I spent Monday and Tuesday mostly sleeping, more long Covid. On Wednesday I was able to get the kitchen cleaned up, laundry nearly done, and put some time in on the bills and budget.
Tom was here and he got the new router up and running. He discovered that the quantity of lights on the tree in the dining room interferes with the signal there. But there’s now a signal in the living room, but not very good. He says next time he’s here he will see if he can improve it.
The parsnips never got dug between illness and the weather didn’t stay warm as forecast. Maybe we will have a January thaw at the end of the month and we can get to them then. Otherwise the critters will enjoy them, I’m sure.
Thursday I worked on bills a bit and my general helper was here. We went shopping and then started taking down just the decorations throughout the house.
She had to leave early because my surrogate granddaughter’s mom was picking me up to take me to her new house for the first time. She arrived about 11AM and off we went in the rain. (It’s rained most of the week.)
She has a new dog, Joy, a well bred German Shepherd who is nearly 2. She greeted us at the door, all excited there was a new person to pat her. She settled pretty quickly and was a nice dog to have on hand throughout the visit for petting.
We looked over the house, which is pretty old and had had more recent work done in the 1970’s. It had also been done by a guy who didn’t cook or entertain much. My friend’s plan is to slowly make it a more accessible floor plan and more efficient in the kitchen. So we talked of ways of doing that.
She had a lovely soapstone woodstove in the living room that heats the first floor pretty well.
The second floor has an upper porch (there are lots of deep porches on the ground floor) right off the room they turned into a TV room. There’s some odd things the previous owners did with closing off doorways that they might change. And there’s a cool old mural over the stairwell to the second floor.
A lot of the paint choices (done over old textured wallpaper) that do not enhance the house, so she wants to repaint. But overall it’s a very nice old house and I will enjoy seeing the changes as they happen.
Friday morning started out as rain and both my helper friend and general helper were here. I set my general helper to finishing taking down the rest of the Christmas decorations and packing them up.
My helper friend and I tackled the structural support problem on the new stove. We took off all of the upper part of the burner area and found the problem was several missing screws. Because the support hadn’t been there, the trim and other pieces had gotten bent in moving.
He had to go to the hardware store for more screws and nuts as I didn’t have the right sizes. I packed up Christmas stuff while he was gone.
Once we got all the screws in place, bent pieces back into shape, the problems I had found all were gone. I did discover several missing screws inside the oven and replaced them.
That’s as much as I intend to do to the stove until I know it is working properly. The plumbers still haven’t rescheduled installing it yet.
Around 10AM it started to snow and at one point the flakes were enormous. It snowed all day but this is all we got.
We had gone up to the store room to get the boxes for packing away, so now that bedroom is a mess again. It’s where Tom works when he is here on Wednesdays, so I must do something about it before next Wednesday.
The office isn’t much better, with all the new totes we got when shopping on Thursday.
But except for the pomander all the Christmas is out of the living room and elsewhere, except the office, trees, and candles.
On Saturday, as it will be past The Twelve Days of Christmas, I will take the candles out of all the windows and pack them away. Now I can stop the heat loss for 4 hours each night, as I will be pulling the shades at 4PM instead of turning on candles. Hopefully that will slow how much wood we are burning.
The contractor is coming to work in the root cellar in the afternoon. We hope to finish the pipe work for the vent system.
Then on Sunday I will start on the big Christmas tree first. It will be the hardest to do. It will probably take me all week, but my general helper will be here on Wednesday so it will go faster then.
The week of my birthday my old homeschooling moms group is planning a Moms’ Night Out, the first since the summer of 2020, I think. We’ve yet to settle on venue but it looks like it might be a lunch. It will be good to see them all again and get caught up on all the doings.