Nannie's Horses

I engaged in something that I rarely do yesterday.

It's something most people do every day.

Walt does a lot of it.

I did some housecleaning...and it about did me in.

See, we are having this little gathering here on Saturday.  Tomorrow Walt and I are celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary (where did the time go?) and the kids decided they wanted to have a party.

 

But where?  These days when we get together socially, it's at Atria because it's easier for my mother, but that wasn't going to work for this party.  But my mother doesn't do well in restaurants...well, she's OK, but she's uncomfortable...so they decided we would get together here and that Tom and Ned would cook dinner for us.

It's just a small group, just the family.  Walt and me; Ned and Marta; Tom, Laurel and the girls, my mother and Walt's brother and his wife.  Then Ned said he didn't believe in keeping secrets so he let us know that Jeri and Phil are going to fly out and be here too.  And because she's family as well, Charlotte is coming.

(This is a huge deal because Brianna and Lacie have never been inside this house and I'm having grandma performance anxiety.)

It's not that these people have never been inside my house and don't know that I am a terrible housekeeper, though since Walt has been doing so much housekeeping, he house is better than it has been in a long time.  Ned, bless him, said he would come over today and help clean up.  But I've always said I would have to clean for two days to get the house to a point where I could apologize for how messy it is.

A HUGE part of cleaning up is dusting the etageres.  These are two glass and brass shelving units that Gilbert bought shortly before he died.  I was so proud of those things and I felt so strongly that I wanted to take care of them for him after he died.  So they stand in the dining part of our living room and they hold all of the tsatskes that either we have collected on our travels or that people have given to us.  To dust it all takes 45-60 minutes, so it doesn't get done that often, but really needed it now.  When it's finished, the room doesn't look different at all, but I feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment to know that everything is dusted and on dusted glass shelves.

I set up a speaker so I could listen to my Amazon book and then I brought in my little desk fan because it was warm.  Even with that, I had sweat pouring off of me as I worked on the shelves.  

I had to do things in small increments because my back starts to give out after awhile.  Even sitting in a chair as much as I could while I cleaned still ended up with my having to take a break every now and then.

As I cleaned I was thinking about having the girls here and what a temptation all these cute little things on these open shelves would be for them.  I have thought about this before.  How to "baby proof" the etageres so I wouldn't have to worry about them.

Then I thought back to my paternal grandmother and the times we spent at her house (very, very often).  She had a little shelf on which she kept a collection of miniature horses.  They weren't necessarily fancy or expensive...I seem to recall a couple of them were even made of plastic.  But they were very special to her (and it bothers me that when she finally moved out of her apartment they just disappeared...I never got the chance to ask for them).  But the rule was "look, but don't touch."

I was a horse crazed kid and I would spend a lot of time sitting on the floor looking at those horses and imagining playing with them, my grandmother yelling at me if I tried to touch them.  She was so afraid I'd break them.  To this day, I am sorry that I never had the chance to play with them.

And as I dusted all this stuff on the etagere I thought about the girls being drawn to it and wanting to investigate and realized that there is nothing on those shelves that is so special that I would be upset if it got broken, and what fun it would be to share those little animals and figures with them.  So I'm not worrying about it.  If they want to play with anything on those shelves, I will smile and be happy that they are getting to do what I always wanted to do and never could.

I didn't get a lot more done than just the etagere, but I did get that much done but it feels as if I cleaned house all day.  And I don't have to do it again for a long time....

Now I just have to worry about the dogs who use the house for their bathroom, and what to do about puddle pads, and whether or not our dogs will get along with the dog Tom and Laurel are bringing with them.

Walking to China

Now I don't want anybody to get excited or to expect that I was establishing a precedent or anything, but I started cleaning house today.

We removed the puppy fence the day the puppies left and last night Walt took down the "upstairs apartment" (the smaller cage that sat on top of the large cage). All that empty space was an inspiration and I started folding towels so I could clear out the playpen and fold it up.

I tried fitting the playpen into our little closet in the family room, but was having a hard time, so Walt took over, removed most things from the closet and managed to get all the tubs of towels and the folded up playpen all into the closet, which left this wonderful space.

I also removed all the barriers that we had put up to keep puppies from peeing on the treadmill.

When I finally finished this is what happened.

