It's only halfway through the day, so technically too early for a progress report, but I'm having lunch at the computer.

This morning was Phase I of getting signed up for pre-kindergarten. Aside from not having proof of his age (we never did get around to ordering his birth certificate), everything went fine. Now we wait to see if he's overqualified.

After that, we came home, and I cleaned up the kitchen a bit... mostly just unloading and reloading the dishwasher, and neatly stacking all the stuff that's out of the cabinets so that my husband can put the new shelves in. (Eventually. Tonight we get to do the Chuck E Cheese thing in celebration of my son spending three nights in a row completely in his own bed.)

Now I'm in the middle of cleaning out the linen closet. I'd moved the cleaning supplies from under the bathroom sink (since my son is quite dextrous enough to defeat the safety latches) to over the fridge (where even *I* can't reach them), so I moved the extra toilet paper and boxes of tissues there, freeing up a whole linen closet shelf. Now I'm sorting our eclectic collection of towels, and getting rid of the fancy ruffled ones we were given as a wedding present and have never used. Officially, our towels are off-white and hunter green, but we've never managed to give up our assorted bachelor-pad towels so we're more often using the mauve or blue or, when we're desperate, lime green ones (those are last resorts not because of the color, but because they're not oversized and we've gotten spoiled). I think I'm going to get rid of all of them and buy a larger set of matching ones.

Next is sorting out all the sheet sets and figuring out what we have that goes together. Anything that doesn't goes down to the laundry-room shelves to wait for the rest of the set to appear. And then I'm going to put a rack on the inside of the linen-closet door, to take up the 4" of clearance between it and the actual start of the shelves. That'll become the storage space for all the little household items that don't have a home... extra switchplates, all that sort of junk.

Not bad progress for a Monday.

I finished the bear. The only mohair I had (I like synthetics better, tradition be hanged) was some ultrashort stuff I ended up with way too much of, that was really for smaller bears. I made do, though, and picked a nice antique white, with dark brown suede paws. A very generic, traditional bear, so I had to name it (excuse me, "her") Vanilla Bean. Bear names are very important to bear people. VB will end up with a dress made from something of her grandmother's, I think.

And no, I didn't quite make the deadline. I called her house and discovered that about the time I was putting the finishing touches on the bear, her grandmother died. I'd've rather been able to give the bear to her grandmother (not that she'd have been aware of it... then again, who knows) but as it was, I went down and gave it to her in the counseling room with the chaplain and whatnot. Awwww.

The bear

My mother commented that I was awfully generous (the subtext was "you're *too* generous") with my time/talents. I told her that I suspected it was an avoidance behavior... if I finish a non-gift bear, there's no good reason not to put it on eBay, up against those four- and five-digit bears. So I'm gonna do it. This week.

I also have an appointment tomorrow morning with the school district, to see if my son qualifies for pre-kindergarten. We've been wanting to get him into preschool or whatever, just because he's an only child and, outside of church, his only friends are grownups. It's kind of scary... in just over a month, he could be in school half days, five days a week. What will I do with myself?

Today I called my cleaning lady and rescheduled for tomorrow, since today was the only day we could manage to get the church finance team (the quasitreasurer, the pastor, and me) together for our monthly meeting before the quasitreasurer goes out of town. Except the QT called me this morning from the hospital, where her grandmother is, and said she'd been there on deathwatch since 3:30am, could we cancel the meeting? Um, yeah.

So it's still a good thing, because I got the reports done anyway (I work best under a deadline). I'm refreshing my accounting-programming memory (it's been quite a few years since I maintained an accounting system at code level) and basically writing an accounting system from scratch, more or less, because I'm an old-skool programmer and we always reinvent the wheel. Actually, it's not that hard, since I'm using Quicken (the QT is computer-skills-impaired) as a front end, and OO spreadsheets for reporting, so it just takes a little Perl/MySQL glue in the middle to make it all work.

Anyway, so I called my cleaning lady back, and she did some stuff while I decluttered the living room some more, and worked more on getting the overcrowded workroom cleaned up (I haven't been able to get a vacuum in there in too long, and there's both natural and synthetic fur all over the carpet). After lunch, I grabbed the shopping list on the way to take the cleaning lady home, and she said she had all *her* housework done so she'd like to go to WalMart with me, so we did. And in the course of that she tsked over the printers bouncing around in the back of the van, so after we took the groceries back to the fridge we went by the thrift store and dropped those off, finally.

My husband ended up working late (I *still* think "Sarbaines-Oxley" [sp] sounds like it ought to be followed by "Syndrome" or some such) so I ran some deli meat and cheeses and sammich rolls over to the QT's house because I know when you're doing the whole family-in-town-for-a-funeral thing you need lots of decent noshing stuff because nobody's eating right. (We're not a Lutheran church, but nevertheless when there's a crisis, we show up with food.) After that, my son and I hit his favorite wrap place for dinner, then went next door and bought a new Veggie Tales video, which he watched, then zonked without me even having to stay in the room (we've been working on his going-to-bed-alone skills for awhile), and I did some more living-room decluttering.

