Weekends kill momentum. Especially when, for all intents and purposes, my weekends are four days and my workweeks are three days.

My husband's back to taking Monday afternoons off. Add to that that I've been using Mondays as Gamehawk-programming days, and that means I get nothing done, housework-wise. Now, granted, this weekend we got some of the shelves put in the kitchen cabinets, which means I got to reorganize them, but otherwise, I haven't done much since last Thursday.

Today, I got a little done... cleaned out the fridge, got rid of the jars of pickled okra that hadn't properly sealed (it was my first and only attempt at canning... okra is a whole lot like zucchini: you have to pick it fast or they get huge and nasty, and if you *do* pick it fast you end up with a LOT. Pickling was self-defense), that sort of thing. I also took inventory of what was in the fridge and freezer... while the truck's being repaired, my husband is taking the van to work, so I couldn't go shopping. We've got a well-stocked deepfreeze, so aside from fresh veggies, I'm good, and I ought to be using some of the frozen stuff up anyway. I think I'll go tonight to pick up milk and veggies and call it good, since tomorrow will be occupied with the cleaning lady, and taking the dog to the vet for shots, etc.

Oh, and this weekend I got five pairs of pants shortened and hemmed for my sister, so I guess that counts as an accomplishment. At least, it removed one bag from under the computer desk, so now my dog can curl up under there. I expect that'll result in the need for another accomplishment (getting the Linux box installed) when she shorts out this tired old Win95 machine...

It's Friday, so I get to put on my (mostly fabric-) artist hat.

Yesterday was Put Away The Clutter In Those Boxes day. I found homes for two and a half boxes' worth (and we're talking copier-paper-sized boxes), mostly in the trashcan, so I'm fairly pleased. My husband was less than impressed, since it didn't really look like progress (there's still two boxes of "give away or garage-sale", one box of church financial records that need to go to the pastor's basement office, one box of art stuff that needs carried downstairs when I have the shelf space again, and one box of stuff to unpack into the "new" curio cabinet, which is already stuffed full. Oh well.

Today, I'm going to work on competition entries, and maybe finish up a couple of scrub tops for my mother-in-law. But I have so much good momentum going on the housecleaning that I'll probably do some of that, too.

Both the Perl programmer hat and the small-business-person hat are on the rack right now, and I've actually gotten some stuff done.

My cleaning lady came over, and we cleaned, swept and mopped the kitchen and living room, and then - because it's unseasonably cool and perfect for working outside - cleaned the porch. Now, we have a little bungalow with a covered porch the width of the house... porch swing, flower boxes on the rail, the whole nine yards. The porch is concrete, and covered with a nasty indoor-outdoor carpet we'd really like to replace someday, because it accumulates dog hair (tracked out the door) and tree bits (tracked up the steps). And it's like Velcro, it holds onto the stuff despite our best vacuuming efforts. Broom-sweeping was moderately effective (though the stuff grips the pushbroom so well I had to pull it), so we got it done as well as possible.

Then I went and enrolled my son in preschool (learning that we'll spend a month in once-a-week parent/teacher conferences and assessments before starting five-day-a-week class), bought him a backpack (awwww), and picked up some begonias to put in the flowerboxes (the pansies never make it through July).

Whew.

You know you've been out of the workforce too long when you embark on a self-imposed deathmarch.

I haven't been posting much lately about getting caught up because, well, I'm not getting caught up lately.

In fact, for the last couple of days (evenings included), I've been sitting in front of the computer, and letting the housework slide.

You see, tomorrow's the six-month anniversary of the domain I bought for the flagship Gamehawk community. (I know, technically the Phoenyx should be that, but I wanted to make a fresh start, rather than trying to convert an existing community. That'll happen later.) So I wanted to launch it then.

So I did. It's a soft launch, unpublished, but it happened on time.

Now I gotta get the house cleaned up. Oh, and today we found out that although we never got the letter, our son was accepted into pre-kindergarten (we expected him to be on a waiting list). So starting next month, I have three hours a day all to myself. I'm going to clean the basement if it kills me.

Whenever my cleaning lady cleans an area, I go ahead of her with a box and dump all the little cluttery things into it to get them out of her way.

End result: I'm accumulating a lot of boxes of little cluttery things. I'm not sure whether I should set a goal of putting away one box of clutter every day, or get my packing tape, seal up the box, and put it out with the trash. The latter option is looking attractive.