Yes, I actually got up on the treadmill and turned it on. I didn't exactly set any speed records or distance records, but I did put in about 10-15 minutes walking and that certain seems to be a decent start on, as Jeri puts it, "walking to China."

Our friend Suellyn (from the Russia trip) asked if I was getting in shape to climb the Great Wall.

Walking on the treadmill, or outside somewhere, to quote W.S. Gilbert, "revolts me, but I do it." I wish I liked exercise but at the very least I can work on tolerating it to make life easier for me when we go to China. I suspect there will be more walking on this trip than we had in Russia.

Incidentally, I started reading a book called "Listening to Van Gogh," which is a poorly written book, but is a good one to read before this trip because it's about some retired people who take a boat trip down the river in Southern France. It's our Russia trip meets our France trip. I'm finding the activity on the boat remarkably similar and when they start doing side trips into river cities I suspect I will have lots of nice memories of the France portion of our trip two years ago as well (and should bring back enough unpleasant memories that it should keep me on the treadmill as well).

If I can just get past the rotten dialog. This book is a good example of why I don't write fiction...this is the kind of dialog I would probably write!

Mr. Clean and the Merrie Maid

There is nothing that creates a burst of years-postponed cleaning like a phone call from someone saying "We'll be in the neighborhood; we thought we'd stop by for a little bit."

The person in question was Walt's brother Norm. He and his wife Olivia were going to a wedding a couple of blocks from our house. The reception was going to be held across the street at the Veterans Memorial Building and they thought they would drop by while the photographer was taking photos and visit for a bit before they went to the reception.

Now it is no secret for anybody who has read this journal for more than a month that I am not a housekeeper. But I'll say one thing for that new show Hoarders (which I could only watch once because it made me feel too guilty), if nothing else, I can stand here watching the dust accumulate and trying to find a place to put the crap on the kitchen table so we can find a place to put a dinner plate and I can congratulate myself because I'm not one of "those" people.

You can actually see my floor. Some of it. And you can find space to stack things on a shelf here and there. I know that the kitchen counter is blue because there is actually a piece of it that shows when you walk through the kitchen. The laundry pile doesn't reach nearly as high as the ceiling. Yet.

And my desk doesn't look all that bad because I semi-organized it before the guy came to install the wifi last week and so far I haven't screwed it up.

It's only a matter of time, I know.

Now, in fairness to me, because I get so little chance to feel good about something when it comes to housekeeping, I had already planned to wash the floor today, long before Norm called. I suspect there are men's rooms in Grand Central Station that have cleaner floors. And I have this perfectly lovely steam cleaner that works great on Pergo floors. The problem is trying to clean a floor with five dogs curious about what you're doing. But even I could no longer overlook the pawprints everywhere that were starting to make the family room Pergo look like it had a marble overlay on it when you looked at it from the side.

But the dogs were going to Petco and I had decided long before the phone call that while they were gone would be a good time to wash the floor. Norm's call just sent it all into overdrive.

Walt, bless his heart, long ago stopped waiting for a miracle to happen that would turn me into The Happy Homemaker. When he retired and especially when we had these puppies running everywhere, he took on the task of keeping the living room floor clean. Every day he is picking up stuff and sprinkling stuff and vacuuming stuff. It is because of him, dammit, that the recent house breaker didn't run screaming out the front door when he sniffed the living room.

I have kind of ignored the living room ever since we decided to have Pergo installed there in addition to the rest of the house. I stopped caring whether the foster dogs tore up chunks of the rug or not. At one point I packed up boxes of stuff and moved it into the family room in preparation for the Pergo, but the time wasn't right, so the boxes went back into the living room and are stacked around on chairs and the dining room table, waiting to be moved out of the living room so we can get the Pergo laid. The boxes need dusting.

The dogs have been teething on a chair and have destroyed it--but I don't move it out because they only teethe on THAT chair and it keeps them from tearing up other chairs.

(OK, the logic is faulty, but stick with me here)

We haven't had guests here in years. I wonder how old Brianna is going to be before she asks her parents why she has never seen Grandma's house. When we DO have guests, we take them into the family room, where there are only two chairs (because with cages, a playpen and a treadmill there is no room for more. Walt moves in a couple of kitchen chairs for him and me to sit on while the guests have the recliners. It's no biggie. We have no close friends here in Davis any more anyway and it's rare when any family members stop by. And the kids grew up with my casual approach to housecleaning, so they are used to it. Embarrassed by it, but used to it.

