Almost!

Almost! The furniture that has to go, that will not fit into Mist Cottage, has almost all been passed along to someone who needs it. The only item left is the chair purchased for $15, which will be donated to a charitable institution in the nearby city. Then all that remains is to learn how to live with the houseful of furniture that might be kept in the long term.

The boxes are dwindling. Attila tackled the basement last weekend, and cleared enough space to erect the shelving units. Then he loaded the shelving units with stuff. It is now possible to walk around down there!

The back bedroom though, it is still full to the ceiling with boxes and totes. Most of the contents in that room must remain upstairs, where there is no potential for moisture problems, as there are in the unfinished basement.

A visit to the print shop will be squeezed in on the trip to the nearby city. The second draft of my book is now printed, but not bound, and ready to be picked up. This draft will hopefully bring to light any problems with the formatting and layout. If all is well with it, it will be bound and sent to Archives Canada, as is required by law to send one or two copies, depending on the number of books sold. Then it will be possible to determine how much the shipping and handling will cost per book, information needed for future sales. The first run of printing will be 14 or 15 copies, then a series of smaller runs as orders come in.

Attila is on the afternoon shift this week. Neither of us like it as much as the night or day shifts, although the afternoon shift is far superior to Attila’s former situation, where he worked long hours for six days a week.

Soon it will be time to sort the overflowing shelves in the basement, reorganize, purge, and lighten the load in this little house. There is not much point in working on the furniture layout, or comfort related projects, until the sorting and purging are well under way.

Attila has decided that we need to eat items out of the three freezers in the basement. This week he unearthed a bucket of frozen sour cherries from Vineland, Ontario. This is providing us with wonderful cherry squares, which is the same recipe as mincemeat squares, but the filling is cherry.

Also on the range is a soup pot full of turkey bones, leftover from the roasted turkey that was prepared for Thanksgiving. In a few days time that will be transformed into a delicious soup.

The change of address odyssey continues. Today several missives from the Ontario government arrived, an online application was required, which took hours, and then a form had to be downloaded, printed, and mailed. My office is the most informal it has ever been. I bet there aren’t too many corporate head offices that find an old woman, who has managed to plug in her printer with an extension cord reaching from the bathroom, who has crawled under all the cords and squeezed past all the barriers to get into the inner sanctum of the corporate office and near the printer, standing in front of the printer, printing the forms and receipts and certificates required for record keeping. Not all corporations are run by ruthless, profit seeking tycoons; nope.

My oldest little sister and I have been gabbing on FaceTime a lot, which we both really enjoy. Nothing like a smiling and familiar face to bring light into a room! My youngest little sister likes to chat via her cell phone (bluetooth, hands free) while driving home from work, we manage some pretty awesome conversations while she battles her way home through heavy traffic. I use MagicApp from MagicJack, on an iPad (Attila’s), to call her on her cell phone, works like a charm. My Mom has a new iPad and we have chatted on FaceTime, but I think Mom prefers the written word, which is equally pleasant. The iPad does email really well too, so Mom is able to do everything she wants on her iPad.

Attila’s iPad was meant to keep us in touch, in an affordable fashion, when Attila was living near the country house to go to work, and living in Tank. The first week he was living in Tank we spent over $70 on cell phone bills, so the iPad mini, with which we could talk as along as we wanted, for the price of the tablet, was the cheaper and more practical solution. Truth be told, now that we are living together, Attila is more interested in getting Mist Cottage into some semblance of order, than spending time on the Internet. Sometime this winter though, he will be feeling like sitting down to read the paper again, with his iPad.

In the meantime, I use the iPad for playing Mahjong, as a cookbook synced to my laptop, as a radio using Jango, as a kitchen timer (built in but I bought a $1.37 timer at the App Store that suits me better) and occasionally to watch youtube videos and Netflix. It is a handy little device, but it won’t do any coding, and is difficult to use for a lot of intensive tasks. Also, the finger tapping keyboard gets to be a real pain when writing. I should look into connecting a bluetooth keyboard, as I have an old one around here somewhere… somewhere…

Corporate Head Office Maggie Style:
Yes, that’s my office space, the printer part of it anyway. The laptop gets carried in through the narrow entry and is placed on a pile of boxes, then connected to the printer via the usb port. I will be very glad when we get the desktop computer setup and the printer attached to it. Despite my current “state of the art” office, everything got done.

Worldly Distractions

Weather

12°C
Date: 8:00 PM EDT Monday 19 October 2015
Condition: Mostly Cloudy
Pressure: 101.7 kPa
Tendency: falling
Visibility: 24 km
Temperature: 11.6°C
Dewpoint: 4.6°C
Humidity: 62%
Wind: SSW 36 gust 54 km/h

Quote

“You know you’re getting old when you stoop to tie your shoelaces and wonder what else you could do while you’re down there.”
George Burns
1896 – 1996