December Trivia

Bed Trivia: My parents' house is a lovely three-bedroom ranch with a full, unfinished basement. Howsomever, a couple of decades ago, my dad converted my bedroom, or the spare bedroom as it were, into a combination laundry room and full bath. I've written about it before here. It's a large space that's wonderful, not the most efficient floor plan, nor blessed with closet space due to the basement stairs ruining that idea, but still large. You can dress in it without tripping over a bed or other furniture. You can actually set the ironing board up in there, and you can shake out and fold sheets without whacking a wall.

The biggest problem with the room, though, is that it effectively deleted a spare bedroom in the house. With all the people that used to come visit them and stay overnight - me and my family, Mom's sister, Mom's niece, and just friends from out of town - Joe got rid of the spare bedroom. God forbid he spent a little money and just added either another bedroom or bathroom. No, let's make sure no one ever comes and visits again, unless they're willing to sleep in the unfinished basement.

Well, since the basement has leaked for years, and Dad didn't consider that important enough to fix, it's damp and full of mold. It's probably why I've been sneezing like crazy since I've been here. The leak caused the carpet they put under the bed down there to become something you wouldn't walk on barefoot for fear of your health. Not to mention that after Dad became crazy he let a cat have kittens down there, and said kittens used that carpet as their personal bathroom. Shudder.

The point of my windy complaint? This picture is of my bed.  Joe's been out of the house long enough I could use his bedroom, but, OMG, the mattress on his bed is, as I said, like a slab of concrete. One of these days I'm going to have to rent a truck and actually go buy a mattress. I hate doing that. I always choose wrong. Sometimes I think I'd rather just buy the bed that slept great from a good hotel.

Cat Trivia: My dad had 7 cats when I came to live with them. One was a male, which he wouldn't pay to have neutered. One was a female, which he couldn't pay to have spayed. Five were the kittens of that unsurprising union. It took espionage and trickery to get the female cat and her kittens gone, but that got taken care of in short order. The male cat, sigh, has been a different story.

Dad was surprisingly attached to the cat. So it stayed. For a while I called it Bob, but that didn't really stick. Now he's known as Stupid. I meant to get rid of him as soon as possible. It couldn't be done while there was the slimmest chance Dad might return to the house from the nursing home. Now it's been two weeks since Dad was buried, and Stupid is still here. Somehow getting rid of him just hasn't risen as the highest priority yet.

When I first came here, in an effort to keep Stupid from sleeping on the chairs and covering them with fur, I got him a nice cozy cat bed. He wouldn't use it the first few days, so Joe stuck it away. Since Joe's been gone, I put it at the end of the desk. Lo, and behold, Stupid has finally figured out it makes a great place to sleep.

Kitchen Trivia: In his den, Joe put a crazy piece of furniture he built. It had a large desktop and two shelves under the top. On top of that, he put a nice two-shelf unit he built. After removing hundreds of paperback books and a little bit of pondering, I decided to try the shelf unit in the kitchen.

Right now we don't eat in the kitchen, and the kitchen is woefully short on storage space. So the two-shelf unit is getting a try on the kitchen table. I think it's going to stay there a while. It's perfect to hold the cookbooks Lola had in a drawer, which is really needed for other storage. It's perfect to hold the fruit bowl, which opens up a little counter space to put the bread.

Right now I'm slowly going through things and trying to declutter and organize them. When Mom's sister died, Mom couldn't bear to let a single thing of Bebe's go.

There are things jammed into the dining room hutch and buffet so thickly that they're like Fibber McGee's closet. The hard thing there is I'm lousy at discerning good crystal from WallyWorld crystal on small pieces. Unless it's obviously lead heavy and cut, I just don't know. It's kind of hard to get a small dish to ring. And I'm sorry, but I just can't tell real Fostoria from fake.

There are five, really 5, sets of dishes in the basement. I just found another one last night. I've been going through them, getting them washed and put in boxes awaiting further decision. As of yet, because things are so scattered, you can't even tell whether the set is full or has pieces stuck in some other box or cranny.

In the midst of this, I realized I needed to get all that stuff put away and put some Christmas decorations up. Argh. Putting holiday stuff out and then putting it back up has become something I just hate doing. I'd rather just wiggle my nose and have it done.