Keeping house(s)

Today's video clip is of my little studio apartment. You'll see moi reflected in the bathroom mirror. We've got the major move on Monday, with the U-Haul, and then it's just a matter of tweaking furniture arrangements. I've also been busy keeping house here at the "Big House." Our new dining room furniture was delivered yesterday. It looks great. We actually ate supper in the dining room for a change.


As the mate of a marketing man (yes, deliberate alliteration), I can't resist trying out new products to see if they've lived up to their hype, so I bought two different kinds of pet-hair removal devices. One is disposable and uses two rotary bars that pull up the pet hair into a see-through chamber. My cat's hair is, however, too long for this device to work well. It just blobs up between the two rotary bars. The other device uses replaceable pads that feel as rough as a cat's tongue (good concept, really), but it didn't seem to get up as much as the other thing did. Between the two devices, I got off quite a bit of cat fur from the living room sofa and loveseat, but yesterday I noticed that there's more to remove. As long as Simon lives, there will be more cat hair to remove. In fact, we'll have evidence of his existence for many years after he's gone. Never before have I dealt with such persistently strong cat hair. I have no doubt that woven properly, his hair could hold the weight of an eighteen-wheeler.

I really need to prep my two summer online classes. One thing that I want to do is to blog in such a way that my students can read it and respond to it. Maybe simply to do a discussion on the school classroom management site?

It's apparently not possible for me to blog without talking about the weather, but this time, I'm going to talk about the weather in Moberly, Missouri. Weather Channel's Jim Cantore was there yesterday as a huge line of storms went through, but prior to the storms, he was in some kind of parking lot talking to the camera. A group had gathered in the background, and one of the women looked like my former daughter-in-law Wendy. She lives in Moberly with her mother since she and Daniel divorced, so it's entirely possible that she was there. I miss her. I miss the feeling of completeness that she gave the family: two parents, two sons, two daughters-in-law. Now with Daniel living with Stephen and Heather, I wonder if he'll regain any sense of a social life.

While I am meandering about, I guess I ought to mention that I'm having to reestablish my boundaries with certain relatives. It irritates me so much for people to assume I agree with them politically and religiously. I got one Friend Request to join a group on Facebook that would create a network of Christians. (I declined. In fact, I changed my Profile to show that my religious preference was Secular Humanist, NOT Christian.) My cousin Phyllis sent me this posting that purportedly proved that Einstein had convinced one of his college professors that there was indeed a god. I sent her the snopes.com link that indicated that the Einstein/God thing was not true, but that won't stop her. Sigh. I think I'd be happy if people would just stop forwarding their sentimental crap to me.