Dear Mr Footless

Today was your birthday. You would have been 75. Your daughter and I spent a lot of time talking this weekend about the last year and a half, and what that was like for us.  The words that she used were Compassion and Grace.  I understand now that you were in the depths of paranoid dementia.  Neither one of the two of us can figure out how much of it was drug induced and at this point it really doesn't matter if it was opioid use or brain shut down that made you so entirely impossible to deal with.  Over all I am glad that you  are gone.  I loved you for most of the twenty three years we were married.  Out of twenty seven, that's not a bad ratio.
I am still dealing with the hoard, the house is still in progress, but the things that you could not deal with or do are being done.  The family things are back where they belong and the records of the mess have been burned, shredded, or mulched.
 I miss you.  I miss the man I married, who was my friend, partner and support and whom I dreamed some mighty dreams with.
I am so glad that you got to see your Grand daughters graduate from high school and go on to be functional people in the world.  They all are regular working folks, holding jobs and supporting themselves. 
You got to see my boys graduate from college.  That was a big dream for you too.  The dings and pain were there, and both of them have needed help to get past the pain but both of them have been doing the work they need to do.
I am still in limbo.  I still am focusing on the cleanup and not on my "proper" work but I still have some recovering to do.  The last year of your life plus the year before that took it all out of me and while I held things together I was just scraping by. 
Wherever you are please keep a loving eye on the Swordsman and Thursdays Child, They need whatever help that you can give them.
The Erstwhile Child will be getting married soon, please keep and eye out there as well.
I love you , I miss you.
wherever you may be please think of me
Love, Dances

Getting the next thing done

Sometimes getting unstuck is the best thing I can do. These  two weeks I got several kidney stones in the way of progress out of the way.

• the tree trimmer came in with The Grande Dame and took out all the brush, pruned the apple tree and took down the weed elms that were growing where no elms had any business growing He left with his ginourmous dumptruck full to the rails with the chips from all the brush and branches.  Tree Trimmer guy is good with trees and inexpensive for what he does, as long as he is under supervision of The Grande Dame.  She has warned me that I must not use him if she is not supervising because he may show up either drunk or hung over.  That's just fine with me, She knows what she is doing.

• The claw foot tub and the fireplace insert are out of the basement and left in the company of Habitat who also took some awkward pieces of furniture and they will be back for the tools when  I get them sorted.
• The power chair and the diabetic equipment are going next, so the main floor is getting ready for carpet (bleagh) removal and then for paint and the laminate installation.
• The Grande Dame and I have removed 3/4 of the very last of the heaps of wooden detritus that were in the yard. Most of it was too big for us to move until I cut it up into manageable pieces. never underestimate the joys of a power saw
• After surveying what I would need to do now and in the future, I have decided that this is the last dumpster load I will have. The Dumpster itself is leaving.

  I have finally and at last come to the place where anything I need to throw out can be taken to the dump in my truck.  I have run out of massive quantities of things that I have to dispose of .  It took six months, but the majority of the mess outside and in has been cleaned up.

It still looks like a disaster in slow motion but it is a much improved disaster and I have learned how to cope with an overwhelming project. (saw it up)

Any one know someone who needs a whole lot of vinyl records? I have five copies of everything  Linda Ronstadt ever recorded and three of Tammy Wynette in gold Spandex and the bouffant from bride of Frankenstein.
Right now I am going to get cleaned up and eat, and then I am going to go out and dance,to celebrate my unstuckness.

I have a new best tool

The weather suddenly got nicer than it has been for way too long. Sunny weather and the mess outside is more compelling than the mess inside.  My friend who takes no prisoners came over to help and advise me on lilac pruning.  Apparently there is very little to it really, it is a matter of removing all the old growth and the dead branches and then letting the tender green whips grow up and out,
OK, so you take something that looks like this

and then after you are finished it looks like this

 

The amount  of brush this generates is amazing

That is just one lilac's worth of branches, and that isn't all of it.
Anyway, the tool that does this with a minimum of fuss and bother is a Sawsall.
It's my new friend.

Well what on earth is that?

Today I managed to get the flake board in the front yard sawn up and in the dumpster. The flake board was sitting on top of a two by platform and was used in the first part of sorting the mountain of trash, from the mole hill of good stuff when we can tell the trash from the good stuff. It's not always easy to tell.
So I was hauling the boards off and looked down into the two by foundation.... The more I looked the more elaborate it got, and it took a while to really understand it.  I was looking at a mouse estate.

There were three nests, and a whole complex of tunnels and what looked like a couple of store rooms divided up by the foundation boards that kind of set it up with walls or hedges. There under the platform was a fairly large mouse city, or perhaps a village.

It looked a bit like what you find when you turn a rock over and watch the ants frantically haul off the goodies that were under there, only much larger in diameter. I wondered where the mouse colony that was living in the junk on the back patio had got to.
Looks like they moved house into the platform.  I wonder where they will end up now because the platform is next to be leaving.
I hope that it doesn't rain or snow until I can take a picture of it.

