Today has been a pretty good day. I’m not feeling well in my tummy again, but even with those issues I got a good amount of stuff done today.
I got out of bed in time to walk and check the mail. As expected, nothing exciting inside. But it was good to get my mortgage statement. I’ve got it on auto-pay, but I’m also sending in overpayments each month and it really seems to confuse their system, because it takes it as a pre-payment.
During work breaks, I picked things up. Put things away. Threw things away. I slowly brought my kitchen from the brink of a disaster zone back up to pretty clean. I gathered some more things to pack for the nieces trip.
I cried thinking about how Ambrose would have been helping me with preparing for the trip. I put up a collage of photos of Ambrose by the front door, where I can see it from my nest on the couch. And after work, I got a wild hare up my ass and decided to take down the fan in the living room all by myself before I even figured out what to eat for dinner.
My stepstool wasn’t quite tall enough for me to reach the screws, but the piano bench gave me a few extra inches, and I got the screws on the lower part of the ceiling without too much trouble. The ones on the higher side were a challenge because I couldn’t move the bench directly under it – the couch was in the way. I ended up piling up some pillows and books on the couch to get the last screw out. All the screws on the outside casing had paint on them, and that last one was not only hardest to reach but most encrusted with paint.
I got sweaty reaching to my absolute limit and trying to bully a screw into coming out when I couldn’t get a good look or a good angle with the screwdriver. The inside screws were easier; no paint, and I could access them with my power screwdriver. Then it was just a matter of not letting the thing fall when the last screw came out, which I managed. It’s out on the porch now. I’m going to throw it away. From my stint at the Habitat for Humanity Restore last year, I know that ceiling fans are not worth very much. They had so many in stock that they would practically give them away just to make room for more. Plus I cut the plug off so I could keep the chain that was wrapped around the power cord.
I think it was that chain that motivated me today. It hung down right behind my TV and I saw it every day and I just got tired of it. I didn’t want to look at it anymore. I suppose I could have just cut the cord high up near the fan, but I didn’t think of that at the time. I just decided that it was coming down, come hell or high water. I found just enough soft spackle at the bottom of a tub to fill in the holes in the ceiling.
It excited me to hang my photos on my walls. I was thrilled to pumice stone the rings out of my toilets. And now I’ve gotten rid of a fan that we didn’t even use much when Ambrose was alive, partly because the pulls stopped working and we had to turn it on and off by plugging it in and unplugging it. I personally don’t like a fan blowing on me while I relax, so why was I putting up with this thing collecting dust over my head? The room is much brighter without it. After so many years of living in spaces that were never going to be all mine, I think I’m getting used to the idea that this space is mine. And I can make it my own.
I want to hang shelves. I want to fix the whole curtain rod situation in big window. I want to see if I might get shutters for my kitchen windows as a solution to my not being able to easily reach the blinds to open and close them (I have to get up on the counter, it’s not reasonable). Or maybe remote controlled shades, but I did look into those last year and I felt like the prices were a bit out there. I’ll have to compare.
I think Ambrose approves of this message.
