Mom hit the roof this afternoon, after searching for the miter box for two days. I think if Chuck had been close by she'd have done her level best to hurt him. There are so many things she hasn't been able to find since he came to 'help', I'm kind of afraid for her blood pressure. She's taking a nap right now.

We've both had a bit of a bug since Thursday. We ran a bit of a temperature, with upset stomachs. Pepto bismol solved Mom's stomach, and I sucked on a peppermint for mine (Pepto bismol has always made me hurl when I've had anything wrong with my stomach) and we both took aspirin to knock back the temperature. My joints ached like the dickens, but not Mom's. We've been wiped out and sleeping twice as much. At first I thought it was food poisoning, but our symptoms didn't start at the same time and we haven't been eating the same things, except for Thanksgiving. And then of course we thought it was H1N1 for a minute, but common sense prevailed. I think we'll just chalk this one up to a bug.

Mom's given me big time mega money bucks to do her shopping online for her, and I don't blame her one bit. I don't need a cane to walk and I hate to go into the crowds, so I can understand her hatred of Christmas shopping completely. So I'll be spending a bit for her, and everyone will have something under the tree to open instead of just cards with money. Although we like cards with money too.

It's a beautiful day outside, crisp and clear in the fifties, and I'm going out to walk the dog. Back later.

For the first time in years, Mom and I have done a quiet Thanksgiving at home with turkey and all the trimmings. For about the past five years we've either blown it off entirely or gone over to my sister's and mooched off her. I've really enjoyed it. The dogs are lying around stuffed to the gills with turkey, and so are Mom and I. It's been a good day.

I managed to get in a little lacing while Mom took and afternoon nap, and once I tired of that I got out a sock I'm working on in Mountain Colors, one of their brown-purple-blue fall colorways, the name of which escapes me. I'll have to see if I've still got the ball band. I finished one sock and started the other.

On this Thanksgiving I'm thankful for most of my family, for my friends who keep me sane, and for the little things, having a job that makes me think, a roof over my head, and a salary that keeps body and soul together, although my budget is and always will be tight. Ha! I wouldn't be happy even if I won the lottery. But I don't worry about where my next meal is coming from, and I'm thankful for that.

More house painting tomorrow, along with minor carpentry as I reconstruct the bases of the porch pillars. I get to use the miter box, and I have to figure out how to sharpen my dad's saw. And cover the kitchen windows so I don't get paint on them. And caulk the living daylights out of the porch where it joins the long axis of the house.

I put the breakfront back together (after my brother took it apart), and I think we may have to move it back to where it was; either it's off true, or the house has settled, but the vertical pattern in the wallpaper behind it is aslant the vertical lines of the breakfront. I get a headache just looking at it.

Okay, back to polishing off the leftovers. This is hard work.

Finished another wall this morning. At this rate I'll be done in a couple of years, just in time to start over. Anyway, it was a beautiful day here, and I was happy to be outside in it for a while.

I also sat and laced for a couple of inches on my latest project, in between painting and taking Mom shopping. We're about to sit down to a dinner of pork chops and who-knows-what, with roasted garlic mushroom sauce.

I picked up a copy of Up the other day, and this morning before I went out to paint I sat down and watched it. It was a cute movie, and let me tell you, the worst part of it for me was when the old guy told Dug he was a bad dog and the poor dog put his head down and walked off. I felt bad until he reappeared. I'm supposed to be an adult, dammit, I'm not supposed to sympathize with a cartoon dog.

I finished up the kitchen wall of the front of the house; this is the wall that faces west and gets all the weather. It was in the worst shape. I'm going to have to go over the molding around the windows again as the paint wasn't quite thick enough to hide the gray of the weathered wood.

It's not going quite as fast as I remember it going when I was twenty-five. Imagine that. Back to Nashville this evening to collapse. I'll get back to painting when I come back for Thanksgiving.

I still have to get the shelving up in my room and get everything off the floor. And the closet.