I'm entering a pig and a horse in the State Fair this year, I think. At least, as long as I don't sell the pig first.

For you guys on the coasts, you probably think this is normal behavior for everyone out here on the prairie. It's not, at least for those of us who're confirmed suburbanites. Now, it's still fun going to the fair, and we used to do it every few years and now that we have a kid it's every year.

My husband's family, on the other hand, is small-town Kansas, so my mother-in-law always enters a crocheted baby afghan, and my late grandmothers-in-law entered quilts and preserves and all that sort of thing. I grew up in Indiana, and while I think we went to the State Fair (because we lived in Indianapolis and that's where the fairgrounds are, so it was handy) I don't remember actually going to the really stereotypically State-Fair-ish parts. In fact, I don't remember which bits were actual Indiana State Fair and which bits were just the various antique shows and car shows and all the other stuff we went to *at* the fairgrounds in the off-season.

So anyway, if you haven't figured it out, pig and horse will be entered in the art divisions (teddy bear and soft sculpture, respectively), partly for the egoboo but mostly (or so I tell myself) for the free publicity and ability to put "Award-Winning Artist/Designer" on my eBay auctions. Which I'm going to have, Real Soon Now.

(As far as real animals go, I've had dogs, cats, various caged rodents, and fish. Not even a bird, and definitely no livestock. I've never lived on a farm. So there.)

Well, I didn't quite get the pig finished, but it's close enough that I'm pretty confident I can put it on eBay next Sunday night. My debut, woo hoo.

After going back to 5x8 days for awhile, my husband has decided to flex back to 4x9+4, so he's taking Monday afternoons off. That'd be today, so I'm not sure what that does to my schedule. I think for awhile Mondays will be "work on Gamehawk" day, which brings the "work on the house" days down to three. Well, three and a half, since Monday mornings will still be housework days.

And my housekeeper is laid up, having had pretty much all of her molars pulled. They pull more teeth next time, and fit her for the dentures that she's needed for many years.

At least I've gotten a fair amount of catchup work done today. Cleaned the kitchen, mostly, and sorted all the laundry from the trip. Discovered that my husband left wet stuff in the washer during my entire trip, so it's been there a week and a half. Eww. It didn't smell mildewy, amazingly enough, so I dumped more detergent in and rewashed it all. It's a lovely sunny 100+ degree day (obWeatherblogging) so we've talked about stringing a retractable clothesline.

And, in the middle of that sentence, my husband called to say his mother had invited him out to lunch, did I and our son want to come? Which we would, except that I put a pot roast in the oven an hour and some change ago, figuring he'd be home for lunch. Oh well.

(If you're a parent, you know that's preceded by "To market, to market, to buy a fat pig," and if you're a geek, you know it's followed by "Good evening, JF." If you're a geek parent, you get battling memes.)

Anyway, after a week away, I'm back home to the mess. Well, it wasn't that much of a mess until I unloaded the van into the living room last night. So this morning will be putting things away and trying to remember where I left off.

I didn't get as much done while I was at Mom's as I'd hoped, though she did teach me (more or less) how to use the serger she gave me awhile back. I got her scrubs made, at least, and some progress made on a mohair teddy bear (pig, actually). Fridays will be "work on the business day," so hopefully I'll finish that then. Or maybe just make more scrubs for my mother-in-law, now that I have a good master pattern made.

I also made the tour of the fabric stores while I was down there, and acquired some more teddy bear fabric, and a nice chunk of wool that'll make a good Renfaire cloak. So maybe I should sew that up, since September is the local faire and I was considering a booth there. Or maybe not... I have too much other stuff on hold.

Wow.

It's really not all that much progress, but it makes a big improvement. I cleaned out three drawers in my son's chest of drawers, then put away all his winter clothes... he has a total of five drawers full of winter clothes, including two in the dresser. That's just out of control for a four-year-old, so I'll have to thin them quite a bit. Grandma gets carried away at garage sales.

Then I cleaned up the rest of his room, and did things like laying the model rockets down on their sides so they don't cast scary shadows on the ceiling. I'm not sure if all that helped, but he spent the whole night in his own room so maybe it did.

