Meanwhile, Back At The Purge

So here's a question -- Who glues that wretched indoor / outdoor carpeting to bare cement?  Really, who?  Well, the people who built my house for starters.  And it covers my entire basement:  the mud room, the hall, the laundry room, the rec room, the workout room.  Wall to wall, end to end, fraying grey-blue carpeting.  I've contemplated trying to rip it up.  The mere thought of that hurts my back. And so it greets me in all it's discoloured glory every time I enter the house via the mud room.

The mud room...no idea why it's called that.  Other than the fact that it's the room off the garage that's used 99.9% of the time to come into the house so it stands a fair chance of getting muddy. Not that I'm in the habit of hosting professional mud wrestlers.  Mud wrestling dogs on the other hand....

But I can now cross the mud room off the purge list.  It's not so much a room really, more of a large vestibule with three cupboards, a table and an old dresser.  Home to a plethora of coats and shoes and boots and hats and scarves and mitts and all the crap you drop the second you walk in the door. Other than the carpet, that's the biggest problem with the mud room.  It's the first thing I see when I come home.  And for me, a cluttered room (or vestibule as the case may be) equals a cluttered mind. Got to where I hated coming into the house.

But not anymore.  Now the space is pristine.  Nothing on the table but my keys.  Everything has a place in the cupboards -- coats are hung, shoes are stowed, hats and scarves and mitts all have their own neat little basket.  The ones that survived the purge that is.

And so I'm down to it.  One room to go.

See, I do more than read books and bitch about bedding.

On another note...In a couple of days, I'm outta here.  Italy here I come.  So...Ciao...for now.     

There Are Giants Among Us

And they sleep on flat bed trailers with mattresses for pillows.  They must do.  At least the sheet manufacturers seem to think so.  'Cause I mean...have you bought sheets lately???

When the kid moved out I bought her a new mattress and bedding.  Really really really nice sheets. Bamboo.  Expensive, but oh so soft.  She couldn't wait for those sheets.  So imagine my chagrin when I started to make up the bed and the sheets were beyond enormous.  (What's the word for beyond enormous?  Gynormous??)  I figured, okay, just a little extra tucking.  Let me tell you, no amount of tucking was going to make these sheets fit.  The "fitted" sheet covered the mattress AND the box spring.

So back they went to the very nice bedding store where I bought them -- 'cause isn't it nice to support independent stores and not the big-box behemoths -- where I could only get store credit, no cash refund.  So I went home and measured my almost new pillow top mattress, 'cause I was due for some new sheets, and went back to the bedding store (which is in another town so this isn't just a quick trip to the mall).  Now my mattress measures 14 inches in height and I'm thinking that's pretty damn big. It sure looks big.  Apparently not.  Every set of sheets in every brand in this store fits mattresses up to 19" deep.  Who has a mattress this big?  And those that do -- is their nose scraping the ceiling? Oh, I'd need the extra inches for tucking.  So I was told. No, assured.  So I fork out so more cash on top of my store credit for some very nice Tencel sheets, 320 thread count.  Yeah, yeah, eco friendly blah, blah, blah, with excellent wicking abilities and excellent temperature regulating properties. Apparently not tested on menopausal women with night sweats, however.

Let me tell you, no assure you -- you do not need five extra inches for tucking.  I like a sheet with some spring.  Snap those corners on and bounce a dime.  Instead, I'm sleeping in wrinkles.  I roll over, the sheet shifts and wrinkles some more.  Oh, they are very soft.  Temperature regulating?  Not so much.  And don't even get me started on the size of the pillow cases.

And the kid?  I had to make a quick trip to Target to get her some sheets.  Lovely and soft, 400 thread count, and the corners have two elasticized sections to fit a variety of mattress sizes.  What a cool concept.

Oh, and less than half the price.

Aptly Named

I'm talking about the King -- Stephen King to be precise.  I think if you're a Stephen King fan, you're all in.  There's no middle ground. Love him or diss him.  I happen to be a genre fan.  No Nobel prize winning Alice Munro for this girl (but good on ya, Alice -- nice to see a Canadian honoured).  I've tried reading Munro.  Just don't get it. I'm sure a lot of people feel the same way about King.  In the past critics called him a hack but I say, "hack away, Steve."  Oh sure, he's written a few dogs.  When your body of work numbers fifty books and growing, there's bound to be a couple that don't grab you. (I mean, Lisey's Story?  Even for Steve that one was just weird.)

I was introduced to King when I read The Shining all those many years ago.  It was a perfectly sunny afternoon in my perfectly safe little apartment and it scared the crap out of me.  I had to call my roommate to come and be in the room with me.  But it was the beginning of my love affair with his writing.  I went back and read his two novels published before The Shining -- Carrie and 'Salem's Lot -- and never looked back.