ANYWAY, when faced with a rush cleaning job, you work your little tail off and hope that you can get the house to the point where you can apologize because it's so messy and not feel totally appalled that the guests are about to sign us up for a future edition of Hoarders.

While I was sweeping and steam cleaning the rest of the downstairs, Walt was in the living room sprinkling and vacuuming and moving stuff off of the flat surfaces. At one point I found Sheila looking very wistfully at the couch, which had a coffee table and a chair stacked on it (so Walt could vacuum the floor). You could tell she was wondering why she couldn't get up on "her" couch and look out the window.

By the time Norm and Olivia got here, through my eyes the house looked damned good, but I'm used to seeing the stacks and the dust and the clutter. I don't see anything unusual about a bright red blanket sitting in the middle of the living room floor with a broken secretary's chair standing on it. The blanket covers up the concrete, where the dogs ate through the rug, and the chair holds the blanket in place. It's all perfectly logical.

Still Norm and Olivia did stay for awhile and I even let Norm come into my office to check out the wifi set up. I mean, it's not as if they haven't SEEN this house at its cluttered best. Some of the stacks of stuff covered with dust were probably there the last time I hosted a family Christmas dinner, many years ago.

I figure we did our good deed for the day. We've given Norm and Olivia hours of things to talk about, and they can dine out for years on tales of "my brother's house is SO messy...."

When I went into the family room a few minutes ago, I see that the dogs have already torn up something and there were a couple of puddles from the puppy, so it will be no time at all before things will have settled back to normal again.

But for one bright shining moment, it only looks "terribly messy" and not deplorable.

Love Those Appliances

The coffee pot exploded this morning and spewed wet grounds and coffee all over everywhere, because I had put the pot on the burner slightly askew. The worst part of it was that I had to clean it up without having my morning coffee first!

As I was cleaning out the coffee pot, I was thinking about all my appliances. I don't have to have the biggest, the newest, the most expensive appliances and, if push comes to shove, I can do with much simpler, but I do love my electric toys.

I was looking at my KitchenAid mixer, for example. This is the real workhorse of my kitchen. I don't remember exactly when I got it. Walt must have given it to me as a gift, but I have been using it since the 1970s, when we lived in Oakland.

I got it during the years when I made all of our bread and the dough hook was just perfect. I made bread several times a week (and made lots of soup in the pot that was imbedded in one burner of our stove--loved that feature!)

When we moved to Davis I took cake decorating classes and started decorating cakes and selling them. I can't tell you how many probably hundreds of cakes and batches of frosting this mixer has mixed. I've never really had a problem with it in all these years of heavy use.

Now I don't use it all that much any more, more to blend potatoes for mashed potatoes and, more recently, to blend the cream mixture(s) for ice cream. I love this mixer and don't know how I could have done without it all these years. I wonder if they still make'em like that in these days of planned obsolescence.

This is a brand new Cuisinart, which we just got a couple of weeks ago because I was mixing up some bean soup and a bone from the ham I thought I had removed wedged itself between the blade and the container of the old machine and we were unable to remove it and get the thing functional again. However, the Cuisinart may be the appliance I use the most in the kitchen.

It was the only thing for me that I used the money in my father's bank account for after he died. I had long wanted a Cuisinart food processor and I went for the top of the line. I've never regretted it. It makes the very best pie crust (and yes, I am able to make a pie crust without it, but this just makes it easier). It works so much better than a regular blender for things like soup and it's great for chopping large quantities of vegetables. The old blender had stopped being able to grate cheese, but this new one does just fine.

I have this big cuisinart blender and the little Mrs. Kitchen food processor. I use the little one more than the big one, though the big one is great for smoothies and that sort of thing.

The little food processor was something I probably wouldn't have bought for myself, but Peggy gave it to me for Christmas several years ago and I'm surprised at how often I use it. Where the larger food processor is good for large amounts of vegetables, if you just want to chop up half an onion or mash an avocado this is great.