Then we gutted the medicine cabinet(s) and they're nice and empty now. My bathroom junky drawer's next. I have two big cardboard boxes full of stuff to give away, and a full trash cart.

Now, to make up for that progress, I'm going to visit Mom for a week. At least I can take sewing projects and not feel guilty about working on them instead of working on the house. Hopefully I can knock out the dozen or so scrub tops I've acquired fabric for, and maybe a teddy bear to actually sell.

I got sidetracked yesterday (what else is new) and didn't actually get the bedrooms cleaned up. Now, before my son was born, we lived in this house for around six years, and what's now his bedroom has been a spare bedroom, a computer room, and various other things, so his closet is full of shelving. The over-the-rack shelves are covered with our board games, and we've gradually moved (or sold) most of the books that took up the additional shelving. There's also a little linen-closetish thing (in the other bedroom, it opens into the hall instead of the side of the closet, and *is* the linen closet) that is built into it, and that's what occupied my attention yesterday. The rest of the waterbed sheets turned out to be there instead of in the laundry room, so I sorted those out and stuffed them in the bag with the others (we haven't had a waterbed in YEARS) so that's that, and the bagged quilts came out of there and went with the afghans (or whatever the PC term for them is now) on the newly-cleared top shelf of the linen closet. Then some of the boxes (antique children's books, mostly) went from the floor of his closet onto those shelves, where I remembered that I hadn't finished vacuuming out that closet from when the mouse was in there. So vacuuming mouse poop is the order of the day. We're planning to take the nasty pinchy folding doors off the closet and replace them with a curtain, so it's going to be important to have it clean and playable in there.

This morning I've been cleaning out the linens that were in his chest of drawers, so I can sort his winter clothes into "outgrown" and "not-yet-outgrown" and put the latter in the drawers and get rid of the former and redeem the laundry basket I've been sorting them into.

So maybe we'll actually get to shampoo his bedroom carpet today (or at least half of it, since we probably can't move the furniture all the way out). At least we'll get it thoroughly vacuumed.

Then I'm taking the van over to get the brakes done, and tomorrow I'm driving four hours out to visit my mother for an extended weekend (so she can get her grandson fix). It'll greatly improve my productivity when she moves here next spring and I don't spend a week or so there every couple of months. Not to mention the incentive of "Mom might drop by anytime, I need to keep the house clean."

Nearly all of the running-around objectives were achieved... the dog's had her allergy shot, so hopefully she'll stop trying to gnaw her legs off, then we made a quick stop at the meat shop to pick up a roast and a chicken, dropped dog, roast, and chicken off at home, then turned around and went grocery shopping, where we got everything we were after except a rack for the linen closet door (it's under 15 inches and all the over-door shelves they have are around 17). Van's going in tomorrow afternoon, after I drop the cleaning lady off.

So that's all accomplished, and I'm going to drop the chicken in to cook (for chicken and dumplings later in the week), run some laundry, and get the bedrooms ready for vacuuming/carpet cleaning. If I get ahead of all that, I'm going to clean out the medicine cabinet (we have one of those monster three-way mirrors with cabinet behind all of it, and there's about 20 years' worth of accumulated perfumes (I don't use perfume), aftershaves (my husband wears a full beard), body washes (see "perfume" above) and various hair care products; we've only recently convinced family to stop giving us the junk).

The linen closet is now cleaned out, and the blankets that have been wandering around homeless in the bedroom are nicely packed away. The sheets are all matched up into sets, except for the twin-bed sheets which basically come down to "a whole bunch of beige sheet sets, no two of which are exactly alike" and since we don't, at the moment, have a twin bed set up anywhere, I just put it all into a big zipper bag along with the day-bed cover. The day-bed bolsters are in the laundry room, and I should probably pack them up and put them in the garage with the twin bed. Or get rid of it all; our son's toddler bed converts to a double, so unless we move to a house with a guest bedroom we really won't need it.

Tomorrow will be another running-around day... I need to take the dog to the vet and go shopping. I also need to take the van in to get the brakes worked on (cotton-pickin' warp-happy Ford rotors) sometime this week, so I might do it tomorrow. My cleaning goal is to get the bedrooms picked up enough so that my cleaning lady can vacuum them Wednesday... move the beds and all that. And, I hope, shampoo the carpets. I've got my mother's steam cleaner thingy right now.

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...