stuff done: Saturday-Thursday

Obviously I fed and walked Dottie every day; take that as read. :) Beyond that, though...

1. Confirmed the two days I am swapping with my coworker. (Hmm. Miss Cactus, maybe? Not for any personality reasons; she just grows a lot of succulents as a hobby.) Also wrote down my vacation day schedule for November and December, and passed it on to Mom for use in family holiday planning.

( more items under the cut )

I also got through several chapters of rereading for my Yuletide assignment, and am noticing all kinds of layers to the work in question that I missed on my first two times through. (The first time, it's because the cover art and back cover text gave me slightly misaimed expectations of what type of story I was in for, and I was hurrying ahead to reach elements that never really appeared the way I thought they were going to. The second time I think it's just that I was relatively young and therefore lacking in a certain sense of perspective, and also that I wasn't reading with a specific eye out for details because I was not intending to use it as source material for fanfic.)

wherein Liz rambles about family stuff

Mom drove up to Ithaca today to collect Dottie, so as of about 3:30pm I no longer have a dog. Woe!

On the other hand, I have a lot more available time now. Pets are wonderful, but they eat time like nobody's business.

Anyway, we went out for lunch at the Heights Cafe, a restaurant we hadn't yet been to (discovered via a listing of pretty much every restaurant in the greater Ithaca area, which was published in a recent-ish issue of the Ithaca Time and which I duly saved and took down to NJ for Mom's use), which turned out to be both pretty easy to get to and a place we think Aunt Cara would like, and which we may therefore end up visiting again on either the Tuesday or Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

(We are doing Thanksgiving at my place again this year. That pattern began several years ago for perfectly sound logistical reasons, but I have a feeling that this repeated confluence of work schedules and transportation options means that I have accidentally 'inherited' Thanksgiving, whereas Vicky's the one who will 'inherit' Christmas if and when our parents get tired of hosting it. We've done Christmas at Vicky's place twice now (once in Spain, once in DC), but she's never hosted Thanksgiving and I've never hosted Christmas. I'm still gonna make Vicky do all the Thanksgiving cooking, though, while I handle the cleanup and leftover-packaging work. That split ends up making everybody happier than if we tried to split the work 'evenly' or I cooked while she cleaned.)

We also went to Michael's (an artsy-craftsy supply chain) to buy some gold paint and paintbrushes, so I can attempt to touch up the frames of some old pictures my parents inherited from my paternal grandmother. This would be by way of a Christmas present to Mom, who doesn't want to do the work herself.

...

The reason I had Dottie this time is because Mom and Dad compressed a ridiculous number of home renovations into a single two-week period and for obvious reasons could not have a dog around for any of it. (In fact, they couldn't have themselves around for the second half, and duly drove down to DC to visit Vicky, Aunt Jan, and Uncle Charles & Aunt Ji-lan.)

The first week, they had several ceilings repaired and replastered, had the massive hole in the living room wall repaired and replastered (the hole being a side-effect of a water pipe fix from earlier this year), had the hideous wallpaper in the stairwell stripped and destroyed (which should have been done thirty years ago, and I am not exaggerating that time period in the slightest), and then had the entire downstairs plus the stairwell and the main upstairs hallway repainted. The second week, they had the wood floors of the dining room, living room, staircase, and upstairs hallway stripped and refinished, because they were beat all to hell, aka ugly as fuck and a bit splintery in places besides.

So now they are slowly moving furniture back into its normal locations, and also trying to decide what they want to do with regard to carpets and/or area rugs. I think they have decided against wall-to-wall carpeting, but I will be curious to visit at Christmas and see what they've done with the place.