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Saturday with no plans and no commitments: a rare occurrence. Ruth Anne and I finally got a chance to get the
basement of our new place into some semblance of order, or at least reduce the
chaos somewhat. Our 17 month old daughter Amelia even cooperated, and mostly amused herself in the basement while we worked.
Talking about it now, it doesn't sound like much. We moved some stuff to the garage, threw a bunch of stuff out, brought another pile of stuff to Goodwill, cleaned a bit and moved stuff around. Perhaps biggest impact was made when we found a place we could both hang a florescent light fixture AND plug it in. The added light, plus the added space, make the far side of the basement hugely more inviting. We then moved things around until we could give the rugs their first vacuuming since the Truman administration. We can definitely see the the basement is going to shape up pretty well pretty soon. We did manage to make a nice corner for a small indoor workshop (since the larger one in the detached garage is not too inviting in the winter in Cincinnati).
While we're talking about the basement, let me add that the house was built in 1903, the basement ceiling is really low, and the foundation is fieldstone, so basement is always full of mortar dust and plaster dust. Redoing the walls might be more than we can handle, and there's not much that can be done about the ceiling.
That was pretty much the whole day, unless you count grocery shopping (where I was a bad kid a bought a couple cans of Sobe Adrenaline Rush) or the actual trip to Goodwill to donate stuff. Lunch was excellent, as it was leftovers from yesterday's trip to Copeland's, and dinner was likewise yummy as Ruth Anne made spaghetti sauce (this time served over spiral pasta in three colors). Much playing with Amelia, of course, feeding her and bathing her and trying to convince her that she'd really be much happier asleep. Even the usual singings of Jennifer's Rabbit and Englebert the Elephant aren't doing the trick.
P.S. -- I forgot to mention yesterday -- I got my extended edition The Fellowship of the Ring on 4 DVD's from amazon.com. I used the free shipping option, but since it was shipped from Lexington it arrived overnight anyway. Now all I need is a couple of days to watch it all; perhaps over Thanksgiving, or the next time I fly to San Francisco.