Random Bits

Today's major accomplishment:  I helped my mom wash their dog.  This was an item on my father's "things I want to happen today" list.  But after lunch, he was watching golf (ladies PGA - Park won) and fell pretty deeply asleep (he thinks it is some of the meds he is on right now - I mean, the man had pretty serious open heart surgery less than eight months ago and it takes a long time to recover - he's also 78).  Mom and I were puttering around as we do and I mentioned at about five if the dog was going to be bathed it should be soon.

We totally took the dog out on the deck and hosed him down and shampooed the heck out of him.  He was a little confused, but didn't seem to mind (much).  And an hour later when my dad woke up and I told him we made sure he could check that off his list of things to do he was shocked he hadn't heard us do it.  He had no idea it was happening (we were, no lie, about twenty five feet from his chair on the other side of the glass door).

So they are doing well - and their dog is clean.  I also discussed my mother's cousin - who keeps unearthing things on the Interwebz - this time some paintings my grandmother did were auctioned off in 2008 and the records from the auction house for the sale are online (and two paintings my mother did over forty years ago went in the same auction - I am thinking they were items from an estate because all four paintings were likely bought at the Kendall Gallery in Wellfleet - both my mom and my grandmother had work there for a few years in the late sixties early seventies.  Blasts from the past.

My parents are not spenders. They are the king and queen of "Oh, no, its fine for now" fully cognizant that "now" can turn into a Very Long Time.

Case in point: They completely tore most of the house down and rebuilt it in 1987-1988. The kitchen they put in has a built in spot (including outlet) for a microwave that they "might get sometime." You know what has been in that spot since? Cookbooks.

This past weekend was the tax-free weekend for the year. All sales tax was suspended for items up to $2500 - and if the single item was over $2500? You only paid tax on the amount over $2500.

They decided to make a list and go shopping. Now they have great past shopping expeditions where they go out and come back with nothing. My mother was totally prepared to not get anything. Her list was modest. A new toaster that actually toasts BOTH sides of the bread. A new pole dryer. Some hypoallergenic pillow covers. A bigger cooler for the car for groceries.

She also thought they might be able to find a nice piece of furniture for the master bedroom that could function as a high side table that had drawers in it (pie in the sky, she thought). It would replace a fabric covered piece of plywood up on a jury rigged wooden base that my dad dumps all his pocket crap onto before going to bed. My mother HATES the pocket crap. She wanted something with drawers specifically so he had SOMEWHERE (hidden) to put his pocket crap.

My dad had loftier goals. He wanted a new flat screen TV. He wanted to finally get that microwave.

When they spend money they SPEND MONEY!

They came back with EVERYTHING ON THE LIST. Granted, some is being delivered - like the TV, and stand to put it on, and the bit of furniture for the master bedroom is being made and will be delivered in a few weeks.

The flat screen plasma TV is a 60 inch HDTV (replacing the "new" TV that was only about 33 inches ("new" being a relative term, of course. "New" in this instance means "since I was no longer living there")).

And now its not.

My brother and sister in law hosted this year - and I don't think they could have done so if they hadn't moved into the upstairs bedrooms in the addition. Because they were able to ove into the upstairs bedrooms (and wow - they look really nice!) they had the space to empty out the study/library off all the furniture and put the double table in there.

They fit five kids under the age of 10 and ten adults around the table (my sister-in-law is the youngest adult, as she is four months younger than me). Plus their elderly golden retriever. The spread was epic - and yes, there was turkey even though the vegetarians hosted. The in-laws brought the turkey, gravy, and pies.

I brought a box of chocolates (about all I was mentally capable of seeing as I am still jetlagged as whoa and falling asleep at odd times and waking up in the middle of the night (hi midnight - I WAS asleep - quite happily too, and now I'm NOT... what do I do when I can't sleep? I'm blogging. Oy).

My three-and-a-half year old nephew L (our youngest person at the table) is a major chocoholic. He is a very good eater, but he *loves* chocolate. K's brother (also K) brought a chocolate chip pumpkin cake that L ate the chocolate chip out of his piece (funniest thing I saw).

And I saw G's (my nearly-ten year old niece) multimedia geneology report about my (my father's father) side of the family - funniest bit was about my great grandfather and his brother being run out of Italy because of the Sicilian mob (true family legend).

Story goes Great Great Uncle Luigi's wife had taken up with a mob boss and he (Luigi) had broken into the house and stolen back the bedroom set (that he had made, as he was a cabinet/furniture maker). The mob boss was not pleased. So Umberto (my great great grandfather) brought Luigi to the US. Don't know what happened to the famous bedroom set. Of course G's report only said the Sicilian mob was mad at Luigi so he came here. I filled in the other bits since it is a family legend of how we came to the US in 190whatever.

