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Even though we were still in the midst of our dumpster filling endeavor, I agreed to have my niece spend the night with us on Saturday. She’s almost four-and-a-half and can entertain herself pretty well, so I figured we could continue some of the hauling while she played inside.

When she arrived, she took advantage of the open basement doors to poke around through all of the weird junk I’ve accumulated over the years. This led to an apparently fascinating game that involved burying plastic Easter eggs in a pile of topsoil that I’d just poured into a depression in the lawn. I mistakenly thought that I was meant to dig the eggs up once she’d finished (we’d already played a couple variations of hide-and-seek), but I was halted by her vehement protests.

Thanks to all of the cleaning efforts, I didn’t get a chance to go to the grocery store for dinner ingredients until it was fairly late. By the time I began steaming corn on the cob and grilling hamburgers and hot dogs, it was already dark outside. The hamburgers weren’t the extra-lean kind, so they produced some impressive flames whenever I opened the lid of the propane grill. The first time this happened, my niece exclaimed dramatically, “This can’t be happening!”

It cracked me up because she’d obviously picked up the phrase and delivery from a cartoon or other kids’ show. I explained that our burgers weren’t burning up and that seemed to mollify her.

By then we were eating our hot dogs and corn while we waited for the hamburgers, and my niece proclaimed, “This dinner rocks!”

Since we were in rock mode already, when my niece and I went to the back deck to eat our burgers (my husband wisely stayed inside to avoid the mosquitoes) I told her we’d be having a party in a two weeks with a band and other kids coming over. I said I was going to sing some songs and she wanted to know if she could sing, too. She then burst into a pretty decent rendition of the chorus of “My Immortal” by Evanescence. Combine that with her fascination with my husband’s drums and I think we have a future rock n’ roller on our hands.

She ended up getting to stay up pretty late, but she still came and woke me up at 7 a.m. on Sunday with a desire for breakfast. She’d already put in a request for bacon, eggs and toast the day before, so I dutifully produced them in kid-sized form and waited until later to fix breakfast for the adults.

All in all, it was a delightful visit. Maybe I should have the band learn “My Immortal,” just in case…

Yesterday felt like Friday all day long, so it’s more than a little disappointing that I have to actually go back to the office today. Still, I have plenty of work to do, so at least I’ll stay occupied.

One of yesterday’s highlights was that the triops hatched. Yep, there are dozens of little beasties swimming around in the tank right now. They look just like baby Sea-Monkeys at this point, except that they’re obviously growing much more quickly. I’m glad they hatched right away because that means I can feed them before leaving the office for the weekend, which might cut down on some of the cannibalism between tonight and Monday.

Last night I had my first practice with my husband’s band. Considering that I haven’t sung since about 1998, it went quite well. I’m out of practice, but I did a halfway decent job on the songs I knew. I’m not particularly worried about singing at our party, except that I’ll need to memorize a lot of lyrics between now and then.

I keep meaning to post a photo of my fast-growing pumpkin, but it’s been dark and gloomy in the mornings all this week. The pumpkin is now the size of a football, but it’s still green and striped and rather watermelon-like. By the time I manage to get a good picture, it’ll probably be bigger than my head.

This weekend promises non-stop closet and basement cleaning action! We’ll have a short band practice tomorrow and my niece is spending the night with us from about 5:30 p.m. on, but the rest of the weekend will be given over to tidying, sorting and trash disposal. What fun!

Well, it’s Wednesday, which means I have a jam-packed schedule and no real time for a blog entry. On the horizon:

• The triops should arrive any day now. I’m approaching the project with no small amount of trepidation thanks to the warnings I’ve received since I mentioned that I’m going to get them, but I figure I can always flush the lot of them down the toilet if they get too trying.
• I plan to post a photo of the first pumpkin from my vine. It’s already bigger than a softball. My husband and I have been joking that the vine is still growing so aggressively that the next thing we know, it’ll crawl into bed with us. Ow, scratchy!
• The house cleaning process has leveled off for now because we’re at work all day long and rather tired in the evenings. My latest contribution was the purchase of two enormous plastic storage bins in which we can store/hide all of our excess blankets and other miscellaneous soft goods. All of that stuff should probably be thrown out, really, but who throws out a blanket?

Later!

I’m not quite sure how this happened, but suddenly I’m learning a list of songs to sing with my husband’s band at our upcoming party.

I was sitting at my desk on Sunday evening as the band discussed their song list. They haven’t been together very long and the band could still use one or two more members, so they were trying to decide which songs were even possible. Someone brought up “Highway Star” by Deep Purple and I seem to remember saying, absent-mindedly, “I can sing that song.”

After that, every time I’d come upstairs in the course of my office cleanup project, someone in the band would throw out another song title and say, “Can you sing that?”

Pretty soon I had a song each by the Who, Led Zeppelin, Yes, Rush and Lenny Kravitz.

In the “old days,” learning a song used to mean puzzling out the lyrics one line at a time by endlessly rewinding and playing a cassette tape compiled from a mishmash of LPs and CDs. Now I can download the songs from iTunes for 99 cents each and print off the lyrics from the Internet, too. I love technology.

Really, the only songs I need to put any effort into learning are “The Real Me” by the Who and “The Ocean” by Led Zeppelin. The Yes song is “Roundabout,” the Rush song is “Tom Sawyer” and the Lenny Kravitz song is “Are You Gonna Go My Way,” so I know them inside and out already. Oh, and I guess “Highway Star” is still in the picture, so I’ll have to print off some lyrics just to refresh my memory.

I’m really rather excited about getting to sing again, even if it’s just for one party. The band practices and performs in a studio-type setup with headphone monitors, so the volume shouldn’t be a problem for my fried-out left ear.

