But a round-trip ticket on AirTran is really cheap, so I think I'll just make a couple of trips up there for the weekend between now and spring -- one this month, and maybe another in March.

I have a couple of eBay bids in on laptops for Dad. Even if he doesn't use it to hook up to the internet, he can look at pictures and listen to his music on it anyway. Nice laptops with 17" screens running at 3.0 GH or faster have gotten SO cheap that even if he never uses it, I'll at least feel better knowing he has one if he wants to. There's not enough space for his desktop computer there at the nursing home, but I don't think a laptop - even a big one - will be that much in the way