Life in West Virginia: STILL CLEANING AND MOVING . . . .

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

STILL CLEANING AND MOVING . . . .

Wow! Already, here it is Tuesday and another day of working on the move home. I swear, I am going to post some pictures but I must first get everything looking nice.

I have moved some furniture into the living room and just finished rearranging it this evening, with the help of Mom, Joey and Shane, who stopped by to look at my truck which he wishes to buy. I have been slowly detail cleaning the house, doing such things as polishing my oak trim, getting the little grooves of my coffee table and end table legs really clean and wiping down my Cracker Barrel rockers that are on the porch. I am slowly getting the porch cleaned off. Its hard since I have so many tools that I need handy (like a hoes, rake, weed killer, pruning shears and a hammer) yet nowhere to stick them away except the barn and its just a pain in the ass to carry all that stuff back and then when I go to retrieve an item and come back to the house and realize that I need something else too, well, you can see it turns into a vicious cycle in which I get nothing done except gathering tools. So, they are scattered around my porch, just a few steps away from any job that I find that I need to do. I almost have the bags of pellets, which are the fuel used to heat my home, that the "tenants" left behind on the porch, taped with duct tape, since their 5yo son cut all of the bags open with a knife. I don't even want to know what he was doing with a knife, alone. They are 40lb bags, so I shouldn't really be lifting them but I am taping them back together so that they don't spill out all over the place and make an even bigger mess than the one that exists now. I have been painting things, such as a plant stand (green), wash tub (white) and an old stand (white) that was brass, but is now rust that my ex-mother-in-law gave to me and Joey's Dad some 14 or so years ago. I use it on the porch to hold things like plants that I am starting from seed or a glass of pop or just whatever.

This afternoon though, I felt I was going backwards in my progress I had made. I took Mom's floor cleaner over to the house and got it all set up and then couldn't get it to work. Frustrated, I went and sat in a rocker. I got up after a few minutes to water some plants I had forgotten to water earlier and knocked over the turpentine that was sitting there on the porch, on a piece of flooring where I had been painting. Of course, it didn't stay on the small pieces of flooring that I used to shield the wood porch from the paint and now I have a stain on the porch. I did get some kitty litter from Mom and quickly covered it and crushed it into the stain and left it to soak. Coincidently, I had looked up what to do last night for oily stains as the "tenants" spilled baby oil in two different places on the porch and left stains . . . I found the bottle sitting in the middle of a stain while they were moving and threw it away. Actually, there are a bunch of little stains like someone slung it on the porch . . . maybe a 5yo using an empty baby oil bottle to use as maybe a squirt-gun, after refilling it with water, since I found the squirt gun in the weeds that weren't weed-eated. Mom was off today, so I managed to get quite a bit done. When I have Charleigh-Anne with me though, I tend to get little done as she demands all my time since she is teething and fussy most of the time. Then she spills the mixed gas that I brought in out of the rain, onto the porch, that Mom left on the sidewalk. Its a never-ending series of minor setbacks. And who was watching that 9 month old while I dashed inside to get my list . . .

Normally, all that would be enough to frustrate me and say to hell with it and go back to Mom's and sit in the A/C . . . but I am so happy when I am finished with my list and sitting at MY house, listening to MY Mom's TV (we haven't found mine yet in all the stuff in the basement) and looking around at all that I have accomplished for that day.

Tomorrow morning, I have physical therapy and after it I am going out to the college to register for my classes . . . Joey is coming along to babysit, so he isn't left all alone at home with Charleigh-Anne.