All the toys are more-or-less back in the playroom (which is presently mostly occupied by a card table with the newly-acquired giant Playmobil pirate ship and island, hence the into-the-living-room spillage), the bench seat is *finally* back in the van, and I just chatted with the QT and discovered that her grandmother is still hanging on, and oh, did she mention that she's a huge antique teddy bear fan? So now I'm wondering how fast I can make a bear, and if I even have anything suitable for an antique bear.

Overall, it's progress. And thanks to my handy-dandy inventory spreadsheet, I know exactly which tote to go to for teddy-bear fabric, and I can look up what I've got without having to paw through it. And in case anybody's thinking "Okay, I can see the whole geek mommy thing, but... teddy bears?" let me point out that it's purely mercenary, I don't collect (or even particularly like, other than I can appreciate the workmanship in a well-made one) teddy bears. It's just that in the course of learning how to make stuffed animals (which I do like, but still don't collect because it'd get out of control, and where would I put them?) I read a lot of bear books, and still wasn't tempted until I saw a bear go for $1500 on eBay, which was jaw-dropping to me. (I've since seen a bear go for $15,000.)

And so I decided "I've gotta get a piece of that." That was, oh, a year or more ago. And I still haven't made (finished, anyway) a bear to actually sell. I end up giving them all away. The problem is, I need a deadline to motivate me. Like, say, getting a bear done before someone's grandmother dies. Gotta go...

Not a great deal got done today, so I'm a bit grumpy. I did get grocery shopping done (and got a new rice cooker, since our steamer can make enough for two and a little besides, but our "little besides" now eats enough rice for a grownup these days), but then a series of small brushfires on the Phoenyx took up bits and pieces of my day, so that I didn't get much of anything done. Other than play with my son, which is important too.

I hate maintaining lame-duck code. Unfortunately, Gamehawk's not quite ready for prime time yet.

I ended up staying home, and got a moderate amount of errand-running done, and not as much housework as I'd hoped. I did get laundry mostly finished, and I did some cleaning in the laundry room. Whenever we empty a box of detergent, we use it to stuff lint in. There are probably three dozen lint-filled screaming-orange Tide boxes neatly stacked on the dryer. I'm throwing those away.

Heck, I'm throwing (or giving) everything away. I should have had a garage sale this weekend... one of our odd neighbors is moving out (has been, for several months) and is having an auction tomorrow. Now, as I said, he's been moving out. He's got a detached garage, a decent-sized house (for one guy; 1200 sf or so), and a paved(!) backyard. Which has had a semi-trailer in it for quite some time. He's got several trucks with fifth-wheels, a couple of flatbed trailers (including a Bobcat hauler), and has been steadily filling the flatbeds and hauling them... somewhere. One never knows what he's going to come up with... a pallet of Quikrete (he used the Bobcat for that) here, a stack of wooden children's chairs there, the kitchen sink. The other day I looked out and he had a pony. A PONY. As my husband put it, watching the latest load come out, "It's gone beyond 'secret underground base' to 'interdimensional portal,' you know."

Now, he does have some sort of business (a Bobcat being a bit too expensive to justify otherwise), so I can only conclude that some of the stuff is coming *in* before going back out on the trucks. Still... a pony.

Laundry's been behind lately. We've done a load here, a load there, as needed, and it's built up, so yesterday I sorted some stuff out and got the process started. Today I sorted three baskets of clean stuff and got more stuff sorted out so we have nice full closets again.

I noticed something interesting. We finally own enough red clothing to actually run loads of red: nearly all kid's clothes. I don't wear true reds (I was born a redhead, though it faded to brown with the merest reminder of red before I was school age, but I still have the concomitant complexion and I just don't like red) and my husband doesn't very often (in his case more because of the laundry issue) but probably half of my son's outfits involve some primary red. Nearly all of the rest involve dark blue.

I'm not sure if this reflects clothing trends, or my mother-in-law's preference (she buys him so much I almost never get to/have to, aside from underwear and socks... sometimes). I've bought him a few winter outfits, and they tend to reflect my preferences... earthtones, mostly. But summer stuff? It's all primary red, blue, and the occasional yellow or bright green (green invariably involves dinosaurs, I think).

Makes laundry sorting pretty easy, at least.

Tomorrow I have another decision to make... my son is going to Grandma's to spend the night tonight and go to the zoo tomorrow. I'm trying to decide if I should go along (to the zoo, not the sleepover) or stay home and work. I was planning to go, but now I'm thinking I could get a lot of work done while he's gone.