Strange story

Mr Footless died close to midnight  on a Thursday. I called no one because I didn't see any need for anyone to lose sleep who didn't have to.
The next day I talked to MyMom (among others) who was having troubles of her own. She had just been flooded out of her apartment the week before and had found  a place to roost in Camp Stuffy, the senior living facility she graces with her residence.. She got settled in a meeting room where she had just the essentials. ( I visit her on the weekends which is about what I can manage) Making sure that she had adequate housing had been part of the alarums and excitements of the week before. Also due to the floods I had not been able to go see her.
The roads being washed out and therefore closed does that.
After telling Mom about Mr Footless, there was a silence on the other end of the line. "Well" She says,"Are you coming down to see me this Saturday?"
I said that I would indeed be seeing her then." Good" She says."I need some things from the store."
Alrighty then.
 By Saturday morning a good friend did the research for me, and got me in touch with a coffin maker in one of the towns south of here and north of MyMom.  So I stopped on my way south and picked up the coffin which the maker kindly roped down in the back of my truck. Lucille has a tool box in her bed that shortens the bed by a good two feet so the coffin was propped up on the tailgate, large as life and twice as natural and obviously exactly what it was.
 So I rumble on into Snooterville to meet up with MyMom and do what needs to be done in terms of grocery and basic needs shopping for an eighty plus lady who has been rendered temporarily unhomed.
 After picking up some of the basics MyMom decided she wanted to eat somewhere that wasn't the dining room at Camp Stuffy. That's ok, I have no connection with my body at this point and so I am eating when I think I might need to refuel because I can't tell if I am hungry unless I am so ridiculously low blood sugar I am about to faint.  I'm not fainting yet but it has been a while so eating would be good, right?
My Mom decides on the restaurant, and off we go to a medium high end place at about three in the afternoon.  I had forgotten about the coffin in the back of Lucille as an actual coffin, and started seeing it as the visual obstruction in the middle of the rear view mirror, causing me to use the side mirrors more and the rear mirror a lot less.
If I had been thinking about something besides getting MyMom into the closest parking place so that she had the shortest trudge for her knees, I might have considered the effect of my somewhat battered truck and it's macabre cargo a little more and not parked center front  in the windows of the medium high end place MyMom wanted to eat at.
You would think that waitstaff would be too busy to look and had seen too much of everything that living in a town with Snooterville U could come up with to be at all interested in my load.
Aparently not.
We eat, and we head out to discover a group of people standing around the bed of my truck and speculating on what I might be going to do with the obvious coffin in the back.
I lacked a sense of humor  right then, or I might have had some fun. As it was I packed MyMom up and headed back to Camp Stuffy.
It wasn't until quite a while later that I thought about the effect it must have had on the people watching to see my show up with a coffin and a little old lady.
Mr Footless had a sense of humor that was both pretty black and bizarre. He would have gotten a good laugh over that.

In praise of steam, steam mops and cleanliness.

Due to the distressing circumstances that the house was in for the last bit of time it is to put it mildly, a pit. An ugly really grotty pit at that.
There was absolutely nothing that wasn't gritty, grimy and crud covered from one end of the place to the other. Even after some heavy duty scrubbing  on some sections there is a lot of this place that is grossly dirty. I have never been all that concerned with the process of getting things clean. In fact I have found that for some reason cleaning was something that I did when I was angry. I thought that  cleaning made me angry, and then I thought that I was using anger to clear my head so that I could get things clean.  It turns out that none of this is true.
I find that actually I like cleaning things when  they stay that way for a reasonable length  of time, it actually calms me and leaves me feeling happy.  That really surprises me, Who would have guessed that?
Over time I have had some conversations with My Stepdaughter Who Will Be the Death of Me Someday. She has her difficulties but she is hell on wheels when it comes to cleaning. I think that it is a backlash from living with Mr Footless who was profoundly uncomfortable with clean. ( Thus the condition of  the house)
She sang the praises of her steam mop and how much grime came up without having to use  cleaners and how easy it was to get the floors done up with minimal scrubbing.  I borrowed one.  Then I bought one. It is everything she said it would be.
As someone who is removing carpet and laying laminate from one end of the house to the other and who is entirely grossed out by the incredible amount of dirt that is in said carpet, I need something to take care of a lot of floor.
At present I have been trying to figure out how to use Stanley the clothes steamer to do things that the mop doesn't, like the tile in the shower, and the walls and the stove top. I think that what I am missing is some rubber bands to tie down the towel to the steam head. I am stunned at how much crud migrated to the towel while wiping the steam over the wall that I chose to try this out on.  Mind you  I had washed the wall not too long ago with soap and water and gotten  a layer of dirt off. I can see that I have some of the kind of experimentation that I find the most fun, how do I get this to work?

Tiddly Pom

The weather has reverted to winter. it has snowed and snowed again, and for what reason should I be complaining? We need the water, we need the moisture, we need the time for quiet contemplation.
I am really fine with it Except, the walk needs shoveling, front back and side, and some time today I am going to have to go to the store. The store will be slammed with people who are frantically buying all the eggs, milk and bread for what purpose I can't imagine. Epic amounts of french toast?
I think I can pass on most of it.
Then again I need to talk to Mum about my usual visit to her, because tomorrow is the huge enourmus gladiator fest AKA Superbowl, where men in armor give each other traumatic brain injuries and throw an odd shaped ball around.  Anyway she wants to watch it and I want to not be around on the streets when it is over, because the number of  Drunk People Having Fun in Cars is more than I can imagine dealing with.
I think I am electing myself for wimp hood.
I think it is a relief to just admit that I am scared to be out on the highways with a bunch of people at night who have made themselves unreliable.
I am a grownup. Grownups are not scared of things right? So who made up that lie?
Actually, mostly thinking about it is far worse than doing it. So where is the anxiety leaving off and where is mature sensible caution beginning?
I think that I will be doing any out things today and not tomorrow, and I think that I will no longer beat myself up for what I am scared about.