Since Tuesday, I have gotten my mom's new dryer installed, gotten an electrician into her house to put the 220 line back together so we could plug in the new dryer, had the diswasher hooked up, reported for jury duty and tap danced my way out of it (working in another part of the state) gotten new carpet laid in my mom's living room, and scraped and caulked the front of the house preparatory to painting it, hopefully tomorrow when the caulk and the liquid nail stuff have both dried solid. I've also dropped a bunch of old dead carpet off at the dump and started a new piece of bobbin lace for my next A&S project (a hanky) as well as embroidering a few lines on the other A&S project, the cap.

So let me tell you, the front of the house is so well caulked now that the rest of the house will fall down and the front wall will still be standing. I filled in some big holes. And you know, it looks less than elegant, but there will be no breezes in the kitchen any more AND it will withstand a direct hit by artillery. I have to throw away my gloves if I can chip them off the porch. I have to cover up the white caulk on my black shoes with black magic marker when I get to work on Monday. But, by damn, that wall is well and truly caulked into submission.

And now I have to go buy more caulk to do the rest of the house.

I'm changing some of my entries to friends-only because of the family stuff I've been discussing.  If you don't see today's entry and you're one of my friends who isn't on Livejournal, please drop me a line at my email and I'll either send you the entry or explain how you can friend me on Livejournal.

Otherwise, back to this darn embroidery.

I've spent the morning pulling staples out of my mom's living room floor so we could seal it before the new carpet is put down, and I just realized that when I picked up the sealer this morning, I forgot to pick up putty to seal the cracks we've got in spots.  So, back I must go to Home Depot, to pick up a sizable tub of the stuff.  And a putty knife, because when my brother "cleaned" he either packed the tools up or threw them out.  Ghu only knows where they are.

Does anyone else find Home Depot as dangerous to walk around in as Walmart?  I have to go in Walmart with a list and blinders or I come out with too much junk, and I'm starting to act the same way in Home Depot.  I think my shopping gene's gone haywire.  I need another Leatherman, don''t I?  And another one of those cute little box cutter knife thingies.  And a flashlight.

Last evening, on my way out of work, I managed to lock my keys in my car.  fidelioscabinet sprang into action and got AAA to come by and unlock it. So, added to my list o' stuff to be done is "extra car keys."  One to hang off my cell phone, I think.  And one for Mom.  (I've probably typed fidelioscabinet wrong, Livejournal tells me she doesn't exist.)  And while I was waiting for Fidelio, I was standing next to the truck minding my own business when a flock of birds flew over me and shit on me.  I tell you, I'm feeling very put upon by the uinverse.

I have to make a cover cloth for the embroidery I'm working on, something with a hole over the work area, because I'm making the cloth grubby by holding the frame through it.  The embroidery itself is coming along, though not as fast as I'd like.  Must take pictures. 

Tonight I make pumpkin soup, after the very yummy stuff I had at Istanbul.  And put the boneless pork thingie in the crockpot with assorted vegetables and an envelope of soup.  I plan to make myself a batch of fry bread as a reward for pulling the staples out of the floor, and because it's just time for fry bread.  I haven't had any in a while.

Signs are up over at St. Mary's for All Soul's masses on Monday.  Tomorrow night, of course, is Halloween, and Sunday is All Saints.  I suppose I should walk across the street and go to Mass, just to see if lightning strikes the church while I'm there.  Or strikes me while I walk back.  I've been saying the rosary a lot lately (encountering an abuser like my oldest brother is enough to make anyone ask for Divine intervention) so maybe that'll keep me from being completely fried. 

Off to stitch some while my back recovers.

I've been working away on the embroidery on the Elizabethan cap I've been working on, and now that I've sat down and forced myself to work on it for more than an hour I'm finally starting to get into the zen of it.  The simple pattern helps; I've managed to get the lengths of thread down to enough for a repeat, and reloading the needle doesn't break my concentration on the pattern the way it did when I first started. It's still not my bag, though.  And I've got enough hobbies.  I can't wait to get to the bobbin lace portion of the exercise.