It has also come in handy for blending up meats for puppies who need to be encouraged to eat something and if I want just a quick pick-me-up, I toss a banana and some juice in the thing and in a couple of seconds I have a small smoothie. It's safe to say I use this little machine several times a week.

I don't use the bread baker as much as I did for the first few years after I bought it, but I sure have gotten my money's worth out of it. After I bought it I got back into making all of our bread again (I think at least some of the kids were still living at home when I bought it), but when it was just Walt and me, I had to admit that I was eating too much of the bread myself, and so I forced myself to stop baking homemade bread.

I still use it from time to time, though, for making bread dough to make hockies (fried bread dough). And once in awhile I'll make a loaf of bread if I'm too lazy to go to the store to buy a loaf. It's also great for pizza dough, and cheaper (to say nothing of tasting better!) than ordering pizza from a local pizza parlor.

Two years ago, Peggy gave me another kitchen appliance.

I'd long thought that it might be handy to have a vacuum food processor and it is! I save a lot of money on things like onions and cheese, which I don't use every day, and which go bad in the fridge. I also love it for buying in bulk at Costco and vacuum packing things before sticking them in the freezer. Somehow I can't get out of that "buy lots" mode that I was in for so many years when the kids were home. Using a vacuum seal makes all those foods last much longer and I don't throw away nearly as much any more.

Now, of course, I have a new appliance that I'm in love with Ashley gave me an ice cream maker for Christmas this year and I'm finding that it has seriously changed my attitude toward ice cream. I only let myself make one batch a week (which is three nights of a small dessert for Walt and me) but it's 100% pure, no artificial anything, and I find that I'm not tempted to buy ice cream treats in the store any more so, to my surprise, I think that it was actually a very good appliance to add and one that might actually help rather than hurt me.

(I'm not putting in a photo of the ice cream maker because I'm not making ice cream until tomorrow--testing out rum raisin this time--and won't set it up until then. Should be different from the kind you get in ice cream stores since this uses real rum...and nothing is cooked, so I think you can't gorge on it or you might have a hangover in the morning!)

Where No One Has Gone Before

Well, not "gone before" ever, but not in a very long time.

This entry is inspired by my constant inspiration, Bozoette Mary, who spent the weekend winterizing the family beach house. Now you may wonder why that would be an inspiration, since we don't have a beach house. But in her entry, she and her sister were cleaning out the kitchen and she says, "We were pleasantly surprised when the oldest thing we tossed had an expiration date of 2006 -- we were betting on 2004 or even earlier."

The comment got me to wondering what the oldest thing in my refrigerator is. It also got me to wondering when was the last time the refrigerator was actually cleaned out. So, thanks to Mary, I spent a chunk of time cleaning out the refrigerator and commenting on things that might be interesting. I even made a video about it (and isn't that compelling video?)

My self-imposed challenge was to find something older than 2006 so I could beat Mary. I think it's safe to say that I succeeded.

There were a lot of pickled "things" in the refrigerator, primarily cloves of garlic. Big jars with 4 cloves left in them that had been there for years. I at least equalled Mary's kitchen early on, with this one.

But without going too much further, I easily beat her with this bottle of "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter."

I'm the clear winner. But I was sure that if I got farther into the depths of the refrigerator I could do even better than that. And so I could.

I don't even remember what this was (but it's in the garbage now). But wait...there's more! Several years ago, when it first came out, I was given a sample can of Red Bull. I don't drink soft drinks, so it's been sitting in the door of the refrigerator all this time. How much time?

But then I found the clear winner. Beat that, Mary!

When I tossed the garlic cloves out, they actually smelled OK, but...over 10 years old was just a tad too long to keep, even for me.

So now I have a nice clean refrigerator and the oldest "sell by" date is at least within the current year! (Of course that means that unless I wait 10 years to clean the refrigerator again--a distinct possibility--I have no incentive to go hunting for expired food products!)

Failings

Our "doggie apartment" has become a doggie multiplex. I called Ashley this morning about a lost pomeranian someone had found and she said that she was just about to call me. It seems that her brain-damaged dog, Jessie, had reached tolerance with Nicki and it was becoming clear that Nicki had to leave. Of course I said we would take her back. So Nicki has moved back into the lower apartment and while I had intended to move Tater and Tot to the playpen, now that Nicki is here and I will be leaving the back door open again, and the temps are in the 40s, I decided the puppies needed to stay on a heating pad for awhile longer.

