What Now?

Keeping the home fires burning

D's mother gave us an extraordinarily generous Christmas present, in part because she felt bad about how really sucky 2012 was for us and wanted to do something really nice. She paid the entire cost of buying and installing a wood-burning stove insert to fit into our fireplace. Yay! It costs about $2500, so this is Christmas largesse indeed.

The reason this is such a nice gift is that the fireplace in our house (as in many of the 1920s-ish homes in our neighborhood) is fairly shallow, which means that it's actually a challenge to build a nice fire without smoke coming into the room; plus, it's hard to manipulate the flue because the handle was gone long before we bought the house, so it takes a wrench to get it opened and closed. And then there's the fact that open fireplaces are actually a heat drain, with more heat escaping up the chimney than the fire produces, so we never build a fire when it's really cold outside. All of which is to say that we don't build fires nearly as often as we'd like. I find the flame incredibly psychologically valuable during the grim, dark days of winter; there's something almost primal about what the fire does for our mood and emotional outlook, but it's a big enough pain to build them that we don't get that value as often as we should.

But a wood-burning stove insert that fits into our fireplace would take care of all of those problems -- more energy-efficient, less smoke, all around a good thing, but far too expensive for us to pay for ourselves. So yay for mother-in-law! And today was installation day. Hurrah! 

 ... except ... aargh! It turns out that it's not just the fireplaces that are small in the older houses in our neighborhood; it's also the chimneys. So after the stove people had carried the 300-pound stove into the house, they then discovered that the requisite 6-inch steel pipe won't fit up our chimney. So no wood-burning stove for us. Did I mention "aargh!"? They were pretty bummed too, not least because they then had to carry the heavy stove back out to their van. They said it was rare enough to have a too-small chimney that it's not even the sort of things they look for before installations (obviously). So frustrating! All four of us just sat in the living room clutching our heads for a bit after they broke the news this morning.

So here's what we're doing instead: We've taken the plunge and are getting a pellet-burning stove. It only requires a 4-inch pipe, which will fit up our chimney. Unfortunately, it also costs $400 more, and we can't possibly ask my MIL to pay more than she already is, so we're out some $$ after all. Plus we'll have to buy a flat of pellets, which apparently will cost $250 for a ton, which is the standard weight of the purchase. So we're out some money in January that we hadn't budgeted for, which means the whole thing has become one of those gifts that is lovely but costs us money. (It's our very own Statue of Liberty.)

And, money aside, at first we were pretty unhappy about the whole thing. Pellet stoves just don't look the same! Or, rather, the outside of the stove insert will look almost exactly the same -- we're getting the same stove in the pellet version -- but the flame is really different -- much more vertical, and without those friendly logs crackling away. More like a logless bonfire, really, and less like a fireplace fire. So we considered just saying "forget it" to the whole thing, but by then we'd gotten excited enough about the idea of having a stove insert, with all of its energy-efficiency, that it was hard to imagine returning to the status quo of just not having fires very often. So, after spending probably an hour in the store sitting in front of the pellet stoves (and also considering gas stoves, although there's no way we could have actually afforded those), we took the leap and ordered the pellet stove.

But once we got home -- completely worn out from the experience in a way that probably seems silly, but the whole experience had been curveball, and our entire morning had taken quite a different turn from what we expected -- D started looking up info on pellet stoves, and the more she read the better she felt. More energy-efficient and far less polluting than wood, for starters. (When my mom lived in Denver, which has major air pollution problems because of its mountainous geography, the city government announced which days one could and couldn't burn fires, because the smoke added so much to the air pollution.) Plus it's much greener to buy the pellets, which are made of the sawdust left over after lumber mills do their thing, than to buy kiln-dried firewood. And even though it's costing us $400 more to get it installed, apparently the wood pellets are cheaper enough than firewood that it will pay for the extra expense in a year or two. And the theory is that it will warm the house enough (we have a tiny house!) that we'll save on heating costs as well. Plus it has an automatic starter, which means that it's supposed to be easy-peasy to start a fire, which means that I could even build a fire when D. is out in the evenings, which I never do now because I'm just not that skilled at making fires in our tiny, tricky fireplace. So we're looking on the bright side, even though this is not the path we expected to take.