I've just finished Doctor Sleep, the "sequel" to The Shining.  Those are some high expectations to fill for fans.  And he succeeded to the nth degree.  Fabulous read.  I had planned to go back and reread The Shining before reading Doctor Sleep but found out I didn't have to.  It all came flooding back. Mrs. Massey in room 217...REDRUM...worthless pups need to take their medicine...Shudder.

I love how he slips in little things that make you sit up and say..."Cool."  Like at the bottom of page 273.  I'm not giving anything away here by telling you that Doctor John has an appointment with a girl named Frederika Bimmel.  She's never mentioned again, doesn't figure into the story, but you read that and nod and smile.  A little shout-out from Mr. King to Mr. Harris -- so he's a fan of Silence of the Lambs.  Like I said -- "Cool."

So just what is it that I love so much about his writing?  First off is his voice.  There's no mistaking it, no disguising it.  It makes reading him effortless and it draws you in, like he's just sitting there telling you the story.  (Never deprive yourself of reading his introductions or author's notes.  That's when he really talks to you, Constant Reader.)  And his characters.  He can bring a character to life, even a secondary one, in a few short lines.  No long drawn out descriptions.  No endless back story.  He creates living, breathing, three dimensional people with a few perfectly selected details or snips of dialogue.  That's talent, people.

But there are two things wrong with reading a Stephen King book.  Number one is when it ends.  Even though I can't wait to read one, I'm always bummed when I turn that last page.  And number two -- it's hard to pick up another book afterwards.

Because everything else just pales in comparison.

The Hanger Trick Revisited

Remember this one?  The hanger trick?  If you missed that post, it was back in February.  Go ahead and read it now...I'll wait...

...okay, good, you're back.  Well it's been eight months since I purged the clothes closet and turned all the hangers backwards.  So today, while practicing packing my suitcase, I figured it was a good time to deal with all those hangers that still hadn't been turned back around.

Remember my rule about not trying the stuff back on?  Well, I broke my rule.  Of course I did.  'Cause that's what rules are for. But turns out it was a good rule to break.  Because the trying on solidified in my mind that the stuff that hasn't been worn in eight months truly deserves to go.  I kind of figured that after so much time spent getting rid of stuff I'd start getting soft.  But I actually think I'm getting tougher.  Less attached.  More of the "it's just stuff" attitude.  So everything still on a backwards hanger is gone.

With one exception.  An authentic Levi denim shirt that I've had for years and years and years.  It's so worn it's almost white now.  And soft.  Like butter.  It gets to stay.  

Okay, two exceptions.  I also couldn't part with a funky vintage second hand white shirt made by the This is not a hat company.  All around the collar it says All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy ....over and over and over.  There is a typewriter stitched on the left front with a piece of paper in it with the same phrase....written over and over and over.  

Stephen King fans will know exactly what this means.  My friend who gave me the shirt sure did. And I happened to be wearing this shirt when I penned the very first short story that I had published.  Coincidence?  I think not.

What I do think is that I really should start wearing that shirt again. 

Clean Sweep

If you've been reading this blog, you probably know that I'm not a big fan of cleaning.  I mean I do it because one has to.  Well, one doesn't have to.  I've been in plenty of places that didn't ascribe to that philosophy.  So let me rephrase that to one should.  Whether one does it or not is one's own business -- until it becomes the business of the Department of Health or an exterminator.  Or an unruly mob of angry neighbours with pitchforks and torches.  So far anyway, my neighbours still like me.  Except one.  But that's got nothing to do with the state of cleanliness of my place.

Okay, we've established that I don't particularly like cleaning.  But there is one aspect of it that I love. Love, love, love.  Sweeping.  I love to sweep.  Really.  It is, for me at least, the most satisfying of the household chores.  Vacuuming, dusting, and scrubbing have nothing on a good sweep.

So when I decided today was garage cleaning day I wasn't going, 'oh crap, it's garage cleaning day.' I was going, 'yay, it's garage cleaning day.'  Well maybe 'yay' is pushing it a bit, because after all, it's still cleaning.  But cleaning the garage is more or less just one hell of a lot of sweeping. All those spiders and wood bugs and cobwebs and pine needles and general detritus that migrate in there on shoes and tires and lawn mowers -- it's sweepers heaven.

And for outside sweeping, nothing beats a good old-fashioned corn broom.  Nylon, rubber or synthetic will simply not do.  Well they'll do, but the satisfying scrape on the concrete will be missing.  Kind of like when they took the corn broom out of curling. Sure, I get why they did it.  No one wants their rock stopped dead by an errant piece of broom on the ice.  But the soft buzz of nylon on ice just doesn't compare to the slapping of the old brooms amidst the cries of 'Hurry, hard!'  Let's face it -- sweeping was the only part of curling that actually felt like exercise.  

And how much more satisfying does it get than wearing that broom down to a nub?

Man, I am way too easily pleased.