The
Joys of January
Oh, my, January was such a confuzzled month. My daughter Anni and her husband Razmik
were here for Christmas and then to fix up my house, which needs it badly.
They started out with a bang. Unfortunately
for me, both of my children are neat freaks. Since I was born without an
organizational gene in my own personal DNA, I don’t know where this
characteristic came from. I don’t think their father was particularly well
organized. Nuts, maybe, but not well organized. However it came to pass, both
Anni and Robin are tidy. Anni even made me clean up a bunch of stuff. Overall,
this was a Very Good Thing, because I found some things I’d even forgotten I
had, including two wiener-dog pictures by Tom Stoner, late husband of Monica
Stoner, my very first critique partner, who now lives, writes, breeds and shows
Salukis in Edgewood, New Mexico. We met in Southern California, and then everybody
moved to New Mexico. Go figure. Anyway, I’m pleased to have found Tom’s wiener
dogs pictures, and aim to have them framed as soon as I can afford to do so.
But that’s not all. Razmik put in new floors, painted the whole inside of the house, and I bought a new sofa and chair for the living room. He also re-hung pictures, so that they’re all now evenly spaced and stuff like that. I’ve never had evenly spaced pictures before. This is nice. Love the new floors. And I’ve taken precautions so the dogs can’t ruin my new furniture. I don’t mind a little dog hair, but a couple of my hounds actually pee on furniture. Not anymore. Heh, heh, heh.
There are still dead stuffies all over the place, but I don't mind those.
And then it snowed. It didn’t just snow. It
snowzillaed. Mind you, we generally get a little bit of snow here in Roswell,
but this snow pretty much brought the
city to its knees. The newspaper lady couldn’t get through the snow to deliver
the newspaper (no big loss there) and even the mail couldn’t get through. Roswell’s mail is sorted in Lubbock,
Texas, and all the roads were blocked into and out of Roswell, which is pretty
much in the middle of nowhere. There was no food on grocery shelves, and lots
of streets remained impassible for a couple of weeks. We’re more or less back
to normal now, but Razmik’s work on the house sort of had to grind to a stop.
He’d intended to paint the outside, too, and put new outdoor carpeting on the
front porch because the old stuff was coming apart and posed quite a falling
risk. He took up the old stuff, but it was too wet to put the new stuff on. Oh,
well. Maybe they’ll be able to come back again someday and finish making my
house worth living in. He did find a huge problem regarding a leak between the
bathroom and kitchen walls, which will have to be addressed at a later time,
too, but not much later because the whole stupid house is apt to collapse if it’s
not taken care of soon. Which, of course, requires money. Details, details.
So no contest this month. I’ll figure out
another one for March.
Please visit my web page at www.aliceduncan.net, and if you’d like to be Facebook friends, here’s my
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Thanks!