We're hoping the new stove will get installed at the end of next week (although things seem to get delayed with this company, so we're not holding our breath). Only once we're absolutely sure that the new stove is well and truly installed will we go to the effort of selling our old firewood (we still have probably a quarter of a cord of wood left) and buying pellets. Having been burned (hah! pun alert!) once already, I'm not counting on this new stove until everything is signed, sealed, and delivered. And I'm sure we'll get used to the different flame after awhile and that it will all be worthwhile.

An exhausting little adventure on the last weekday of winter break, but hopefully one that will prove worthwhile in the long run.

A one-resolution New Year

Happy New Year, everyone!

On the theory that I can't change many things about my life and the world, but I can change my attitude, I soaked up the little bit of sun there was today by going out for a very cold walk -- after 40 minutes my thighs were frozen, although weirdly my calves were fine, which there must be a scientific reason for but I don't know what it is -- and did in fact feel briskly alive in my frozen state.

And during that walk, I decided that I would have one and only one resolution for the new year:

I will keep the dining room table cleared off.

The table tends to be one of those spots in the house that junk winds up piling up on, but I cleared it all off and vacuumed and dusted on Christmas Eve, and I've kept it clear for a whole week now and like it very much, so why not keep going?

I figure that this resolution will have multiple positive effects: D. and I will sit down together for dinner more regularly (rather than eating on the couch while working or watching TV or being distracted in some other way), which will be good for our relationship and also make me more mindful and appreciative of what I'm eating. Plus I figure that there might be a spillover effect, and that keeping the dining room table cleared might also nudge me to keep the neighboring rooms -- the living room and kitchen -- clearer as well. But I'm not putting any of that into the resolution -- nope, all I need to do is keep the table cleared, and I will have met my resolution.

And I've already succeeded in day one of the new year, for I ate breakfast and lunch at our nicely clean table. And we're about to sit down to have our black-eyed peas chili, so there's good luck already brewing for us.

... and this is why my house will never be clean

So I had only one real project this week, and that was to clean the house. It was in a sad state, what with the end of school and all, but it had been all spic and span (at least the public areas) within the last couple of months, so I thought that it wouldn't be too bad to clean it up.

But for some reason I decided that the first thing I should do in cleaning the house was to take everything out of the hall closet so that I could repaint the section of the ceiling and wall that had gotten discolored when we had a roof leak a couple of years ago. Yes, it's true, the discoloration is all in the back corner of the closet, where pretty much no one ever looks -- it's not like there's even a light in the closet in case someone DID want to have a good look at it -- but I notice it regularly and it bugs me every time; somehow it's a badge of "what a bad home-owner I am, because I had a roof leak," even though I've tried telling myself that it should be a badge of "what a great home-owner I am, because I got that roof leak fixed." Anyway, I decided that I needed to repaint it.

Which meant that I primed it one day, then painted it the next day, then put a second coat on the day after that, then realized that I'd never painted the inside of the closet door, which was a sickly gray color, so I got out the glossy paint to do that and then decided I should re-do the outside of the closet door while I was at it, but of course that took two different days because there's not a lot of space to maneuver in our entryway, so the inside of the door was one day and the outside was another day. And, as all of these days passed, all of the junk from the closet was strewn about the living room, which of course meant that I couldn't really be cleaning the living room until the closet project was finished.

Once all of the painting was done, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to finally hang hooks up in the closet (for umbrellas and scarves and the like) as I've been meaning to do for pretty much the entire four years we've been living in this house. And I even went to Home Depot and got the hooks. But then I realized that I should drill small starter holes to hang up the hooks, and I knew where the drill was but couldn't find the drill bits, at which point I fell into some despair about my ongoing inability to be an organized home-owner. So this morning I gave up and put everything back into the closet and simply tucked the hooks up on the shelf in the closet with the promise that I would hang them up later this summer.

While all of this was going on, the other project I tackled was my bookcase in the study (D and I each have one bookcase in that room), which was kind of a disaster -- no order at all, and hadn't been dusted in a year, probably. So that wound up taking pretty much a day, a very grimy, sneezy sort of day. And in the end, it looks almost the same, sans the dust, although there is more rhyme and reason to it now. The problem is that we simply don't have enough bookcases for all of our books, so creating order in the study just meant adding more to the disorder of the bookshelves in the basement, but at least those are out of the public view. When I was a single gal, my books were always impeccably organized, alphabetically by author and divided by genre, but life with D is a life without much order, and after all of these years I've mostly made my peace with this, except for the ways in which I still haven't.

