My craft room is now so crammed full of stuff that I can barely get around in there, let alone actually work in there. I need to take a couple of days and go in there & start rearranging things. A lot of stuff in there needs to be organized, inventoried & put away, some of it needs to be thrown away. I’d really love to get a closet organizer & some shelving units in there, that would cut down on a lot of clutter, and I need to get that loveseat out of there, since it never gets used, anyway.

I’d love to have one of those Sebo vacuums to give it a good, deep cleaning, but I’ll settle for getting it straightened up & then just use my own vacuum on it, honestly, I just want to be able to use that room again.

I’m still trying to decide what I want to do with the booth next year and who I want to participate in that effort. I need people in the booth who can & will be there every day, at least for awhile, so that Dawn & I can get a chance to get out & have a break. The person we had “helping” us this year was never in the booth for more than 30 minutes, which wasn’t her fault, her husband had a booth too, and he was also a performer, so she had to be at that booth when he was on stage. It didn’t work out great, is all. I’d love for Vicki to come back, she’s a great help in the booth, is a wonderful crafter & I really missed her this year.

After I decide on a third partner, I’d really love to have some company logo shirts made up for us to wear during setup, so we can get a little advertising in before faire opens. I think I’ll redo the little logo that we use on our cards into a larger, more t-shirt worthy design. I need to have our business cards redone again, too, the box I had this year got wet during the last part of the week and most of them are ruined.

I’m sitting here eating my breakfast & watching “Loretta Lynn’s Haunted Plantation” on the Travel Channel. When I’m finished eating, I plan to start on the inside of my fridge. I know it seems like I’m really going slowly, since I’m still working on my kitchen & haven’t moved on from there, but really, I’m spending a lot of time in each area, making sure I do a super thorough job while I’m there. If I had a built-in turbocharger I’d probably be done, but since I don’t, I’ll take things at my own pace & make sure it’s done right.

This evening, Troy & I are barbecuing here at home. We invited Rhi & will invite Erin. I want the dogs to come and play and us to just enjoy the day, instead of being rushed to go to Tuatha or anything else. I’m tired of feeling like my weekends are already planned for me & that I have no say in it, at all. It seems like we spent all summer doing what other people expected us to do on Saturday night & not really what we wanted to do. I think I’m finished doing that, at least for now.

One thing I really like about all of this cleaning - other than the obvious clean house - I really work up a sweat while I’m working. My hair was soaking wet several times yesterday, just from the sweat I generated while cleaning. I was also starving by the time we had dinner, which is a pretty good indication that I’d burned off everything I had eaten earlier.

I don’t need to join a health club & work out on their ellipticals, I just need to keep cleaning my house! Speaking of which, I need to get back to it, my drip pans & burners need to be cleaned while I’m waiting to go to the store.

The cabinets are all clean (except for one that I swear manufactures grease every time I step away from it), lined & organized now. I found tea varieties in there that I had no idea I had even bought. I threw away a bunch of old food that I know is stale at this point & didn’t feel guilty about it, I got rid of all of the Gladware lids I had been keeping for some reason (I don’t have any Gladware). I had decided last night that the last thing I was going to do yesterday was clean the nasty stove hood, but I apparently lost the degreaser I was using. I sat it down after cleaning my last cabinet & it disappeared. I still haven’t been able to find it.

By the time I finished last night my whole body felt sticky & dirty & I was exhausted. Have you heard of those companies that send out the maids, dressed in sexy costumes? Those companies have never met a house like mine, because they wouldn’t be able to afford the costumes or keep employees if they had. I swear, no one had ever cleaned the grease from the cabinet doors in all of the years before we moved in here & even though I half-heartedly tried when we moved in, I never managed to get it all off until yesterday & it took me HOURS and there’s still one door that is stubbornly hanging onto the grease.

If I can ever get those done & the hood clean, then I’ll move onto the china cabinet, table & freezer & finally be able to get the floor swept & mopped. What a job this is turning into!

I started cleaning my kitchen at around 9:30 or 10 tonight, I just figured that I can stay up as late as I want to, so I may as well clean when the urge strikes me. I’m not doing anything anyway. I have most of the food prep area all finished, with the exception of my kitchen faucets, because I need to get a toothbrush to scrub those since I can’t really reach behind them with the sponge I’m using.

I put the coffee maker away, I don’t use it since I got a French press. I moved the toaster oven over to where the coffee maker was & now the space it used to be can be used for food preparation, since it’s between the stove & the microwave. Tomorrow, besides the toothbrush, I need to grab a broom & a cheap mop, along with some Pine-Sol or something similar.

I finally decided that I need to stop worrying about the things that I can’t control in my life, like whether my kids are working or have a place to live & start taking care of what I can control, at least that way, I don’t end up feeling useless & stupid. I benefit from a house I’m not ashamed of & that I enjoy spending time in & my kids aren’t mad at me, so we all win.

