Oh my. You can even see the surface of the old mattress on out bed upstairs. ;-) Between a living room that is 1/2 useable and clearing the piles of stuff upstairs, we may actually have a livable house sometime in the spring time.... well, a girl can always dream, right? ;-)

Whooo hee! the fire place is clean! and I don't just mean that we've picked up, vacuumed and dusted, although we have done that as well. I've even cleaned off the mantle and polished the wood.

*AS* we were doing the vacuuming, (and I seriously mean *AS*; D was running the machine and I was answering the phone) the phone rang with an offer of $20 off a fire place sweep and inspection. This has been on my To Do list for about the last seven years, and we jumped on it. How often do the stars line up like this?

So, within a couple of hours, the sweeps were at our door. Yes, they really do use the same style brooms as Dick Van Dyke hoisted around in Mary Poppins, but they 'vacuum' as much as they sweep these days. No, they didn't have any undersized boy that they shoved up the flue either. I checked.

We filled their ash can (which is where the vacuum mechanism deposits what ever it sweeps up). We clogged their hose several times. I did mention that I didn't know when it had been cleaned last, but the fellow assured me that since 1978, in order to sell a house, the fireplace has to be cleaned and inspected. So it's probably only been the twenty years that we've been here that it hasn't been cleaned, and not the the 50-plus (or 70-plus!) years that I was afraid of. Whew.

Huzzah! and it's a nice rainy night, just right for a fire. But I'll probably wait. There's still the upstairs bedroom to tackle, and that needs done by Sunday morning.

Done with the Vancouver pics and sooner than I expected. Of course, the time I've spent on this probably should have been spent making sure that we all have a place to sleep this weekend, when the Boy arrives home from school, but it still feels good to take this off my To Do list.

I am FINALLY am getting a start on uploading the last of the Vancouver BC pics. We spend an afternoon in the VanDusen Gardens while we were up for Bard on the Beach this past August, where they had an amazing display of Zimbabewean sculpture in their southwest gardens. I've got tons of pictures of the sculptures and their surroundings that I'm uploading even as we speak. (or since we were in Canada, perhaps that is 'tonnes'....)

Anyway it was beautiful stuff, and in more affluent times, I would have loved to have taken a piece home.

It will probably take a couple of days to get everything from the Gardens uploaded. Stay tuned

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rainycity1/

It's gotten blustery, with a wind storm coming through. The kittehs seem more doubtful of this than of the rain, even. "Go on out", says I, pushing them out the door. They haven't come back in yet, so I guess they've decided that it's O.K.

...well, maybe it *is* raining, at least a little bit. Cats keep coming in and saying, "Pick us up!", and then I find out that they're wet...

Huzzah! There was a scheduling glitch, and my job did not materialize. Good thing, too, as it took me another 7 hours to finish my homework. I'm not sure what I would have wound up with, if I'd only had the 2 hours I was planning on.

So that class is done. Today's been pretty productive, although not of the sort that you can easily see. I need to hit the house stuff hard starting tomorrow, so that the Boy has a place to sleep when he comes home for the holiday next week. Time to take some before pics, I think. ;-)

After a huge push yesterday (thank heavens for federal holidays!), I've finished my second-to-last assignment for this current "fire hose" of a class, and I've got a pretty good start on the final piece that is due tomorrow. At the start of class. Printed out. With a short essay for a cover letter.

This means that I'm not out of the woods yet, but need to keep focused and wrap everything up. In theory, I have a subbing job again tomorrow, which means that I won't be able to pull the 12-hrs straight effort that I put into the previous piece. I also have to get at least a reasonable amount of sleep, because fourth graders will eat you alive if they think that they can.

So, it's off to the showers now, to clear my head, and then a hard push until bedtime. Fortunately, school lets out an hour early tomorrow, so that will help, but only if there's a minimum yet to be done.... like maybe spell-checking and printing. Fun, fun. But then IT'S OVER! and I can start figuring out where the Boy is going to sleep when he comes home in two weekends for the holiday.

We're in a lull in the weather, but by the sounds of both the weather blogs and miscellaneous facebook posts by friends around the area, we've got something moving up towards us from the south, even as I type. It's been very interesting to watch the kittehs during this last bout of wind and rain. I've mentioned before that, unlike any of my previous cats, these cats *do* play the game of What's the Weather Like Outside of THIS Door, and they will go from room to room looking for the door that leads to the weather that isn't all wet and stormy. The Yar cat appears to have taken this game to a new level, however. Dissatisfied with the results provided by the regular doors, he is now meowing to have the *closet* doors opened for him to check. Go figure.