So now I've spent the entire week "cleaning," and what I've really managed to accomplish is painting the hall closet -- something that no one else will even notice -- and dusting one bookcase.

And this is why my house will never be clean.

A clean house miscellany

• I'm writing this in a house that is clean, CLEAN, CLEAN! So here's the new plan: D. and I have someone over for brunch once a month. Brunch because it's an easy meal that leaves one time to relax and chill out afterward. Once a month because that way we'd actually keep the house in fairly reasonable order. I cannot tell you the HOURS it took to get the house into its current clean state, mostly because I'd stopped cleaning at least two weeks before I went to South Africa. It was pretty grim. Here's a hint: I finally finished emptying my suitcase and got it down to the basement this morning ... almost four weeks after I got home from the trip. Yeah, it's been ugly. 

• Of course, when I say "the house is clean," I should admit that there is a box filled mostly with papers that need to be filed, papers that instead of filing I stuffed into a cardboard box and stuck under the desk. Now, over the past week I did actually go through the mounds and mounds of the paper that was taking over the living room, so all of these papers are legit and I didn't just throw all the junk into the house into a box. But I felt I should be honest in the midst of my clean-house gloating.

• Oh, and I should also acknowledge that, while I sit on the couch writing this, I'm eating tortilla chips and hummus. So it's entirely possible that the pristine house won't stay clean for all that long.

• But that's why I then need to have someone else over for brunch in May! A grad school friend used to say that "no one really vacuums except when someone's coming over"; whether or not that's true for everyone, it's certainly true for us, so clearly the only available option is having guests over regularly -- not frequently, mind you, since I'm increasingly introverted as I get older, but regularly.

• D. doesn't actually get any real joy out of a clean house -- that is, she's no happier in a clean house than a messy house, since she has this amazing ability to just not see mess at all, which is great for her mental health but terrible for the state of our house -- but she does enjoy socializing, and she knows that I'm a basketcase having people over unless the house is really clean, so I think having a social deadline means that, as happened this time, we'll actually work together to clean the house, which doesn't really happen otherwise. Not only that, we actually got inspired enough to clear off some cluttered surfaces and decoratively place knick-knacks on the now-dusted surfaces, so the living room and dining room are both prettier places than they were a couple of days ago.

• All of this is on my mind not only because I'm writing this post in a house that is, did I mention, clean!, but also because I've been reading an interesting post and comments on couples and chores over at Wandering Scientist (linked to by Nicole and Maggie, who are going to be doing their own post on the subject as well).

• And some day, when D. is out of school and we're out of debt -- which is to say, not any time soon -- we are so going to hire someone to clean the house every two weeks. I long for that day. In the meantime, the social-interaction-as-cleaning-motivation will have to work.

In hot water again

Literally, not figuratively!

Last night I took a lukewarm shower, not by choice. So afterward D. and I went down to the basement, where we discovered the water heater leaking water on the floor. Uh oh. We managed to figure out how to turn off the water going into the heater -- we are not a very handy couple, so yay for us on that front! And good to have some victory to cling to, since we then had to tackle the task of forking over big bucks to get a new hot water heater. Such tasks also aren't our strength and can bring with them significant anxiety, which I think is probably pretty usual.

But I'm glad to report that we handled the whole thing with reasonable aplomb, thanks in large part to having a plumber whom we trust, and by mid-day we were a thousand dollars poorer but had hot water in the house again. And we got a water heater with a 12-year warranty; if we pro-rate theexpense over a dozen years, I'm certainly willing to pay that much for the privilege of taking warm showers, but of course one has to pay for these things in one fell swoop. Ah well -- such are the joys of home-ownership.

Besides facing the loss of those big bucks, the real challenge was facing the mess in the basement. Over the past school year, D. and I got worse and worse about treating the basement as a dumping ground, and one of my intended summer projects was to do some major sorting and cleaning and organizing down there. I had made exactly zero progress on that project, finding it too overwhelming to face ... but suddenly we were faced with a very immediate deadline, because the plumber would have to wheel the old heater out and the new heater in through the bulkhead, all of which would require actually having clear floor space enough to do said wheeling.

So I had two hours of really hard labor this morning -- or at least much harder labor than I usually do, which is perhaps not the same thing! -- and by the time the plumber showed up I had made a significant start on the basement project.

