Knee injury, cleaning, yarn stash

A very garbled weekend update that has very little to do with knitting, though yarn is mentioned.

Friday I attended an offsite meeting at a hotel that allegedly had been completely remodeled. I distinctly remember that it was shut down for a time, practically gutted, and reopened with fanfare. Except, somehow, they either skipped the restrooms near the conference rooms, or the guys who did the work should be hunted down and slapped.

I was wearing jeans (casual Friday is only one notch lower than Mon-Thurs for us) and my favorite sandals ever, with the three inch heels yet as insanely comfortable as slippers. And I went to the ladies room, and the stall doors were all swung shut. So I'm trying to discreetly determine (and not in a Larry Craig way) whether any of the stalls were occupied. So I'm focused on trying to identify an empty stall, and as I walked down the row of stalls I stepped into a floor drain that was clumsily chiseled out and a good inch, inch and a quarter, lower than the tile floor, and twisted my knee just a little bit. Not badly enough to complain, at least not at the time. By the time I went to the gym last night, I got on the treadmill and realized that yeah, my knee is hurtin'. Every step on the treadmill caused a twinge, so I used the bike instead, and then weights, because it's really not that sore, but it's sore enough to interfere with my usual routine. It's that kind of sore, not hideously sore, not go for an x-ray sore, just mildly sore, enough to make fast exercise walking on an incline treadmill a questionable idea. I soaked in the tub last night, that helped. I just twinged something a bit, and as of Sunday morning it's much better. All I could think was that if an elderly lady puts her foot in that drain as I did she could lose her balance and bust a hip.

Saturday a.m., bright and early, Murphy had a hair appt. I dropped him at the dot of 8, hit Target and then Petsmart and Publix, came home, unloaded the supplies purchased, then headed out again for Costco. I spent a crazy amount of money before noon, and by 12:30 I was done with all the running around and spending and ready to settle down for some cleaning and Stash Smashing.

Cleaning: Laurie is so damn inspirational. Her post on cleaning green was very useful and entertaining. She inspired me to attack my shower head. Because my shower head was unbelievably disgusting. Yet totally functional, and there were always so many other things screaming for my attention that the appearance of the shower head was not on my long to-do list, and like Laurie, I hate using products like CLR and such, because I always feel like I'm being poisoned. But, after reading her post, I put white vinegar (instead of lemon juice) in a plastic bag and wrapped a rubber band around the whole mess, holding it on the shower head. And a fascinating chemical reaction happened, and it started bubbling, and then pieces of hard-water mineral deposit crud started falling off into the bag. Seriously. It looks so much better - still looks 25 years old and cheap, of course, because it is, but much better.

Then it was time for Smash Your Stash. I purchased these nifty Space Bags Totes, intending to use them to store the winter coats, blankets and such that I rarely need to wear here, to make hugely spacious and decluttered closets for house sale staging. And it dawned on me that this would be a fine way to package yarn stash that is still valuable to me, and yet not likely to be used anytime soon.

It works, to a degree. I emptied a lot of plastic containers (note, not all yarn, but also sweaters and sweatpants and such). But the nifty flat stackable things on the Space Bags commercials were stacked by Space Bag Commercial Professionals, and I'm sure it took a lot of practice and swearing to make everything so precise and square. Yarn, it is a many splendored and really lumpy thing, and it is not possible to shrink it into a neat cube short of using a trash compactor. The stuff on cones wasn't suitable for Space Bagging at all, and the rest shrank into compacted yet lumpy blobs of compressed fiber. So, basically, I consolidated a lot of odds and ends into one Space Bag Tote, and left the stuff on cones in a Rubbermaid tote. It cut down on a lot of plastic bins, but wasn't the magical solution.

My closet still looks cluttered, because it is the storage facility for so many things that are not clothing. There are two antique lamps in the back, and a deep-fryer, a computer monitor, some old family pictures that need reframing, (also very low on my to-do list). I'll get to it all in the long run.

Because it appears that "in the long run" is the new time for moving. Listing in November isn't looking like a good idea. The housing market is dead. Dead, deader, deadest. I live in one of the most desirable and still affordable areas, with a great school system, convenient to everything, and my neighbors have had their very nice houses on the market at a reasonble price for months with no results. My neighbors have cut their asking prices by $15k in the last two weeks, and are now down in the "You've got to be kidding me, how can it not sell now?" price range. I am not going to list my own house until those two houses sell, because we do not need to have three very similar houses competing with each other, things are tough enough without that, though I will continue with the pre-sale fix-up as if all is well. The state of the housing market is really scary for me on lots of levels, not just the personal, I want to move level. Right now my job is stable, we are moving forward with bargain-hunting dirt as other developers who had too much land are unloading dirt, but the reports on the future of the market are not very encouraging. It's depressing and uncertain, to say the least. All I can do is keep on moving forward, with faith that it will all work out in the end.

Yesterday was the highly productive day. Today I'm having lunch with friends, fellow escapees from The Big Developer Which Must Not Be Named. Then I'll try the knee on the treadmill again, and continue my Training for Vacation.