Since finding out the neighbor had a termite problem, we've been planning to have a bug inspection, and probably have them spray for general-purpose indoor bugs while they're at it. It's an 85-year-old house, so we have plenty of spiders and whatnot. Generally, the spiders keep the whatnot under control so we have a balanced ecosystem and nothing gets out of hand, but lately we've had an epidemic of mud daubers (wasps), many of which have been in the house. Mud daubers are relatively nonaggressive, but between a naive dog, cat, and four-year-old, I don't find it hard to believe that one might feel a bit threatened.

So that's been a kind of vague "we should do that someday" sort of thing. But yesterday I let the dog out and, when I came back in, felt something tickling my arm. I brushed away what I figured was YA fly or other stupid outdoor bug, and what fell stunned to the floor was a gen-you-whine German cockroach.

I hate cockroaches. Well, let me rephrase that. I hate cockroaches being in my house. I'm hoping that this fellow was a refugee from next door, from where my elderly neighbor has moved into assisted living, and he was looking for someplace where all the food *hadn't* suddenly disappeared. Just in case, the cleaning lady and I spent today emptying the cupboards out, searching for signs of infestation, and cleaning up the various bits of spilled flour and whatnot that might attract them. Fortunately, nary a sign of them.

So everything's happily sealed up in plastic bags, I'm going to get some preventative stuff (I think we still have some diatomaceous-earth bait out in the garage, provided it's still sealed against moisture) and make sure they don't move in. And now getting the bug guys in here ASAP has become a much higher priority. Time to get the basement cleaned out.

That's the lovely thing about housekeeping. It's an endless holding action. Here it is, first day back from a long weekend, and I'm having to go back to grocery shopping, which was the thing I last wrote about when I left off.

Not much new done today (getting the menu planned and writing the shopping list took most of the morning), other than I have a new assistant. My four-year-old announced that he wanted to cook "just like you do" when he got older. And then suddenly his face lit up. "I'm *four* now! I *can* cook!" Um... okay. It's a challenge finding a recipe that doesn't require handling raw meats, cutting anything, or very much measurement.

So we made Chicken Nugget Casserole, which is a pretty good recipe for single guys of any age who have a few people to cook for.

13.5 oz box chicken nuggets
1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese (I use Frigo, none of that nasty Kraft sawdust junk)
28 oz jar prepared spaghetti sauce (I used Prego)
1 cup (4 oz) shredded mozzarella cheese
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning

Layer everything in a 11x7 baking dish, cover with foil, and bake at 350 for 30-35 minutes or until everything's heated up. (I took the foil off at the end so the mozzarella would toast a little.) Serve over spaghetti noodles.

I've pretty much resigned myself to needing to put more time into the business *before* I get caught up on the house. I got an order from the website (first one since I fully automated it with Paypal, yay!), but that was for a "stock" item I've farmed out to a subcontractor. So today I got grocery shopping done, and then dropped off the work there, along with a shipping box with prepaid label.

This weekend's the big 4th of July beer bust at the in-law's, so I'm presently boiling five pounds of new potatoes for a potato salad, and and am pretending to cook beans for baked beans (my family recipe calls for soaking/cooking dry beans first, but I cheat and buy canned, so I don't need to actually fix those until tomorrow).

In between, while supervising my son's bath, etc., I've been playing with the foil and nondrying clay and will soon, I hope, be casting plaster molds for maskmaking. Once that's done, I can mass-produce (for very limited values of "mass") some masks, which will improve the business's rather sad bottom line... important, since technically that's what's supposed to be paying my housekeeper.

When I don't do any housework, I just don't blog on it.

I haven't made much progress lately. Once again, I'm just playing catchup, getting the kitchen cleaned up, etc.

On the plus side, I've gotten some work done on the business, and Gamehawk. But those are topics for other blogs.

My husband took both Friday and today (Monday) off, so it's been a long weekend houseworkwise. My mother came up to visit for my son's birthday party, so she got to see the progress on the floor and the curtains, and the apparent lack of progress everywhere else. She commented favorably on the former, and politely ignored the latter. (We converse in email almost daily, so she knows some of what I've done, and why stuff hasn't gotten done.)

My husband unloaded the dishwasher for the first time in I-don't-know-how-long, which was quite welcome. This break from his classes will be good for all of us, I think.

And my son got a monster Playmobil pirate set... the island and the Red Corsair. We've never had Playmobil before, so it will be interesting to see if we can keep track of all the tiny bits. We also don't have conventional Lego, just the larger Duplo, so we haven't had the really tiny toys yet. (Well, technically there's his daddy's Lego, but we haven't gotten that out yet. I don't think he has the grip strength to take apart the small pieces.) I'm once again glad we put Pergo in the living room. We have very short-pile carpet everywhere, but it's still much easier to sweep the floor and then pick bitty swords and cannonballs out of the fuzz, rather than out of the vac bag.

