blizzard?

back home

We were in Maryland for the last week, at my parents' house. My two brothers who live in California, one of my sisters who lives near to my parents, and Dennis and I started the work of preparing the house to sell so my parents can move into a smaller living space, a living space on one floor. My mother likes to accumulate, um, stuff, and so there was much clearing out to do before we could begin to clean and paint. But we got the front room, dining room, and family room cleaned and painted (many many coats required, since the unpainted-in-40-years walls were very thirsty), as well as the entryway and the upstairs hallway. Sometimes it seems we accomplished a lot. Sometimes it seems that the five of us should have been able to do more.

But we worked steadily, listened charitably to each other's music, and occasionally groused about each other's painting habits. (Note to myself: when I start complaining about the drips in the paint that someone else put up while I am busy making my own drips, it means I need to go take a nap. From painting mullions {all 72 of them = 218 small strips of wood surrounding them} in the big windows in the front room and dining room, I also learned that painting mullions is a labor of love. And I better understand "decadence": ostensive definition: the desire to make houses *look* colonial even though we now have the technology to make large panes of glass so that mullions are no longer a requirement for large windows.)

I also got to work on her algebra with the coolest niece in the world.

We are home now, though, having arrived on the midnight jet, and, this morning, just missed the trash truck on its bi-weekly pass through. There is still snow here.

Better, however, is the current Carnival of Feminists.