As for the pomeranian, Ashley checked him for a microchip and there was none and the woman who found him decided to keep him, hoping that someone would put up a lost dog poster. Ashley thought she had seen him at adoption with another group and thought he had been newly adopted. I didn't follow most of the conversation, because Tater and Tot decided to choose that moment to be starving (check the video of the day to see what Tot is like when she's hungry!), Lizzie and Sheila only wanted to jump at the pomeranian, who was being held by the woman, and since it wasn't going to concern my hosting the pomeranian, I just put Sheila on a leash to keep her from jumping, heated up a bottle and settled in to feed the puppies.

This does seem somewhat like Doggie Central today.

I thought about this house a lot when the pomeranian lady was here, how my inability to get and keep a neat and tidy home has changed my whole view of what life was going to be like after I was married.

We moved here from Berkeley in 1973 with 50 other families who all worked in the same office, which was being moved to Davis. Those people formed a social circle on the other side of town. They did things together, they had dinner parties, etc. We never did any of that. I was always embarrassed to invite anyone here to dinner...and Walt was, I'm sure, embarrassed to have co-workers see our house.

When I was growing up, Karen and I could never have friends come to visit because of my father and so we always had to go to other people's houses to hang out. Our house was going to be different, I promised myself before we had kids. I wanted to be the house where our kids and their friends hung out. But the only group who ever hung out here were the foreign students from the high school who were friends with our Brasilian student. This became kind of a meeting place for them after school every day for a year, but our own kids were off at other people's homes, homes that were neater, that had better "stuff" to play with (or a pool).

Occasionally I have invited friends to dinner, but it means going through a mid-year Mom's Christmas Crisis to do it and I'm always aware of the stuff that is piled in corners and the dust bunnies I've missed. So over the years I just stopped inviting friends to dinner, and consequently we rarely get invited to dinner, so the "let's drop around for coffee" groups I had hoped to find when we had our own home in a small town, never came to be.

I meet people at the door and stand there talking to them, trying to hold Lizzie and Sheila back from jumping at them, rather than invite them in because I'm mentally doing an assessment of just how bad the house may be at the moment. I finally threw up my hands and gave Ashley a key to the house because it was just easier for both of us. She hasn't run screaming into the night yet...and she gets to go upstairs too!

It seems like my whole life, and probably my relationship with our kids (it's no surprise that Tom always comes to town and stays with friends instead of here and my mother stays with my cousin when she comes to the area) has all been shaped by the one huge failing in my life -- I never learned how to organize, clean, or keep a house orderly. The older I get the more difficult it gets to even start because the greater the accumulation of the years becomes.

Of course, when it comes to people like Pomeranian Lady, the up side is that I don't care any more. I figure I gave her some nice horror story to go home and tell her kids.

And the dogs don't care what kind of housekeeper I am. As long as I feed them and love them, they seem to be perfectly happy. That is something, at least.

The Magic of Photo Shop

Before it gets lost in all my brilliant prose, here's a great article on Al Gore that I recommend reading. I think it nicely points out why the former Vice President is not running for President. (Also check out his video on my "Look at these Videos" page!)

It's no secret that "house cleaning" is not high on my list of priorities.

A week or so ago, I reported on Bissell tearing up a magazine and making a bed for himself under my desk.

I don't often publish photos like this, showing the floor cluttered with junk but, you know what? It doesn't usually look this bad, but it rarely looks as clean as you usually see it.

Photoshop is a wonderful tool. A couple of years ago, I posted this photo:

This was the original photo:

Note the stuff on the floor, the dust up against the leg of the desk, the container under the desk and the chair in the way. All cleaned away with PhotoShop. I even brightened the look of the rug with PhotoShop.

I frequently use PhotoShop to make things look better than they really are. I've gotten pretty good at it and am almost more proud of the photos where you don't have a clue that I've "fixed it" than photos where I've made obvious corrections.

This morning I finally got around to sweeping up Bissell's magazine bed. Including getting the broom and the dustpan, sweeping up the mess, and taking it to the garbage, the task took roughly two minutes.

Fixing up the above photo took at least five minutes or more, to get it "just right." Sometimes fixing a photo to my satisfaction may take as long as 15 minutes.