Then this afternoon I spent a while sorting through a couple of boxes that I'd brought up from the basement -- boxes that I had packed up from my St. Martyr's office when I left that job and hadn't looked at since! That sounds like sorting through them should have been an emotional sort of project, but it really wasn't, and I threw away or recycled most of it. It gives me confidence enough to contemplate actually continuing to make progress on the basement project ... as well as on the other household projects I have lined up for the summer. All easier to think about tackling since there's once again the option of having a hot shower after the hard work!

But you know what? I'm not letting any of those projects interfere with drinking more iced tea and remembering that summer is a time of R&R!

I have no landscaping vision!

I find mowing the lawn incredibly tedious -- hot, noisy, requiring timing around rainshowers, tiresome -- and the fact that our lawn never looks very good even when newly trimmed (it's all dandelions and clover and other weeds) doesn't help my motivation. Really, it's only the fact that I don't want to be that neighbor who lets down the block that keeps me mowing it every week.

So this spring I decided that I either had to devote some energy to creating a beautiful lawn or I had to get rid of the grass altogether. I opted for the latter.

First observation: Pulling up grass is a lot harder than it seems like it should be!

Second observation: Once the grass is pulled up, one is left with a big dirt plot, which doesn't particularly help that whole "let's not let down the neighborhood" project. One needs to put something in place of what one has removed.

Which brings me to my problem: I have all kinds of ideas for what our yard could look like -- big rocks & beautiful wild grasses; mosaics & colorful plants; a stone path that cuts across the yard, or maybe not; flowering plants or otherwise; whimsical gewgaws or objets d'art (although not the glow-in-the-dark solar bibelots that our neighbor loves); plants in tall pots surrounded by other plants in the ground, for height contrasts -- but I can't commit to anything! Which means I'm not planting anything at all. Which means that I've missed the beneficial spring planting season and am now heading into the hot part of the summer, when normal people don't plant new things but rather concentrate on keeping alive the things they planted earlier and that have already taken root.

The good news is that, now that it's mid-summer, perennials are all on sale. And it is true that every perennial I've planted in the three years we've lived in this house has been purchased mid-summer on sale, and they do keep coming back each year. So maybe this is just my way, especially given a school schedule that is busiest just as one should be putting new plants in the ground.

Okay, so I've worked through my anxiety about timing, but the challenge still remains: What shall I plant in the pile o' dirt I'm creating?! How does one who is not a gardener know what to plant? Very difficult. I should say that our front yard gets full sun all day, which of course affects what one can and can't plant.

I went to the garden store today and walked around, looking for motivation, but in the end I was pulled in so many different directions that I just bought mulch and left. I could just go with a hodgepodge aesthetic; as I rip out new grass and expose more dirt, I could just plant whatever strikes my fancy at the moment. That approach could result either in wonderful, unstructured beauty or in a royal mess; I fear the latter.

At least I can comfort myself that the planting I've done this year that is not aesthetically motivated -- my vegetable garden! -- is doing quite well, although it needs serious weeding now that I've come back from vacation. But it's way too hot right now (see "middle of summer," above), so instead I'm going to lounge on the couch and read and do my outdoor labors once it's cooled off a bit.

One thing leads to another

D. brought home a lovely small quilt from her latest trip abroad (for work, so I didn't get to join her), and we had decided that we were going to hang it on our bedroom wall. But, as you know, one thing tends to lead to another; that one decorating idea has now resulted in our entire house's getting torn apart.

I spent this past weekend on a short spring break visit with my family, and my mom and I figured out how to hang the quilt and attached a sleeve to the back of the quilt to do so -- a good project for me to do with my mom, and I drove home pleased and ready to hang it on the wall. But nothing is ever simple, and there's nothing like a long drive, such as I had on Monday coming home, to make big plans. I wasn't entirely sure, you see, which wall I wanted to hang the quilt on, and gosh, maybe we should re-think our room arrangement before we committed to putting a curtain rod into the wall.

So I got home that night with oodles of ideas about rearranging furniture and redecorating rooms, ideas that I started putting into place Tuesday morning. The goal was to rearrange the bedroom furniture, putting the bed at an angle so that it no longer partially blocks one of the room's windows, and also to take up the bedroom rug and put it to the dining room instead. Of course, as is my wont, I thought, "Should take a couple of hours -- no problem! I'll even have time to work out and shower before my 7:00 meeting."

