This week’s update, or “take my junk, please!”

I had an agreeable Thanksgiving, except for having to get up early [for me]. The food turned out very well. Aside from that, it was all about football! I am very thankful that the Patriots were kind enough to win, and not spoil our day. 🙂 Dad and I watched, at least in part, three games in a row, and didn’t do a lot of talking. I am getting way too interested in football these days, sheesh. How did this happen?!? I was also reinstalling Windows 7 on Dad’s laptop which had become corrupted, so he couldn’t log in. I brought Dad’s laptop home with me to finish installing stuff I couldn’t find on disks, because I’d forgotten to bring an ethernet cable with me and needed to connect the laptop to a router so I could reinstall its wireless drivers from the web. I was completely successful in making Dad’s laptop as good as new and hence I’m feeling very full of myself, heh. I even put a Fringe wallpaper on Dad’s desktop as a surprise. He loves it. 🙂

I’m still working very hard on purging, cleaning out, and getting rid of stuff inside and outside the house. The monster bush is about 2/3 down now. It’s a slow process because the branches have to be felled carefully and strategically, and once they’re down, it takes far longer to cut them up and clear them away than it did to cut them down. The branches are so big, and so tricky to cut, that I clear away every bit of them before I cut the next ones, for safety reasons as well as practicality. Deciduous trees would be far easier because they’re bare of leaves; evergreens never are, and all that fluffy foliage takes a lot of trimming. I have developed a distinct loathing for landscaping these days. Bushes Are Evil, and forsythia is a pox upon the land! Fooey!

The new chain saw works fine but is a glutton for bar oil. I also had an unplanned lesson in how to replace the chain when it comes off the bar today, *grump*. At least it’s a lot easier to manage than the old chain saw. But chain sawing is just plain hard work, and it requires constant bending and stooping. After two or three hours at it, I’m pretty tired, and fantasizing about Napalm.

I’ve been clearing junk from the crawl space. On Tuesday I made six trips in a row to the transfer station and got rid of two ancient gas-powered lawn mowers, an old bicycle, assorted lawn furniture, two trash bags full of random small stuff, and other things. Tomorrow I may make as many trips again with all kinds of crap. A lot of this was down there when I bought the house. I’ve offered a few items on the freecycling list but most isn’t worth giving away. But it’s not all junk–I’ve found a few treasures, too, things I can use and need and forgot I even had. It feels really good to get the place cleared out–it’s been nagging at me, like a stone in your shoe when you can’t stop walking to take it out. I’ve taken a box of books to the library for their annual sale, but I don’t know how many books I’ll purge, since I’ve done culls of my book collections before.

This clear-it-out/get-it-done-finally mania that hit me like a bolt of lightning on November 15 (when I looked around my living room and decided, “this shit is going“) has progressed–if that’s the right word–to tearing apart the house. Specifically, the bathroom. Mind you, this is yet another of those projects which have been sitting there unfinished for years. The bathroom sink has been unusable and non-functioning for…I can’t even remember how long. I’ve had a new sink, in cartons, in the front room since…again, I can’t even remember. I had this idea that I wanted to replace the floor, and that was hanging up the whole project. Now I’ve just said, screw it–I’ll redo the walls and replace the sink, if the floor is the bottleneck for that whole process, the floor can wait! I had the tub redone a couple of years ago, I had that Bathfitters company come in and do that. So last night and tonight I’ve been ripping the ugly tile board off the walls, and working toward getting the old sink out, which is tricky because it’s been unused for so long. (One of the shut-off valves is stuck, and getting various chemical applications to try to loosen it up.) But gods, it feels good to get that hideous tile board off! I’m just going to smooth out the walls and paint everything white.

I have pretty blue holiday lights: electric candles in the windows and twinkly blue lights around all three of the front windows. I could never do that before I cut down the monster bush’s [relatively] little brother in front of the house! I even put a blue light bulb in the side porch light.

I can hardly believe what I’ve gotten, and am getting, accomplished, in such a short period of time–I don’t know what hit me! But I’m tired of it, I really am, literally and figuratively. I want to get back to my regular routines, I want things to settle back down and stabilize, I hate transitions! And it’s such hard work, and it’s so slow–especially the chain sawing, because that’s dangerous, and I’m being very careful and methodical. I’ve probably spent 20 minutes studying the branches, and calculating, and thinking how they’d fall and where to cut, for each minute I actually ran the saw, and I still had some scary moments. I wake up early and lie there thinking about how much I have to get done. I moved my bed to see if it helped me sleep better to be pointing in a different direction. It’s only been one night so it’s too soon to tell.

I’m reading an ebook of The Count of Monte Cristo from Gutenberg on Kindle for PC, on my netbook, before I turn out the light. I should finish it by 2015, at this rate. *wry grin* I’ve never read it before! It’s keeping me up too late. I’m watching Ondine for a cycling video right now. Three episodes of Sherlock were definitely not enough! I liked it a lot more than I expected.