So here's more family drama.  If you're not into it, skip this part.

We all sat down yesterday, Mom and Cathy and I, and talked about what to do about my older brother now that he's decided to come home and rearrange my mother's life after not even giving her the time of day for forty years.  She's agreed to go to a lawyer.  We're going to make that happen.  I've gotten the locks changed.  We've discussed an order of protection (much more difficult to get for infliction of emotional harm, because that's harder to prove. If she had bruises, we could get one with no problem.)  From here on out, it's up to Mom.  She's the one who has to tell him to leave when he shows up and then call the police when he refuses to leave.  I'm hoping the lawyer will give us some mechanism for dealing with this kind of abuser, and Cathy's going to research elder law to see if she can come up with anything.

From everything I've read about this type of abuser, he's not going to change; he's doing this for our own good.  And he's never listened to anything any of us have said, and he isn't going to start now.  He's always been smarter than anyone else, Mr-I-Am-Too-Smart-To-Finish-College Boy.  My presence or Cathy's presence here isn't going to help, it's just going to give him more targets. 

He's always been terribly jealous of me, but he would never discuss any such thing with me; to him, I'm the one with the problem, not him.  As a kid, I internalized this; if Chuck thought I was stupid, well then, I must not be very bright.  And I still find it very difficult to deal with him.  Mom just shuts down; Cathy said that at one point, Chuck brought her over to Cathy's (they were out shopping for something) and Cathy said Mom never spoke a word during the entire visit.  Mom herself has said that she just stopped answering him when he'd ask her a question because he didn't listen to anything she said anyway.

I suppose Chuck will use this as an example of Mom's senility.  He's started back into the whole put her in a home thing per Cathy's boyfriend; he's the only one who answers the phone when Idiot calls.  He's also been trying to phone my niece, who also doesn't answer the phone when he pops up on her caller ID.  He hasn't even tried to call me. 

But then, I commited the heinous crime of going with my Dad when he asked if I'd like to go for a walk.  Chuck righteously turned him down because parents are stupid.  And I graduated from college, unlike Chuck, who didn't do that because diplomas were so Establishment and were just a piece of paper.  Idiot.  He did go back and finish about ten years ago, but only because it was a condition of keeping his job.  Duh.

Oh, I'll go on.  More later.

They've cut off our access to Livejournal at work (they want us to work. Imagine that.) so expect to see a bit less of me here.  I don't sign on a lot from home as I've got too many other things to do here. 

I won't have the money to go to Crown List this weekend, unless the lottery takes pity on me.  I've got more than enough to keep me busy, though.  I shall be embroidering my fingers to the bone.

I be hatin me some embroidery.  I've finally managed to figure out the blackwork pattern I picked out, and I've started the cap I'm going to enter for A&S, but it's going so slowly I'm not sure it'll be ready for KA&S 2011, let alone next year.  It's 32 count linen, with the stitches done over two threads.  I'm tired of it already, so I'm doing a repeat of the pattern, and then kumihimo for an hour.  Really.  I just hate embroidery.  The happy thought I'm keeping in my head is that I'll be taking the kumihimo over to geodesimagining tomorrow to share it with another fanatic, T.

Cleaned out most of the wardrobe yesterday preparatory to getting rid of it.  It's a slow slog because I'm raising so much dust I have to go outside to breathe periodically,  and let the dust settle.  I comfort myself with the thought that once I've decluttered, I can keep the whole shebang cleaner. 

fidelioscabinet has found the rest of the quinoa I bought and I shall be using that to make more dishes.  I do need to pick up some barley so I can try out the toasted barley recipes in the Tibetan cookbook.  Not sure how I'll grind it.  We've got a huge hand crank grinder somewhere, but I think I'll just use the cuisinart.  I've never tried grinding grain in it, so this will be an adventure.   

Back to digging stuff out of the wardrobe.