Countdown

We're counting down the days.

A starts back to school at the end of next week (either Thursday or Friday, our school hasn't notified us which day the pre-school will start for A). This will be a very good thing, for both A and the rest of us. His chewing and hand flapping seem to increase exponentially every day if he's bored. And he gets bored a lot, if mommy is doing dishes or mowing the lawn (which takes a while ~ over a half acre with an old fashioned reel mower! But it's great exercise and I've lost 43 pounds since Christmas). A likes cups, too, but we're trying to limit him to two a day.



Z has less than 8 months left in his current job, and then he can go and do whatever he wants to do (most likely with a hefty salary increase). He can't wait to be done, every time another inane thing happens he repeats it: "Only _ more weeks".

I am most likely going to have some minor outpatient surgery soon, in the next couple of weeks, so there is some amount of dread and nervous anticipation of that too. It would seem that I am one of those lucky females that develop kidney stones with their pregnancies (every one of them), and I had the joy (?) of developing their formative relatives, gallstones, with Miss K. Apparently it's the same mechanism that can cause both, just in different places in the body? The doctor at the time said they may never bother me, or one day they just might start flaring up for whatever reason. Anyway, K is two now, and the stones are making their presence quite known, so after a consultation with a surgeon later this week we'll know what to expect. To quote my ultrasound technician this morning, "Honey, you are just FULL of rocks!" I guess I'm relieved that the nausea and pain (and lack of sleeping) has a fairly simple fix, although I suppose surgery isn't exactly a "simple fix" ~ even if it is an outpatient procedure.

We are counting down the days left of an uncomfortable upstairs level of the house. We quickly discovered that office-style acoustical tile ceilings do great for sound insulation, but not so much for temperature insulation. It was always freezing upstairs when we moved in, and it's been blazing hot up there as summer arrived (we're talking at least a 15 degree difference between upstairs and downstairs despite central air conditioning and oil heat), and we discovered why: when whoever it was put in the upstairs (which was apparently added after the house was built), they never insulated the roof, or above the ceiling grid. Brilliant. If you move a ceiling tile upstairs, you can look straight up and see the roof planking. And our gables are open with louvered vents at either end, you can see outside. So all the cold or hot air just comes rushing into the "attic space" and then seeps down through the ceiling tiles, which have an R-value ranging from 2 to 4. Yippee. So when the church handyman mentioned he had a bunch of R-19 batting left over from an office building project he could give us, we jumped on it. For $20 to pay for gas, we had enough to put a layer over the entire upstairs. We wound up putting it directly on the ceiling tile grid because the gables are open. It wouldn't have done us any good to shove it between the rafters, because the air from outside would still be rolling into the house and down through our ceiling. And he's bringing us more next week, so we'll have a double layer in place for winter ~ houses in this region are suggested to have R-35 at the roof. We are unbelievably blessed! And this ought to also help out tremendously with the oil bill for this winter, too. There is already a tremendous difference since we put up the first bit on Friday ~ so long yucky indoor temperatures!

And, finally, I get to pick up my kitten on the 29th. I still don't have a name for him.