Uncle Fred and Great Grandma have both passed fairly recently. Fred in 2024, and Great Grandma only a few weeks ago, but now we need to turn our attention towards the state of what was left behind. Their homes, belongings, cottages, and all of their hoarded waste. It is a non trivial matter just how much cardboard, and empty containers they both kept for no apparent reason. It is going to be a slow moving, and concerted effort to get the farm house, stone house, and middle cottage into a place where they are either usable, or need to have their interiors taken back to the studs, and exposed sub floor. Because, I mean, Yikes! Moulds, mildew, and musty odours abound. Going to need a respirator, goggles, gloves, boots, and a shower afterwards to tackle some of these issues. I think carpets, drywall, and ceilings as being unpleasant jobs, once you get the furniture, and general junk out of the living spaces. Yellow pages? Trash. Empty boxes, fire pit, clothes, donation boxes, busted tech, to the dump. It’ll be a long, protracted, and expensive exercise with not much upside. A dedicated week at each site might get you something you can then begin to clean for use. The cleaning step alone will be back breaking. So much bleach, and soapy water. Rinse & repeat. Walls, floors, tubs, toilets… Might be easier to yank those items, and replace them. Ugh.
Tuesday is here, so the kids have summer programming at the Library, and tomorrow they go back to flag football. A couple weeks later they start up swimming lessons again. Looking like a full, and busy summer ahead.
Three days in and I am still seeing a heightened response to my archives coming out of Germany. Which is cool. Problem with that initial jolt is that these newer sustained numbers seem weak, even though just four days ago they would have constituted the single best days this blog had even seen. The meteoric rise and fall sort of dampens the joy from the sustainable level where you end up afterwards. Glad it was just the one day, as that kind of attention could easily go to your head, and make you nutty! The glimpse was enough to make that readily apparent. Chasing the high of increasing numbers would taint your experience of anything that doesn’t meet or exceed those high water marks. Guess we know where all that depression comes from (or a portion of it at least). But what do I know, one day a fairly mid sized school’s worth of people checked out my blog, and now a fully rostered football team comes by. I hardly know if that which I speak (fame, or anything adjacent to it for that matter). Just an observation given how I have reacted internally given one sudden jump in numbers, followed by a level I would have previously jumped for joy at, now feels blasé. Didn’t take long. So I’m going to be very grateful for whatever numbers I get, as I have had many zeros, and ones, and will do my best to feel like normal once we get back to that level of anonymity again. I am more than the yearly viewership of my blog posts!
Happy Tuesday. Yesterday was Domestic Duties Monday wherein I cleaned, and did laundry for the family. It was not very satisfying. Life moves forward. Which reminds me, I have a bunch of paint, and old broken tech in the basement which I need to take to their appropriate dump sites. I need to look up the times, locations, and costs associated with both. I might get to know by way of cleaning up after Uncle Fred and Great Grandma anyway. We will see.
Ciao Bella!
Greatwall Studios Graphic Design 