Friday miscellany

I spent most of the morning helping the s.o. drag a bunch of extra beams, mouldings, and other leftover wood over to the guest house. We had been storing it under the main house, but then we suffered a minor termite invasion a couple of weeks ago and were told in no uncertain terms to get any and all wood out from underneath the house.

When I say "main house" and "guest house," please don't imagine that we have some kind of palatial estate. There are two structures on the property, but both of them were disaster areas (literally home to numerous birds and raccoons, and possibly also a homeless person) when we bought the place. I won't even describe what was wrong with the main house, because I might have a horrible flashback. It's a pretty nice house now, and that's what matters.

We haven't started remodeling the so-called guest house yet. It has no functioning kitchen or bathroom, no insulation, no plumbing, and no modern wiring. The floors of what ought to be the kitchen and bathroom are a complete loss. The two main rooms are kind of nice, though--the bedroom even has knotty pine walls. One day, after a lot of work, it'll be a great place for relatives and friends to stay when they visit. For now, it's a shed.

Which reminds me, the reason my other blog is called the Manor Menu is because of the s.o.'s amusing habit of answering the phone "[last name] Manor." Now you know.

At lunchtime, the s.o. spotted a small scorpion on the screen porch floor. I kept the dog and the cat away from it while he trapped it in an empty peanut butter jar. It's still in there because we couldn't figure out what to do with it next.

Work was work. I did some of it. TGIF, etc.

Later, I drove to the Ingles because we were Code Red on coffee and toilet paper. The name of this grocery-store chain is pronounced "ING-gulls," but when I first moved down here I couldn't stop hearing it in my mind as "een-GLAYSS." I wouldn't be surprised if Georgia's Mexican-American population has the same problem.

The s.o. changed the oil in my glamorous 1990 Honda Accord. I helped.

Rhododendrons and azaleas are beautiful right now (not ours--we don't have any).