My father's mother and my mother's parents and K's parents parents parents (possibly parents) (her mother's side has been here a long damned time) stories aren't nearly so colorful. Although my father's mother's parents came in 1880s and were first cousins. Which for Italy in the 1880s was not such a strange thing. Most possibly an arranged marriage.

Anyway. Now I'm just babbling nonsense so I'm gonna give sleeping another go. Hope everyone who celebrates had a lovely Thanksgiving!

When they first moved into their current home, my sister-in-law was pregnant with B, their second of three kids. B is now seven years old (as of February). When they moved in the house was a five room (two bedroom, 1 and 3/4 bath home) in the center of a lovely NE town (the same town I grew up in, and where my parents still live - although they are on the south side, and my brother and family live in the center).

My brother immediately started renovating the inside to make it livable - the two bedrooms had never been completed - the man that built (and died in) the house was quite elderly, and didn't climb stairs, so he lived in the three rooms on the ground floor. M (my brother) had to install flooring in the two bedrooms. So the summer K (my SIL) was pregnant with B she spent living with her folks (and G who was two at the time), and M spent the summer, when he wasn't working, completing the house enough so his family could move in. The kids are in the two bedrooms and M and K have their "bedroom" in the tiny den on the first floor.

He has spent the seven years since B's birth planning and building the "addition" to the house - which happens to more than double the square footage of the house, and added a two-car garage.

The architectural plans were done by man who knows how to design an addition that will seamlessly expand the current look and feel of the house. M bartered for the plans. M is an artist (amongst his other talents), and at the time was working on a commission for the Eastman School of Music - a portrait of our grandfather for their portrait gallery. So instead of paying thousands of dollars for the plans, he did a portrait of the architect's daughter (and a couple of landscapes of land the architect owns on the Cape).

Three years in to the build (since he is doing 95% of the work himself) the cellar was excavated, and cement was in, the framing was up, and the exterior shell was weatherproof - windows and doors were in, garage was complete, and the shingles were on. None of the interior walls were up the last time I saw the house, which was about three years ago.

My mom took me over to see it today - since M was spending the long weekend trying to get a little closer to moving the family into the new bedrooms - because if the girls spend one more school year sharing a very tiny space we might have WWIII on our hands.

The plumbing and electric has all been done, and the walls are roughed in (drywall up, mudded and all - but the interior window sills have not been finished yet) - in some places the walls are even painted! There are stacks of hard wood for flooring planks in what WILL be the family/livingroom/kitchen waiting to be installed. The original plans only had a one-car garage, but when he expanded it to a two-car garage he left the girl's bedrooms the same size - but that expanded their closets - so they have the most AMAZING walk-in closets ever - with beautiful hand built built-in shelves and shoe towers (because my brother wouldn't do anything so mundane as buy ready-made anything).

The girls will share the new upstairs hall bath - L, their little brother (who just turned three) will remain in the original part of the house and have his current bedroom and the space where the girls' bedroom is, and the current upstairs bath to himself. Which I think he will be glad of when G is fifteen/sixteen/seventeen, B is thirteen/fourteen/fifteen, and he is nine/ten/eleven - living on the opposite side of the house from his teenage sisters. He'll still be a boy - and they will be rolling balls of hormones and hysterics (I know - I was once a teenage girl). That space will probably be a huge relief to him.

The master bedroom is gorgeous - with a closet slightly smaller than the girls' closets for M and a *huge* walk in closet for K - this closet is the size of my smallest bedroom! The master bath has a gorgeous oval soaker tub and a separate shower - but none of the tile or fixtures other than the tubs are in yet. The upstairs also houses the laundry room - which is probably a space about ten by ten feet, and two hall closets - linens and sheets, maybe? Perhaps one will house all the cleaning products?

The floors are in, but as yet unstained, in the upstairs hallway, and he is working on finishing the stairs and the newel posts for the bannisters. The bedrooms will be carpeted - that isn't in yet either. He showed off his pin-nail gun. And mentioned a couple of the windows "sprung" and before he finishes them he's got the replace them - what he means is that the seal broke on them and condensation got inside the panes - but the windows are under a twenty-year warranty so all he has to do is call them and they send him replacements. He'll replace the ones that "sprung" before he puts up the interior finishes - sills and framing.

The what-will-be-the-new-kitchen area is his current workroom - and the kitchen will be the last are of the house he finishes before he breaks through the wall to the current kitchen and joins the ground floors together. The upstairs he'll break through the wall as soon as the upstairs is ready to be occupied - but he can't break through before, because the wall where he will break through is currently where the girls' built-in bunk beds are in their bedroom (he built the beds when they moved the girls in together when L was born, because the roof line right there is weird, and there isn't the head space for standard bunk beds. He also built desks for them that fit the space they had in the very small room.).

He is planning the design and building the kitchen cabinets himself. Since he did this for his first house (and learned a LOT about making kitchen cabinets) I have no doubt his kitchen will be amazing once complete.

