30 April 2009

DAMMIT!!!!!!!!!

It's my blog and I can shout if I want to!

Last Friday at work I broke a tooth. No pain, but I hied myself to the dentist who took impressions (of what, the painfully jagged edges??) and told me the new guy would be ready in a week, his office would ring.

K, well, if you follow this blog (btw if you do, leave a comment, I've become convinced I am invisible) you know two important things about me-that I don't get a lot of phone calls I care about so I rarely check my voice mail, and 2, that I am worked obsessed and try to schedule appointments for the weekends. I chose my health care providers by three criteria and weekend hours was high on the priority line.

So the new tooth comes in early and the dentist's office leaves me a message which I get later than I should have. He has two appointments available, one on Thursday morning and one on Saturday.

K, so I call during a break and I get Thursday off and I am getting ready to go in when the phone rings...

Bottom line, his office will call back if they can get me in today but my first thing in the morning appointment is out because he's had an emergency case come in. And oh btw, since I chose the Thursday appointment they gave the Saturday one to someone else.

So I'm on standby for the dentist. Swell.

I never take personal days. I schedule most of my appointments for anything before/after work or on the weekends.

So I will use the time I have unexpectedly to clean house and make sure I have sickroom supplies in case this damn flu hits as hard as it looks as though it may.

Oh, I just love the 21st century! Well, maybe I do after all. They didn't have disposable vinyl gloves and isopropyl back in 1918, did they?

20 April 2009

Things change daily, but as of now I am still employed, and striving to keep it that way. My hours have been cut-I only put in 43 hours last week,lol! I was putting in 60.

I try to keep busy with the extra daylight hours I now have courtesy of the hours cut. I made a killer purse, and am about to start another; I started another scarf, and I am spending a lot of time figuring out how to make The Tin Shack more winter proof.

Re The Tin Shack winterizing, the work done last spring and summer paid off enough this past (passing?) winter for me to be inspired to do more this spring and summer. I know, I am on a tight budget and so have to look carefully for the bargains. I also have to use ingenuity and improvisation.

For example, I am redoing my exterior door frames with found materials; I made draft stoppers using trouser legs and the old bath towels I almost tossed-WHAT WAS I THINKING?? I mean those poor things were poised over the bin when I noticed the cats had dragged an old pair of slacks out of the Goodwill box. Really, what was I thinking?! I cut the legs off the pants and stuffed one of the towels into the cut leg-WOW!

The draft stoppers worked really well, so well that I dragged out the rest of the pants and made whole frame draft stoppers-yeah, my doors are a warped mess-that I stapled to the frame, which clued me in that the frames needed replacing, so I started looking for construction leftovers from a friend in the business.

This weekend I was going to get uber serious about the Goodwill boxes but my previously mentioned friend decided to drop over unannounced to see if my garage sale power mower would fire up after my abuse of it this winter-no cover, no draining, nothing. I parked it at the end of the driveway in October and beyond a daily check of it's whereabouts, didn't really think about it until early Saturday morning as I passed the kitchen window and saw Jack out there on the lawn with his helper spraying WD40 all over the cables...

By the end of Saturday afternoon my entire front yard had been spring-cleaned.

Jack mowed and I felt guilty about going back inside so I got the rake and started raking.

That led to straightening the 6x6's lining my drive (another construction left-over of Jack's) which led to trimming the privets, which led to more raking, which led to a new compost heap, which I will have to make a point of telling Jack is a compost heap because he has a nasty habit of carting off my compost heaps thinking the heap is just a heap of leaves I forgot to cart off. Hmmm, it may be time to build a real compost bin.

OK, now halfway through raking the driveway Jack finished mowing, and went over to his ex-wife's to fix her roof-they aren't really exes, they just can't live in the same house and she divorced him a few years ago. He makes a big thing out of calling her his ex with benefits. He gets Sunday dinner and the honey-do lists, laundry, a place to spend the holidays, and probably the other kinds of benefits that are really none of my business...

But after Jack left I kept working, and by the time I went in last night the yard really looked good. So good that this morning after Breakfast Club (with the previously mentioned couple who are Baptists who go to breakfast before church instead of after the way we Anglo-Catholics do) I hit the clearance rack at the Wal-Mart Garden Center.

I got a six pack of petunias ($1.75 for six) and three bare root roses (an incredible $3 each, I was thrilled). I love the clearance rack!

The petunias needed a pricey ($3.75-OUCH!) sack of Miracle Gro potting soil, but I am mollified that I was able to get enough out of the bag to plant my little cherry tomato seeds in the third of the hanging baskets I had left over from last summer.

Everything is planted. The petunias look great on the double shepherd's hook, the tomato doesn't look like anything yet. And the roses are planted along the front walk.

So, I guess I'll do the Goodwill boxes next weekend.