Now if I had kept the floor clean to begin with, think how much time I would have saved and I could still have taken a photo that I wouldn't feel needed any "fixing."

But then I suppose I have to look not at how much time it would save to keep the house clean, but how much knowledge of PhotoShop I'm gaining by fixing all of these photos that need touch-ups.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

(and I suppose you'll never again look at my photos without wondering if they've been fixed, and if so, what I thought I had to fix. Heh heh heh. That will remain my little secret!)

I Got Ssssteam Heat

t's not often ... well, let's be honest, I've never done it. I've never written an entry about how much fun I had cleaning house.

(I will now take a brief moment to let you all recover your equilibrium at reading that I mentioned the words "cleaning house" after the words "how much fun I had.")

One of the benefits of being an occasional insomniac is that you see really weird things on television. Even stranger is falling asleep during regular programming and waking up during an infomercial.

One time I did that and woke up when I heard a voice say "My name is Audra Sykes...." It was Paul's widow extolling the benefits of some facial cream which had made all of her wrinkles disappear. (I saw this about three years ago and she just celebrated her 31st birthday this month, which may make the thrill of losing her "wrinkles" somewhat suspect!)

A month or so ago, I woke up during a commercial for a steam floor cleaner which, I learned the more I watched it, was safe for laminate floors (i.e., Pergo). Now maybe those of you who are not domestically challenged have known about steam floor cleaners for a long time, but this was a new world to me.

I went to Epinions.com to check out reviews of this particular cleaner and they seemed to be mixed, but people mentioned other brands and so I was on a hunt for buying a good steam floor cleaner. In trying to care for the Pergo and keep it in any even partially decent looking condition, I've gone with Swifters and an electric broom and mopping with real Pergo cleaner. Why not try steam?

The Bissel floor cleaner arrived from Amazon.com a couple of days ago, but with Chunk pooping out applesauce every time I turned around, and the bigger dogs running through the swamp in the back yard and tracking it into the house, I didn't feel like ripping open the box and plunging headlong into a cleaning marathon.

But today is Saturday and Saturday was to be Chunk's first appearance at Petco. I got her bathed this morning and all sweet smelling and Walt and I took her up to Petco. She met Half Pint's siblings (Half Pint has been adopted but several of her siblings have not) and she immediately tried to attack them through the fence. Must be some family scent, I figured.

I handed her off to one of the volunteers and Walt and I went on our errands, me to buy coffee beans, he to buy toilet paper. As I was coming back toward Petco, I could hear Chunk barking her head off. She was trying to get to the dogs in the next pen. Ashley showed up and moved her to another pen, presumably farther away from other dogs. I do so worry about that little girl when she grows up.

Anyway, with Chunk out of the house, the plan was to try out the new steam cleaner. I was only going to do the hall and the kitchen, until we knew whether Chunk was coming back or not.

I had only cleaned a few feet before I decided that I was in love. It cleans like a dream. It does, indeed, "bring back the original luster" of the Pergo, which had faded with the use of chemical cleaners. It doesn't dry instantly, as promised, but dries soon enough that it's no problem (gives me a chance to sit down for a bit).

I even cleaned the floor in the laundry room. I haven't thought of my "what were you thinking??!!!" folly for years. We moved into this house in 1973, with 5 children between the ages of 18 mos. and 7 yrs and I actually chose linoleum that was white with a lovely blue embossed pattern on it.

"Are you sure you want white?" Walt asked.

I assured him that it would be a joy to keep clean.

Well, we hadn't seen the blue since the first week. The house had no landscaping yet, so within minutes, the kids were tracking in dirt that settled into those convenient grooves on top of the blue. It very quickly became a black and white floor and, of course, I quickly gave up any pretense of keeping it clean.

Walt tried once to bring the blue back. He spent an hour on hands and knees with heavy duty cleaner and a toothbrush and he only cleaned two squares of the linoleum and you couldn't really see the blue anyway.

That's not really an issue any more since all of that was gone with the installation of the Pergo, except for the stuff in the laundry room which, within literally seconds of steam cleaning was once again a blue and white embossed tile.

Now I don't, in my wildest imagination, picture me suddenly becoming Mrs. Clean and whipping out this cleaner every weekend. In fact, I'll probably have to dust it the next time I use it. But for one brief--literally shining--moment, the floor looked great.