All in all I was incredibly impressed with where he is now.

I see a lot of work that the house needs, and K and the kids will be very lonely for him, and he will be very lonely for them, but they should have new bedrooms/bathrooms come September and they'll be back from the Cape, moved into the new rooms. Only a year late - he'd wanted to get them moved in last fall - but I think the summer he broke his collarbone (nearly exactly two years ago) put him way behind his schedule. All in all he is building it on his off hours from his day job (sys admin) and as he scrapes up the funds to buy materials and tools. My dad has tried a couple of times to give him money for various pieces of the project - but I don't know if he has been successful at getting M to accept at all. I think his frustration with my brother was what made him offer to redo my bathroom when the tiles were falling off the wall in the tub surround (the really bad tile job the previous owners had done was not done correctly - neither the mortar, grout or backing board was done correctly, so water had done its level best to rot out the backing board behind the (really ugly) tile). Since I didn't have the funds to do it at the time (three years ago) I accepted - and he paid for the tiling of the floor and tub surround, the new toilet, and the new vanity. I have no idea how much it cost, but it made him feel good to do it for me - and it allowed me to use the money I'd saved for house repairs to fix the roofline fascia and replace the gutters that were rotted out and falling off.

And what he really wants for his birthday is a full sized dump truck he can drive around. Or firetruck. Or cement truck. Or any kind of truck really.

Mental post-it for me... Get him something with wheels. Definitely wheels.

Our January thaw hit early this year. Yesterday we got up into the mid fifties, and today we were just shy of fifty degrees. The snow is melting at a very rapid rate (we got seventeen inches last a week ago). Today, we had snow fog. It is not a foggy day, but the snow is melting so fast, there is a mist hanging over everything, even though the sun may be shining and the sky blue.

Today is also my eldest niece's birthday! She is now NINE years old. Which is shocking and distressing. She is becoming a TWEEN. Went over after dinner for cake and presents. She got quite a number of fabulous things - her folks gave her a "design your own converse sneakers," her younger sister gave her a light-up ant farm. My folks got her three origami kits. Her little brother gave her a replacement for the toy he broke (and at 2.5yo, he really doesn't understand what is going on, but was still enamored of the toy in its packaging.). She got a renewal of the magazine series from me, plus a solar powered snap together kit that makes six different things, that are powered with a teeny little solar cell rather than batteries.

Well, back to work tomorrow. I didn't get through half the things to do on my list, but it has been a really good break, I think.

Currently, my first rehearsal is on Thursday night (did I mention I was cast in Annie? Yeah, one long three-month earworm). It is a music rehearsal, so singing! In public! For the first time in years! Thankfully I am in the ensemble, so nothing is riding on me singing by myself (which I am sure you are all thankful for).

Due to the frickin' BLIZZARD going on outside.

So I'm stuck inside until we're through most of the day tomorrow. I'll shovel first thing in the morning, and likely again sometime tomorrow afternoon. The town has, due to our state of emergency, canceled trash and recycling pickup for tomorrow (Monday is my trash day), and all trash pickup will happen one day late this week - like a Monday Holiday schedule. Which is good, since I have been spending the day throwing things away and getting the multitudes of boxes broken down in prep for recycling.

The Christmas holiday was good, if a little weird. My brother invited us to dinner on Christmas Eve, and he, his wife and kids, his in-laws, my folks, and his wife's brother and his family all crammed ourselves into their tiny kitchen/dining nook/livingroom. Five kids, nine and younger (the youngest is my nephew, he's 2.5yo), all hyped up on sugar and holiday excitement, and nine adults. Plus one aging golden retriever.

Dinner was amazing, mostly because both my brother and his wife are really good cooks. Plus they are vegetarian, so they prepare a wide variety of foods (my SIL's folks brought meatballs and Italian sausage for the carnivores - my folks brought wine).

After dinner, we went to their across the street neighbors to carol a little bit (although we need to widen our song base if we do this again next year - plus, some hand held electric lights might be useful, as it was dark and extremely cold).

Christmas morning found my parents and I back at my brother and sister in law's for brunch and presents. All three kids were excited and wound up, but also really really appreciative of everything they got - L loved the wooden workbench my folks got him - he wanted to bang on it all afternoon. I have awesome pictures of him standing at it with the wooden hammer, just happy to bang on it for the rest of the day. G wanted to play her Muppets Monopoly game (even if it was slightly defective in that it did not have a Gonzo player piece, and TWO Swedish Chef player piece. I suggested painting one of the Swedish Chefs so six people could play the game and not get confused if they were going to keep the game as-is (G wanted to keep it, as she didn't mind there were two Swedish Chef's and no Gonzo)). My folks and I left around 2pm, so they could get to the other grandparent's for dinner. I went to my folks for a mellow afternoon with them, and a comfortable dinner.

