What I've Been Doing, Part 1

I'm having a bit of a problem uploading photos today. Hope this eventually works!! Very frustrating, to say the least.

Oh my - 10 days without blogging. Yikes! And I'm not even in the States playing with my grandkids. I think I need to post a whole lot of photos, not just the ones I was originally going to post. Oh well - we'll see what happens.

I've been busy. Busy working on this room. I totally rearranged it, except for the desk. I'm going to keep this desk so I can look out the window at the trees and sky and birds and clouds. Don't want to look at the wall. Don't want to look at the rest of the room. I want to look 'free'!!

I left the shkaf where it is - it's too heavy to even consider moving unless I totally empty it and have Mel move it in pieces. So, it stays where it's at. However, I did clean it out again. Seems like I'm always cleaning it out.

Well "always" is too broad of a term. It's more like "whenever we get ready to go home, I clean out the shkaf" in this room. I seldom put anything in the cupboards and on the shelves any more, so I don't know why it always needs to be cleaned - but there you have it.

But I moved the bed, and I moved the table, and I moved the empty and full of winter clothes now suitcases and I moved the empty boxes. And I threw away 2 full boxes of old video cassettes that we don't watch anymore, but kept another box full of ones we might watch again. The throw-aways were recorded off of tv - Columbo, Murder She Wrote and Diagnosis Murder. Kind of sad to see them go - but I needed the room!

We are downsizing. The greater team is downsizing. We are letting the office lease go. That means that all of Mel's books, and anything else we have downstairs in that room, need to come up here and go into storage here.

Ei Yi Yi. We do NOT live in a large flat to start with, so I needed to make room. I'm going to have to go through boxes and shelves of books next and get rid of books. Many books. Books that are so-so but I might read them again will go. I'm not sure where they will go, but they are going. Probably in bags out by the dumpster to someone can haul them off and sell them as used books in the market. That's fine with me. I will tear apart any that I don't want sold (we've been given a few books that are questionable - and I've bought a few that looked good, but when I started reading them, I ended up knowing that I won't share them with anyone, so into the trash they will go. Unfortunately, sometimes I just set them aside later to rip them apart and they end up getting shuffled back into the mix....) So, I need to go through at least 2 boxes of books and a whole bookcase and discard with a fury. Then, I'll have room for Mel's books - seminary books, theology books, study books, just for fun books that he has.

We like books.
haha

So, it took me at least 3 days to get the room where I have it now. And it will take a few more days for me to get inspired to do the books next. But in the process, I also weeded out old papers. I killed the shredder by plugging it into an extension cord without a transformer. Whew! The room stank for days! It sure did work really fast until I got it unplugged, however - like a chainsaw roaring away over there on the table! Poor thing. But I killed it in the process. 220v does not do good things to 110v electrical appliances and machines. So, all of the stuff I weeded out I had to shred by hand. Some I just tore into pieces, but names, addresses, dollar amounts, receipts no longer needed, etc. all got cut into tiny pieces and thrown out. Of course, two bags out in the dumpster were very appealing to someone who tore them open, rummaged through them and then left them for the garbage men to scatter all over the place when the dumpster emptied into the garbage truck. :( sigh. Looking out there and seeing that bright neon pink paper in the middle of scattered tiny pieces and knowing it was mine was not encouraging, but embarrassing. Should have taken a photo but didn't think of it, so here's a photo of what's out there right now (not ours!).
On Monday this week, Mel and I went over to Nova Linea. As you can see from this photo, we've had some dark, gray clouds recently and a couple of very heavy rainstorms. There was a little lightning and thunder, but not much. Mostly heavy rains. We really needed that rain, tho - it's been very dry. Fortunately, the temps also dropped, way down into the low '60's. Unheard of for summer here! :) I'm glad they dropped. It's been wonderful.

Along with other things, I bought a new fountain at Nova Linea. It's not as pretty as my blue jug fountain, but it has a light! and that is something I was trying to figure out - how to get a light to shine down into the pond so I can see the fish some day when I get fish again.

Mel helped me fill it with filtered water and in the process we discovered that the room is not level. Really? A room not level? Here in Ukraine? Wow. I'm shocked. Not. No, not shocked, just very sarcastic. :P How did we find this out, you ask? Well, we were filling it to the top so that the water would be deep enough for the fountain to circulate the pond water, not just the fountain bowl water - and the close side is apparently about an inch lower than the far side. Good grief. Water everywhere cuz we were watching the far side, not the near side. :) (Sounds like a comic strip or something.) I plan to get a couple guppies or maybe 3 or 4 goldfish to put in it on Friday or Saturday. Right now the water is sitting, recycling through the fountain and de-gassing or whatever it does while it conditions for fish. I'm hoping that whatever was left on the sides of the pond and on the rocks of the algea and stuff that fish need will "come back to life" and grow again and make it ready faster than if it was all brand new or freshly scrubbed (I didn't scrub any of it for that reason). We'll see.

And what else have I been doing? Well, that's for another post!