Well, we’re gradually adjusting to not having kids at home anymore, even though Erin stays here part of the time & we’re helping Rhi out with groceries and such sometimes. It’s like a different world for us, at times, I mean 6 months ago, we were still worrying about grades, acne creams, getting kids to school on time and graduation. Now, we’re pretty much thinking about what we want to do, sleeping as late as we want to (and trust me, it’s really nice, especially since school started last week), eating what we want & when.

We’ve been able to start planning ahead & saving up for things that we’d like to have, instead of relying on credit cards all the time & that’s really nice. Right now, we’re saving for a new TV, after that, I plan to save up to get my home office squared away & looking spiffy. Who knows after that, maybe we’ll start thinking about new furniture or something.

Anyway, it hasn’t been bad & we’re learning to let go & let Rhi live her life how she chooses & not interfere with it. We’ll get there before we know it, we have with Erin & it makes life a lot easier these days. Growing up is tough on everyone, but we’ll make it through.

I’m not sure it’s really considered a “vacation,” but we’re going camping over the weekend. We really just need to get out of town, go away from people who create chaos & strife and just relax, enjoy the mountain & the people we want to be around. We’re going to go shopping for our food & a few supplies in awhile here, I’m hoping there will be an end-of-season sale on camping equipment. We don’t need a lot, but there are a few things that would be really nice to have, like a cooking rack and things like that. We go to an unimproved site, mostly because it’s quiet & beautiful, the fact that it’s free doesn’t hurt either.

We’re taking Dawn with us, she has so much garbage going on in her house that she really needs to just get away from it for a couple of days and Rhi is planning to go with us, too. Dawn had a hysterectomy & had her prolapsed bladder repaired in the past couple of weeks & most likely has more medical procedures that need to be done in the near future. I think it’s almost impossible to heal when you’re surrounded by spiteful people, so I want to give her a couple of days away from it. She went years & years without any insurance, because the Medicaid office screwed up the DNA testing for her oldest & accused her of with-holding the father’s name & denied her Medicaid. Now that her oldest daughter is grown & on her own, she is able to get health care again.

I guess we’d probably better make a list & get ready to go buy our groceries and such, just so we know that it’s all taken care of.

The past couple of days have been a mixture of ups and downs, emotional highs & lows. Yesterday was my son, Erin’s, 20th birthday. We took him to see “The Dark Knight” on Tuesday night and bought him some things that he asked us for. It was a nice evening with him that truly felt like old times. He came over yesterday afternoon, we visited for a few minutes, he made a couple of phone calls and asked me to take him to his friend’s house. We got ready & left & as I was getting ready to turn off, my sister-in-law called to tell me that my dad’s cancer was worse than the doctor had originally diagnosed & that my grandmother was dying. She told me that I should go & see her if I wanted to before it was too late. I hung up & told Erin that I couldn’t take him right now, explained what was going on & asked him to call Rhi & tell her to get ready to go.

I went & picked her up & we came out here to my mom & dad’s house. They both went in to see her, Rhi spent a lot longer in there than I expected her to be. I went in & was pretty shocked. She had lost so much weight that I didn’t even recognize her. Apparently, she had stopped eating several days before, and was no longer able to swallow liquids. Fortunately, hospice was working closely with them and reassured them that they were doing everything they could & had done a fantastic job taking care of her. I stayed for the rest of the day, until Troy picked me up after work. I told my mom to call me, no matter what time it was & went home.

I had a feeling that it would be today, and got up when Troy got up for work, went in the living room, made coffee & turned the TV on. At about 7:10, my phone rang. It was my mom, telling me that my grandma had gone. I hung up, called Rhi and Troy & took a shower, then I left. I got here as the hospice nurse was finishing up (they had cleaned her up & gotten her ready for the mortuary to pick her up). My parents seemed at peace, and the stress in the house was gone. Taking care of an Alzheimer’s patient is hard on the whole family and they really did a great job taking care of her & dealing with the stress over the past 2 years. After the mortuary left, I got a cup of coffee & a donut, talked to Troy on the phone & then me & my mom started on the room my grandmother had been living in. I can’t believe that she managed to collect so much useless stuff since we moved her out of her house a few years ago. She seemed to save everything, from plastic bags to old pantyhose. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have found an old car cover in there somewhere, honestly.

Anyway, I’ll be a little scarce around here over the next few days, between my dad starting his treatment & grandma dying. Time to get back to cleaning out things.

Troy, Rhi & I made a trip to St. George this weekend, mostly to go to the new bookstore they opened down there, but for other things, too. I honestly could have spent the entire afternoon in there & been completely happy. I got several really nice books, including one called “Extreme Brewing” that I’m really excited about. Jason & I have been wanting to learn to brew beer for awhile and this pretty much has all of the information we’ll need to get started.

I got a couple of books on green witchcraft, the new Breaking Dawn book, and a paperback by an author I’ve never read before because I liked the sound of her books. I saw “A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose,” but didn’t pick it up, even though it looked like a good book. I tried to find Jeff Lindsay’s “Dearly Devoted Dexter,” but was told it was sold out, so that made me pretty sad, but I’ll try again some other time.

All in all it was a pretty great day, it was nice to spend time with Rhi again and nice to get out of town for a few hours, too.