Came home around nine, and nearly went straight to bed.

Today it started snowing around 2pm, although there isn't a heck of a lot of accumulation yet. But the storm isn't supposed to end until tomorrow afternoon, so there is lots of time.

In other news, I cleaned up on tea and tea-related items, which is *completely* awesome. And I *think* my brother and sister in law liked the pancake extravaganza I gave them. They are so food-oriented, this might be a good idea in general, to keep gifts consumable.

My not-quite-nine year old niece is learning how to play the string bass (how cool is that?). It is bigger than she is.

My six and a half year old niece is going to start piano lessons in the next couple of weeks.

My brother is still working on the addition to their house to try to get the upstairs live-able. He just has to complete installing the bathrooms, cut a door into the new part of the house, and move the girls into their new rooms. B is a little anxious to have her own room. We pointed it out (gently, of course) that her Papa said he was hoping to have it done this fall, and Fall is only a couple of days old, so he's got until after Thanksgiving, at least. But I guess she's been hounding her mother. She is one of those people who is still after instant gratification, instantly. Her older sister is far more patient, and able to see the bigger picture. Always has been.

This past weekend was incredibly busy - I helped backstage for a brand new theatre company trying to get off the ground - their very first production was "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum..." which I'd never seen before. Sure, I know the music - "Comedy Tonight" is a classic, as is "Everybody Ought to Have a Maid" and "Pretty Little Picture." Less well-known, but still pretty standard are "Lovely," "Impossible," and "Free."

But, as the cast tells us in the opening number ""No royal curse, no Trojan horse, and a happy ending, of course!" it is a pretty mad-cap musical that is never PC, and kinda dated, but still damned funny. It seemed as if the audiences ate it up and laughed for two hours. Two sold out shows, and a third that was nearly three-quarters full. Not bad for a show that is almost fifty years old!

The costumer, who I enjoyed working with very much, is one of those people who you know for two days and are already old pals. I've known her for less than two weeks, and yet, she is completely awesome, talented, and knows a heck of a lot about many different subjects. And she is one of the sweetest, most genuine people I've ever had the pleasure to meet. I told her I want to be her when I grow up.

Today, back to the grind stone.

...found out today my brother ran the Boston Marathon. Not officially, or anything. He didn't have a qualifying number. But he ran it - sort of on a whim.

Would have been nice to know that *two* *weeks* *ago* when, y'know, he actually ran it.

He finished in under four hours.

My brother, ladies and gentlemen.

Saturday I ran about doing lots and lots of errands - one of which was a three dollar solution to a fifty dollar problem for gwendolyngrace. We are crafty! But I also went to Lowes to research some things for the shop.

Sunday I went into the shop and helped out with display. My mom was "big picture-ing" it - she was moving large items hanging on the walls around and making the shop look really good. LLC set me on "little picturing" it - I was relegated to clearing off and re displaying one shelf of jewelry in one of the cases, and making a list of the designs the shop had sold out of. I really enjoy the time I spend in the shop - it gets me out of the house and talking to people. I love the ladies who meet for Sunday morning display work. They're pretty fun and entertaining. Plus DL, the leather worker at the shop has given me three large bags of leather she no longer uses. There are some full skins as well as some pieces she's cut things out of. All of it will be fairly useful in costuming, for items or trims. Maybe a patchwork vest. I've never worked in leather, so I am looking forward to it. Interestingly, for health reasons DL has been vegan (celieac-casin? Something to do with gluten allergy and other animal protein, maybe?). She is no longer strictly vegan, but she is on a limited diet.

My dad came in with the dog while I was there to get everyone tea and coffee from Starbucks. I got a chai tea - which was a mistake, as Starbucks has changed their tea. Don't get me wrong, it was delicious, but man, I was shaking with the caffeine hit an hour later. Starbucks tea did not used to do that to me. But now, with the new "full leafed tea" and the tea bags are about twice as big as they used to be, it is also three times as strong. Guess I won't be getting any caffeinated tea from Starbucks anymore (bastards).

Then Mom and I went home for lunch with my dad. And after lunch my dad turned on the football game and my mom and I sat and chatted in the living room while I cut up a pattern I was thinking of using, and she covered a couple of pillows with some soft rugs she got at the discount shop for less than two dollars each. The pillows look fabulous.

Monday began benignly enough, and sort of went down hill from there. But it did end with a dinner date with my dad, so it wasn't all bad (mom was at the monthly meeting for the store, so dad was at loose ends). Today began with email from my client who hadn't received my email from Friday testing a new tool. So it looked as if I blew him off. I did not. So I resent my Friday email, and followed it up with an IM. ARGH!

Hopefully the rest of the week goes a little smoother. In other, better news, it looks like I am vacationing in Delaware this summer. Beach House! I can't wait. I wonder how hard it is to make a kite?