Yeah, right. The only part of that plan that came off was taking a shower, although even that didn't happen until after I should have left for the meeting. The bed-at-an-angle idea was a bust -- our house was built before anyone had queen-sized beds, and our bedroom is just too small -- but we'd had to move furniture around anyway to get the rug out, so at that point I wanted some change for all our troubles. So we wound up moving the bed to another wall ... where it partially blocks the room's other window! Ah well -- there's just no way around it, and there are some advantages to the current arrangement. And the whole thing took hours and hours, so that the evening meeting at church went ahead without me (which was just fine with me, actually; I had no responsibilities at the meeting and didn't particularly want to be there). D and I went to bed that night with the rug rolled up in the hallway and with all of our clothes piled in boxes in the study (since I'd emptied the dressers to make them easier to move). Chaos reigned, it is true, but the bedroom hadn't been this clean since we moved in, and we slept the sleep of those who have labored hard.

This morning I tackled the rest of the project, hoping that peace and order would soon triumph over the chaos. Again, everything took longer than I'd hoped, but at least, unlike the bedroom project, things went according to plan, and the rug looks fabulous in the dining room -- pulls the room together beautifully. And, again, the room hasn't been this clean since we moved in, dusted and vacuumed within an inch of its life.

So now here it is, Wednesday night, and the house is still chaotic, but, by gum, these two rooms look fabulous! And I still have a couple of days left in this spring break week (and then the weekend, although that's fairly booked) to get our clothes back in the dressers and to straighten other rooms up a bit.

As you know, the cleanliness -- or lack thereof -- of our house is an ongoing source of stress for me, and I've been flirting for ages with the idea of adopting the FlyLady cleaning routines. I find some of the website's rhetoric annoying, but I like its basic premise of aiming low and simply tring to suck less as a housekeeper. My strategy these past two days of tackling a room and clearing everything out and scrubbing it down in an exhausting, mind-numbing blitz is very un-FlyLady-like, but it seems well-suited to the unstructured time of spring break, and I'm hoping that, if the house is actually clean when I return to school on Monday, that I'll then be able to adopt the FlyLady routines and keep them going.

Also, there's just something very fun about redecorating! D. and I have lived in this house almost three years now, and we worked very hard on decorating it for the first couple of months and then lost steam. And we haven't actually done that much since then, which means that there's all kinds of artwork that we've never hung out, some lightswitch plates that are still missing, some windows in which we're still living with old, non-matching curtains that we just slapped into place "temporarily," etc. It occurs to me that our lack of cleanliness and our lack of completed decorating may be connected (and certainly both of them lead to our lack of hospitality), so I'm feeling quite pleased at rearranging furniture and putting down rugs and hanging things on the wall; such renewed settling into our home gives me hope for a life in which we keep our home in a state in which we're happy to invite folks over and share with them the homey-ness that we enjoy daily.

And this is how the decision to hang one piece on the wall may lead to a revision of life; one thing leads to another!

Recalibrating

A couple of weeks ago, I had a heart-to-heart with one of my AP Comp students, who barely pulled a B- last term and is off to a similar start in the winter term (or maybe worse, since the expectations have risen in the new term). She's a nice kid who is clearly doing all the reading and is working hard on her papers but just can't seem to find interesting things to say or, when she occasionally does, can't support it. At the moment, these seem to be insurmountable problems for her, and she's understandably feeling frustrated. When we talked, she said that she really was trying to think well about each assignment, but that whenever she seemed to have thought long and hard enough, it turned out that she still hadn't thought enough. I told her that the task before her was to recalibrate her thinking, to change her sense of how much thinking is enough. When she seemed to have done enough thinking about an essay assignment, she needed to think some more. She promised to attempt this recalibrating process.

Only a few hours after that discussion, I was having a frank conversation with a friend/colleague in which we wound up sharing our greatest anxieties, and I got really teary as I talked about feeling so paralyzed by the deep shame I feel about my terrible housekeeping that I hadn't had a friend over to the house in a couple of years. This is something that I'd really like to change in 2011 -- I want to be the kind of person who invites friends over, both for casual "hey, let's hang out" evenings and for dinners -- but the thought of letting someone see the way that D and I have been living lately is untenable, and the thought of changing things, of creating a clean house that would be a pleasure to me and to potential guests, is so overwhelming as to seem impossible to contemplate. I was really quite upset after the conversation. I mean, I do try to clean and straighten up, but it's just never enough.

