Home Alone, Day Nine

I did finish my puzzle last night. I know the suspense was killing you. :-) And I know it's pitiful to take pictures of puzzles, but I'm just that big of a nerd. At least I don't glue them together and hang them on the wall, right?! This is the one I did before--that took me FOREVER to finish. But it's so pretty. :-)
And while I'm doing the picture thing, here's one I took of all three boys the other night. They slept on the living room floor next to the fireplace a few nights while it was soooooooo cold and we were keeping their bedroom closed off so we wouldn't have to worry about heating that end of the house so much.
Yes, I did pick Sam up off of the tile and shove him back into his sleeping bag before I went to bed. Crazy kid!

And Joe just HAD to take a picture of Charlie tonight.

Okay, and now... our day.

James called this morning to wish me a happy anniversary. :-) Eleven years. He had bought me a dozen red roses and some stargazer lilies (what I had in my wedding bouquet) before he left for Alabama. The roses didn't last long and I had to throw them out yesterday (how sad--ha!), but several of the lilies have bloomed in the past couple of days. They are so pretty. :-)

To celebrate my anniversary, I spent the morning cleaning the ashes out of the fireplace. Ha! I finally got it all cleaned out (actually, it's never ALL cleaned out--but I did my best) and took the ash bucket up to the corner of the yard, dug a hole in the snow, dumped the ashes in, then kicked snow on top of them just in case. Then I came in and scrubbed on the stove and cleaned the glass and vacuumed up all of the ashes that had fallen onto the bricks. I talked to my Mom today and she made me put the vacuum cleaner out on the porch just in case there was still something "live" in the ashes that might ignite. "Way too many houses have been burned down by vacuum cleaners used to clean up fireplaces..." She's not usually the panicky kind (we leave that to James and his mother--ha!), so I figured I should take her advice. And just as I told her, the vacuum was forgotten about and is still sitting on the porch. Not sure how long it takes coals and ashes to completely cool. Probably until Monday night... when James gets home and sees the vac sitting out there. ;-)

Anyway, cleaning the stove out is a nasty job but it felt great to get it done. And the fire is so pretty once you can see through the glass again. :-) Of course, I spent the last half of the morning trying to START a fire! I'm from the paper-and-kindlin' camp and if I have both of those I'm all set. James is from the large-logs-heavily-doused-in-lighter-fluid camp. I usually send the boys out to gather kindlin' from the yard (there's never any shortage of sticks and branches laying around) but everything is still covered in snow right now, so I had to use James' method. Having bare logs with no ashes underneath them didn't help at all. I used about half the jug of lighter fluid (squirting more on and throwing another match in every 5 minutes or so when the fire would die down to nothing) before the logs themselves actually took. Ha! What a waste. If I had a decent axe I would have just chopped some kindlin'. Maybe that's what I'll ask for for my birthday in a few months. An axe. Ha!

After lunch I loaded up Sam and the dog and headed down to the rental place to return our movies. I left Katie and Joe at home to clean the kitchen. :-) They feel all grown up to be left at home alone for a few minutes (it took nearly 30 minutes this time) so it worked out well. I took Charlie's bed and another little dish of ice cream for him. Ha! This is so insane. But hey, he didn't get sick! Twice in a row now. I'm going to serve this dog ice cream in the van every day for the next two weeks if it'll teach him to LIKE the van and not hork all over it. ;-)

The kids were playing really well together this afternoon (rarely happens that all three of them are getting along together) so I was able to go to my room and work on Ladies' Retreat stuff for just a little while. That felt good. I still don't have a staff put together yet. I've GOT to settle on that and start making some phone calls! I felt a little more solid about things today, so hopefully I'm getting close.

I don't know what came over me this afternoon, but I suddenly had an irrepressible urge to empty everything out of the chuck wagon table and move it into Katie's closet and to take everything from that wall in Katie's closet and move it to the chuck wagon table. I think it has something to do with being anxious to PACK so we can MOVE, but I haven't been able to do any of that yet. And somehow the pointless transferring of stuff from one location to another gave me a little satisfaction and relieved my urge to DO something. :-) So now all of the miscellaneous STUFF is stacked on the shelves in Katie's closet and the chuck wagon table has now become the game and puzzle cabinet. I love having things freshly organized and stacked all nice and neat. :-)

I was going to make the kids' favorite casserole for dinner tonight, but then I realized that we're out of burger. So we ended up with tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches. The kids were plenty happy with that and they loved the sandwiches made with our homemade bread.

Now all of the kids have had their Saturday night showers and are in bed, if not asleep yet. There's a new puzzle out on the table (Katie got one out after I put the Coke one away) and Charlie is asleep in his bed at my feet. Maybe I'll do some reading or something before bed. I'm looking forward to church tomorrow, but I'm already missing having James and the Clarksons there. And Sister Galaviz--something came up at work, so she won't be at church tomorrow either. And it was her week to teach Sunday School, too. No fair. I love her lessons. Oh well. We'll go in expecting God to bless the little handful that will be able to make it there, as well as those who will be elsewhere. :-)