Things and Stuff

We cleaned out the closet this weekend. I'd already done a fair bit, going through my own clothes and pulling out anything I don't wear, or is too big/way-too-small for me, but I have been trying to get Jason to do the same. he resists it, because of all the money that's in the clothes we buy him, but I keep trying to tell him to not think about it. We already spent the money, it's being wasted whether we give the clothes new homes or whether it sits in the closet unused. He was grumpy though, which makes for not-so-fun times. I think he's happier now though, especially since we can actually hang all of our clothes in the closet again. We can get dressed somewhere other than the laundry room!

That bench on the short wall in this picture is where my half of the three bags had been sitting for months as I waited for him to get in gear and go through clothes himself. It's actually empty no. We could, feasibly, use it to have people over to eat! Not that most people want to eat our crazy low-carb diet. We got rid of our heavy down-like comforter and the duvet too, plus some blankets and shams and stuff. So much stuff collecting dust in our tiny home. Yay us!

Hooray!

Self-proclaimed prophet Yisrayl "Buffalo Bill" Hawkins, the founder of a religious sect in Abilene, Texas had said that on June 12, 2008 a nuclear war will begin. So .. yeah. He'd said it a couple of times, only to be ... believe it or not .. proven wrong. So .. June 12th has come and gone. And since I'm still here, and I assume you're still here, I can only assume that nuclear war did not indeed break out. So. Happily, we get to celebrate Jason's birthday!

That's right, today, Friday the Thirteenth, is my honey's birthday. And while sadly we did not get our advance copies of the new fantasy novel by Larissa Niec for his birthday, he did get some lovely little things .. and so did I! The little darling sent me some lovely little earrings. Jason and she are determined to turn me into a real girl, I swear it. I've gotten more jewelry in the last two years than I got in the previous twenty.

I'm supposed to be talking about home this month, for NaBloPoMo, and I've been a little slack. But I've actually been kinda busy with stuff I've been doing around the house. Not only did we get the big clunky desk finally out of my room, which made my room seem twice as big as it did before, I've gotten sheers on all the windows downstairs -including- my office, finally, and thile they're a little short, they do the job they're meant to do. We also cleared out a ton of crap out of the house, and just today I got rid of a bunch of boxes and trash and stuff from the whole 'new computer' process. Tomorrow, probably, we're going to put up the curtain rods in our bedroom so we can -finally- have curtains, and possibly even get some new ceiling fans. That is apparently going to be our birthday gifts from Jason's parents.

My mom and dad are giving us a Wii and probably a Wii Fit and stuff for Graduations and my birthday, and Jason's going to get, I think, a nice laptop bag since he's getting a laptop for himself. And I have a little pile of little somethings on his chair for him, waiting for him to come home. I don't know what we're going to do to celebrate other than that, though. We rarely really celebrate birthdays around here. I mean, we do, but we've reached an age where birthdays aren't really 'special' anymore. We'll see what he feels like. he's been working hard at the gym almost every day, so it's hard to do stuff after work, even though he does get our at 5:30 instead of 8-9pm.

A/V Annoyances

So. Sauron lived in our old DVD player. Whenever we attempted to watch a dvd, it would skip, stutter, stop until the movie was nigh unwatchable. My darling husband in a fit of I-don't-know-what brought hom 5 new releases he wanted to watch this weekend. I love him. I do. But good gods, he doesn't realize it takes him 5 hours to watch 1 movie.

After making a concerted effort to watch Beowulf while Sauron refused to let us enjoy it, I made the command decision that we would buy a new dvd player. He got home .. we attempted to show him just -one- part of Beowulf and even that wouldn't cooperate, so he decided we would hie ourselves off to Best Buy and purchase a new DVD player.

$800 later, we returned with a new home theater system in the back seat of our covertible. This is how my husband shops, you see. I did my wifely duty of making certain we could afford it, but he makes about four-times my salary, so who am I to say 'No, we can't buy that' if it's what he wants? We hooked up only the dvd player - a Phillips dealio that was working lastnight fine when we hooked it up by itself. Cool beans, working fine, yay us.

So today, we decided to hook the audio stuff up. Surround speakers, powered sub-woofer, the works. After finding the wire strippers... which I had to hunt through the whole house to find that for some unknown reason they were in the bathroom dresser, I managed to cut and strip all the speaker wire .. having to do one twice because we didn't cut it quite long enough. But now we can't get the dvd player's sound to work. And so somehow, in the process of turning the damned thing around for the eightieth time, I managed to knock a speaker and an oil-scent-thing my stupid sister-in-law gave us for christmas. So the house now smells pine-fresh, and -not- in a good way. It's also manage to ruin the paint on the wall. Whee.

I'm having such a wonderful day.

I don't believe it!

I still can't believe my kitchen is clean. It's like walking into a whole new world. Bit I'm making a strong effort to keep it that way now. We still haven't gotten the living room -completely- straightened, and I've got to spray pest repellant everywhere .. hopefully I can do so today, since it's not raining.

I totally failed on NaNoWriMo. But honestly, trying to do it while I still have school is a silly thing. Work and school in the month of November are just too busy for me to be trying to spend hours a day writing something that's giving me neither a grade nor a paycheck.

Baseboards? I have baseboards?

I've not really seen much of my baseboards in months. We have so much clutter in this house .. usually because we have 3 people living in one-thousand square feet .. that we don't really see much of the baseboards. There's usually boxes and bags hiding them. Not permanently, but .. when one batch is tossed or moved to a proper place .. a new batch takes its place.

Jason and I spent today .. or at least the biggest part of it .. working more on cleaning. The gods awful pile of 'stuff' that had accumulated in front of the bookcase is now completely gone. A box is waiting to be donated to goodwill or somewhere, and another to be brought with him to work. We have two bags of knitting and weaving and spinning stuff - fiber, tools, etc - and a small pile of pictures in frames that came off the mantle that I need to find homes for.

The biggest visible improvements are the refigerator, which is cleaned out completely save for what should be in there, and the kitchen. I can't take the credit for that though. jason's parents came by to bring me what was left of the Thanksgiving ham, and his mom started working in the kitchen. And didn't leave until I actually had counter space again. I didn't ask her to do it. Didn't even expect it. but it's done, and I'm really thankful for it. I have an easier time -keeping- the kitchen clean .. the whole house clean in fact .. when it's been cleaned thoroughly.