Only later that night did I realize that I needed to take the advice I'd given my student: Recalibrate! If the amount of cleaning and straightening that I thought was enough wasn't doing the job, clearly I needed to recalibrate. And let's face it, learning to clean more is a heck of a lot easier than learning to think more! So maybe I had underestimated how much time "normal" people spent in cleaning, and I simply needed to increase the amount of cleaning that seemed like "enough."

I got a bit of a start on the recalibration process that weekend but promised myself that I'd really buckle down over winter break with bringing the house into order; once that's done, I can start figuring out how much cleaning is enough.

Today was the first day of winter break -- heavenly! glorious! -- and I did in fact tackle a cleaning task. Of course, the project as a whole is so huge as to be overwhelming, so I have told myself that all I have to do is to do one hour of work each day, and it can be on anything that I want as long as it's improving the order or cleanliness of our home. I tend to get wound up in the planning -- what should I do first? Oh, but I need to do step X before I can do step Y, and when am I going to do step G? -- so I'm intentionally sidestepping all of that and simply tackling whatever presents itself that I feel like doing.

So here's what I got done today: I ordered a new lid for our crockpot and cleaned off the top of the refrigerator, organizing all sorts of stuff in doing so; the top of the fridge had become a de facto dumping ground when we moved in three years ago, and it had pretty much stayed that way. Now, is either of these the task that has the biggest impact or that would most affect a guest's or our own comfort? Um, no. But it's what I was moved to do, and thinking too much about the jobs that I should do first paralyzes me. Besides, cleaning off the fridge was actually a big, messy job, and there was something very therapeutic about doing some serious scrubbing. And I do think that most of our housekeeping incompetencies are because we don't have "a place for everything," so there is something to be said for tackling these projects are about deciding where things belong.

So that's one of my end-of-the-year projects: recalibrating my own expectations for cleaning and taking a dose of my own medicine; if I can tell a student to change the way she thinks about something difficult, then I can darn well do the same myself.

Odd Hospitality Priorities

I'm managing to carry on with the weekend's relaxation while also, at long last, managing a little productivity. I have decided that, after I teach each morning, all I have to do is get a couple of things done in the rest of the day, and otherwise I can loll about to my heart's content. The things I'm accomplishing are a little on the random side -- repainting a window sill, touching up some grout, throwing some mulch in a bare spot of the garden -- activities determined solely by whatever task is flitting through my mind when I'm in the mood to get something done, but it's a "system" that's working for me at the moment.

However, I have an overnight guest coming on Saturday -- my college roommate, who is passing through this way -- and the house is an embarrassment, so this afternoon I finally made a "to do" list of things to accomplish, with priorities for this week and then for next, after her visit. The goal is to convince her that I live in decency rather than sloth -- a tall order, quite frankly.

But enough of the "flitting about" style is still with me that the one and only thing I have managed to accomplish on this list is finally clearing out the ashes from the fireplace -- and yes, I chose one of the hottest days of the summer to clean up after this winter's fires. This was on the "to do next week" list, and I'm sure that my friend is far more interested in having a relatively pleasant living room awaiting her than in inspecting the fireplace (the glass doors of which will be closed anyway). But I was suddenly kind of in the mood to do it -- having clearly not been in the mood to do so for the past couple of months -- so I went with that impulse and found it quite satisfying, even if the rest of the living room is still a dump.

But, um, I may want to rethink my hospitality priorities in the next couple of days!

Oh, and apropos of all of this, Jackie of A Patchwork Life today pointed her readers to the blog Hyperbole and a Half, which I hadn't known and am looking forward to reading, and one recent piece on "This Is Why I'll Never Be an Adult" seems especially relevant to my inept housecleaning! "I did three things yesterday. Now I'm supposed to keep doing things? It's like the things never end!"

Snow!

We're having our first snow of the winter here in Adventure City. Very pretty!

D. and I therefore decided that the time had finally come to take the window air conditioner out of the living room window. One doesn't want to rush into these things.

Actually, we'd been planning to take it out today anyway. I had taken the window unit out ages ago, but the living room one is a behemoth of a unit, one left by the previous owner, and it was definitely a two-person job. Somehow we just hadn't gotten around to it before -- on days when we were both home in the daylight, it was either raining or, conversely, so beautiful that we wanted to be out and about instead. But it's been getting definitely drafty with it in the window, so the thing had to go. But of course that required scrounging around in the garage to clear some space for it. So all in all we were incredibly productive before 8:30 a.m. getting all of this done.

And then we went back to bed for a little while to recover.