Monday musings

All dressed up, January 2007

On Saturday morning, we drove 2 hours to Alec's grandmother's condo in Upstate New York. It was sad to see how much she's declined. It was several minutes before she showed even a glimpse of recognition of who we were - and at that, she only really recognized Lauren. She smiled a little at her. I helped her hold Lindsay for a few minutes, which also earned a small smile. But otherwise, she didn't seem aware of us, or where she was.

Lauren and Lindsay with Great-Grandma Jean

Lauren spent Saturday night at Nanny and Poppy's house. It's always so quiet here without her...even though Lindsay is a loud babbler these days, it just wasn't the same. But it allowed us a good chunk of time for Alec to work on the bedroom, and for me to finally sweep and mop the upstairs foyer.

We met Alec's dad around lunchtime and picked up Lauren, ate lunch at Uno's where Alec had to crane his neck to watch the Jets game (they lost), and stopped off at the Home Depot and bought Alec some pneumatic equipment and a compound mitre saw for finishing up the bedroom project.

I've got quite a lot of clothes and books to unload as part of the bedroom project, and just general cluttering Chez Stoll. There's a clothing drop pretty much every 10 yards here, but where to donate books? The library's Web site offered only that "the reference librarian must review all book donations", which sounds like an incredible hassle. There is a used book store in town, but they only offer store credit which would sort of defeat the purpose.

I'm tired today and having trouble motivating. It seems these days the sleep strike occurs the day before Alec leaves now, so going into 3 days alone on a sleep deficit is particularly painful...and only more so on a Monday when there's a lot of house related stuff to do.