I went up to Petco to get Chunk, having had no phone call from Ashley, and learned she had just been adopted. I got to meet her adoptive family, a police officer in Sacramento and her husband. They have seen the kind of mistreatment that pit bulls get and want to be sure Chunk has a good home. Ashley says they are the "perfect" family. I was sad to say goodbye to my little Chunkabunk, but I did not come home empty handed. I have a singleton Chihuahua mix male puppy who is trying to figure out what this house is all about.

In keeping with my penchant for naming dogs (sometimes) with things that are going on in my life, I've named this new little guy Bissell! Bissell was doing well until Sheila started eating his food after he walked away from it. Bissell walked back toward it and before I could get him, Sheila had lashed out at him. The puppy ran yelping and yelping all across the family room, peeing all the way.

Sigh.

Walt did yeomen's work today with the floor project and then, because he obviously read my entry called "I'm delighted" and got the hint, he took me out to dinner. A good night!

I Have F.S.S.

We received notice of a lovely quasi-gift from the supermarket where I do most of our shopping. They sent a card which you could redeem for a poinsettia plant the next time you did your shopping.

My initial thought was that I could take it out to the cemetery to put on the boys' grave until Christmas, when I have a little tree that I got at Big Lots yesterday (and decorated to match the article I was working on all day!)

I checked out the plant display, took a look at the size pot that the poinsettia was in and realized that it was about 10x too big to fit in that little hole they give you for flowers and plants. There only seemed to be only one size available.

I thought about picking up a plant anyway and bringing it home, but then I realized that my F.S.S. prevents me from really being able to enjoy the lovely plant. Walt has F.S.S. too, which makes it that much worse.

What?

You never heard of F.S.S.

Around here we call it "Flat Surface Syndrome." People with F.S.S. have this strange aversion to seeing any bare flat surface, so any flat surface becomes a place to lay "stuff."

I remember back before we moved to Davis, when we ordered a new mattress for one of the kids' beds. There was something wrong with the mattress and it had to be returned. We moved it out into the living room, awaiting the guys who were going to pick it up.

Within a matter of a few hours, you couldn't see the top of the box that held the mattress. It was covered with toys and clothes. It was a new flat surface that had to be filled.

There is another problem that people with F.S.S. have. Once you put something on a flat surface, it immediately disappears. It exists only in some dusty portion of your brain which vaguely remembers putting it down, but until you've searched the house for an hour looking for the slip of paper with an important phone number on it does the dust clear and suddenly you remember putting it on top of the box that's on top of the platter that's inside the salad bowl that's on top of the trivet on top of the kitchen counter.

I watch Oprah periodically, and I've seen other "organize your life" TV specials. Sometimes they are very comforting because occasionally the F.S.S. sufferers who are helped are actually worse than Walt and I are.

Some gallant, inspiring employee of some television program goes into the home, works with the tearful victim, gets him or her (usually her) to sort things into things that have to be thrown out and things to keep. And then they send the victim off on a spa holiday and when she returns, the house is pristine. There is a place for everything and everything is in its place.

I want to revisit those houses in six months. I'll be willing to bet there are piles all over the house again. It takes more than the housing equivalent of a Super Nannie to cure a long-time sufferer of F.S.S.

People have occasionally helped me organize my life. Or, on rarer occasions, I have tried to get things organized myself.

It's awful.

See, this house may look like something you'd see on a local news expose, while you shake your head and mutter "I had no idea she lived like that...." but when it gets cleaned up, I can literally find nothing.

It may take me a long time to find some things, but I know which pile I probably left it in and so I can spend half an hour sorting through a pile or two and generally find what I'm looking for.

When the house is organized there is no place to look. There are no piles. I don't know where to begin looking for that elusive slip of paper.

But of course, it does present a problem. You can never entertain because only your best friends and the people who take care of your dogs really know what the house looks like.

And when some store offers you a beautiful poinsettia, you can't accept it because there are no more flat surfaces left and so you have no place to put it.

Sometimes it's a bitch, having F.S.S.

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I'm going off to Cousins Day tomorrow (yay!!!) so don't look for the next entry of this journal until the late afternoon. We're finally going to drink those pumpkin martinis!