We've moved my cleaning lady's visit up to tomorrow instead of Wednesday, since she's having six(!) teeth extracted that morning and probably won't be up to any cleaning. Yowie.

He's only four, and he's had his first geek birthday.

Today (technically yesterday, since I'm writing this after midnight waiting for the sinus meds to kick in) we celebrated (belatedly) my son's fourth birthday with a "rocket party."

My husband's latest perseveration is model rockets, as I may have mentioned here before, so that was what we did for the party... rocket dogs (hot dogs on sticks wrapped in breadstick dough, with dough fins), rocket chips (paper-covered Pringles cans with nosecones and fins), rocket salad (watermelon on a skewer, with a wedge-shaped bit of cantaloupe for a nosecone). Rocket cake was supposed to be an ice-cream log turned on end with a nosecone and fins, but everyone was out so I baked a simple chocolate cake at the last minute, cut it in half lengthwise (reserving half for the grownups), and cut a triangle of Jell-O Jigglers for a nosecone. The "ice cream" to go with it was actually Bomb... er, Rocket Pops.

None of that was actually as hard as it sounded. I am, after all, a professional mommy/housewife so I cook all the time anyway.

My husband, on the other hand, took Friday off work to build rockets. Out of paper. The kids decorated them with stickers, and then went out to the end of the street where he launched them (the kids got to thread them onto the launch rod and/or push the ignition button, depending on their dexterity and courage level) and we watched them vanish. Age range was 2-4, with a couple of older siblings (who decided this was the coolest preschooler party they had EVER been dragged along to), and most of the kids were thrilled... some last-minute reworking of shock cords meant a little more delay between rockets than we'd hoped, and toddler attention span isn't that long, but overall fun was had by all.

And now I think my sinuses have recovered from chasing down errant rockets and nosecones from a field of something I was apparently mildly allergic to, so I'm off to bed. Tomorrow I clean everything up.

Okay, so we've technically been making progress all along, but today we made some really good progress.

("We," on Wednesdays, means me and the cleaning lady.)

She brought over her vacuum, since she sneers at both of mine... a Eureka battery-operated, which works really nicely *when* I remember to recharge it, and a Hoover stick vac that I mostly use on the bare floors (and for its attachments, which the Eureka lacks). We cleared the floors in my son's bedroom and playroom, and picked up an amazing amount of dog hair. I vacuumed the filters on the air purifiers, and cranked them up to max, so hopefully by the time Mom gets here Friday we'll have most of the pet allergens under control (she's mildly allergic to dogs).

The living room's very nearly clean, except for the folding table (which has been there since pre-Christmas), and the van bench, which is still there. I have two more printers and a bunch of keyboards and mice to drop off at the DAV, along with a bag of books, and then the van is emptied out. Theoretically, we could put the van bench in the garage now that it's no longer Backdrop Painting Central, but it's over 100 pounds so sometimes it's just not worth moving.

My workroom, on t'other hand, is still a mess, including the vacuuming thing. I tend to put that off, as being "business-related" and thus something that shouldn't be worked on until the house is cleaned, but that's the largest depository of pet dander at the moment. Not to mention that I need to get everything out of there so we (and that "we" is my husband and I) can get the ceiling redone. Once VBS is over, we're going to have to get cracking so we can get all the home repairs done during his school break.

This afternoon, I need to bake six dozen cookies for VBS, and probably get a quick grocery store trip squeezed in there, so I'd better quit typing...

Being a geek, I had to try the fried chicken recipe from the Google blog (check the blogroll on my Gamehawk blog or, well, Google for it).

Two thoughts. One, THAT'S A LOT OF PEPPER. I like spicy food, but that was overpowering. If I make it again, and I might, I'd cut down on that a lot.

Two, you should never bake fried chicken on a cookie sheet. My shallow pan was in use, so I put it on an airbake sheet, and ended up with a large puddle of grease on the bottom of my oven. My cleaning lady's advice to put salt on it actually worked, I think. It turns into a sort of evil sludge that's relatively easy to scrape off the bottom of the oven with a spatula... better than using up two rolls of paper towels, anyway. Since it's a relatively cool day and I have the whole-house fan on, I'm now running the oven through a cleaning cycle, which may or may not set off the smoke alarm...

Eww.

It's been really humid lately, and I left the stupid dishwasher for 48 hours without unloading it. And there's mold. Not just on the plastic kiddie cups, but on the Corelle.

Eww. I just reran it, and I'll end up hand-washing what doesn't come clean (probably all of it, since mold is peculiarly water-resistant).

We've had five drought years so far, so the brief rainy period in the spring always seems kind of perverse... because it happens the one time farmers don't want it, during the winter-wheat harvest. The paper suggested that it's not just coincidence... that maturing wheat releases a lot of moisture into the air, resulting in storms. Interesting.

I don't gross out easily, but... eww. I hate mold.