After all these years I’ve never actually played in a band with my husband, even though he set up our first date 12+ years ago on the pretext that he wanted to put a band together. He’s a significantly better drummer than I am a vocalist, so I hope I can keep from shaming either one of us.

We’re practicing Thursday, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

All I can say is, thank goodness we get to keep the dumpster for 10 days.

My husband and I worked all weekend long and made a lot of progress on our house de-junking, but there is much left to be done. The office/studio was the big project and it’s not quite finished yet, but all I have to do now is file one tiny stack of papers and my portion will be done. My husband still has a lot of music gear to sort out and deal with, but he’s accomplished a huge amount already.

We’ve massively improved the feng shui of the room in that, making an exception for the stuff that still needs to be put away, one can now walk directly from the front door of the room to the back door. In the traditional definition of feng shui, I believe it would now be possible for a dragon to turn around in the room. (The preceding has exhausted the whole of my knowledge of feng shui. Thank you.)

I have started cleaning out the garage, but it requires actual dirt removal-type cleaning, so that won’t be finished until probably next weekend. I tidied up our tool shed (it turns out that if you bolt your cheap Wal-Mart tool rack to the wall, it won’t fall over when you put all your tools in it – what a concept!) and moved lots of shed-appropriate items from the garage and basement to their new, permanent homes.

We have a short hallway between our kitchen and the upstairs that also leads outside. It has a shelf beneath the window that easily becomes a catchall for sports equipment, gardening supplies and tools that really belong elsewhere. I pulled out the dust-choked wooden shelf and actually hosed all of the gardening chemical spills off of it. It turned out that the bottom of the shelf was in pristine condition (with an ancient JC Penney price tag on it, perhaps from some time in the dim past when Penney’s sold decorative lumber?), so I flipped it over and nailed it back down, nice side up.

This week and next weekend we’ll finish the garage and studio, clean out our guest room (another notorious junk repository), and take a hard look at the things we’re storing in the basement. At this point, I think the 20-cubic-yard trash container may have been overkill, but I’m probably being overly optimistic. After all, we have seven days left to put more junk in it.

Because this is the Great Dumpster Weekend, I’m doing all I can to prepare myself for at least one full day of junk sorting and disposal. As an added incentive to do a thorough job, I sent an Evite yesterday to 115 of our closest friends, inviting them to a party at our house on Labor Day weekend.

The difficult part will be the sorting. Early this spring I had my desk at home pretty well cleared off and all my paperwork filed. Now I’m back to having big piles of papers all over the floor around my desk, sliding to and fro. There might be things there worth saving, and figuring out which things those are will take most of the weekend.

Still, I’m looking forward to clearing out my unnecessarily large supply of old cardboard boxes, paperwork from my husband’s former job, outdated printing from my dad’s company, the highly expendable stuff that’s migrated to the center of our garage, etc., etc. My goal is to be able yodel in the garage, basement or office and hear an echo. (Theoretically, of course. I don’t think I’m the sort of person who would really ever go around yodeling, even in private.)

Then there’s the hidden mess inside closets, cabinets and our over-abundance of “junk drawers.” I would like to pare down the number of junk drawers in our kitchen to one (but I’m not holding my breath on that one), and I would also like to prove that it isn’t necessary to keep a 5-foot deep bathroom cabinet completely full. If and when I can afford to have our bathroom remodeled, that ridiculously-designed cabinet is going away to be replaced by one that doesn’t require the user to crawl inside to get to items in the back.

Wow, this is going to require a lot of strong coffee. Wish me luck!

I spent the morning in the company of the fine public servants of my state department of revenue. I was finally licensing the emergency backup car, which we’ve had since April. We bought the car from someone in another state, so I had to pay the highway patrol $10 to comb the vehicle for VIN numbers before I could take my stack of paperwork to the clerk and get my new license plate.

The whole process took less than 45 minutes, so I had time to start processing an order for my dad’s company and swap laundry loads before proceeding to work (early!).

It’s taking me a while to get organized, as always, but I’m definitely on my way.

When it comes to keeping our house tidy, my husband and I both seem to be laboring under the impression that some mysterious third party will float along behind us and pick up the things we leave behind. Lately we’ve managed to keep the kitchen semi-presentable by virtue of never eating at home, but the rest of the house is strictly off limits to company unless we have at least a couple of hours to prepare. Thank goodness we have someone who cleans twice a month; otherwise, our house would be messy and filthy both.

Our big, annual effort to keep the mess under control involves hiring a gigantic trash container to be placed beside the driveway for a week. We set aside an entire weekend and just start hauling junk out of the house and dumping it in.

You’d think that a 2-and-a-half bedroom house would not hold enough junk to require ever-larger dumpsters to clean it out every year. However, that would be underestimating our ability to set aside giant piles of detritus for a whole year, always with the thought, “We’ll put it out on big trash pickup day.”

We mean to put it out on the first Monday of the month when our trash service will theoretically take just about anything you leave for them. However, we have an unfortunate tendency to forget about big trash pickup day until 11:30 p.m. on Sunday when we’re already shoeless, pajama-clad and sleepy. We’ll say, “That’s okay, we’ll put it out next month.” Eventually we require the big dumpster.

I’m ordering the trash container for this weekend, so I’m working to get other chores out of the way before it arrives. So far I’m on my second load of laundry out of, oh, maybe 20. Something in our basement is giving me uncontrollable sneezing fits (probably the dirty laundry itself), so you can imagine that I’m really looking forward to the rest of that project.

We have no illusions that we’ll ever be able to keep our house straightened up, even with the yearly purges. It’s all about maintenance and fleeting moments of presentableness. Still, I’m looking forward to being able to walk across our office/studio room after we’ve cleared a path this time. It seems like a worthy and reasonable goal.