General Update

It's been a busy and stressful couple of weeks at the Caer, but things are finally starting to approach sanity.  This last two weeks, hopefully, will be our last round of scraping for available cash, especially if the outfit cymru was working for on Ohio for the two weeks it took to tell that it really wasn't working out will get off their corporate ass and mail out her back pay and expenses.  (However, she said some of the people she worked with were only now getting paid for work they did in June and July, so I'm not holding my breath for the check to show up.)

On the medical front, I now have a portable infusion pump continuously feeding oxacillin into my superior vena cava via a PICC line.  It's been in for roughly 80 hours now with no sign of any allergy issues, so I think we're safe on that front (there was a slight concern because I am allergic to cefazolin, an early cephalosporin, and some cephalosporins have structural similarities to oxacillin).  I'll be toting it around until about mid-December, by which time the bone infection in my foot should be history, and if we're really lucky the fissure under my toe will have finally healed.  Then we probably go on to the next stage of dealing with this screwed-up foot...

Housewise, we finally have money to start getting the outstanding house maintenance issues dealt with. Probably the first of those is to tear the garage down to the bare walls, throw away all the mismatched odds and ends of bodged-together shelving that we can't even use for firewood (what isn't particle board or oriented strand board is painted), and have the entire garage re-insulated, vapor-barriered, and lined with fire-resistant sheetrock (with some electrical cleanup and conduit installation along the way), then put up some actual decent-quality steel suspended shelving.  What comes next after that on the list of major jobs, I'm not sure, but the list includes replacing all the uninsulated single-pane windows, all the very poorly insulated cheap (and badly installed) aluminum sliders, the almost completely uninsulated roof, the nasty (and badly done) acoustic-tile suspended ceilings in two of the three bathrooms, the remaining two 1970s-vintage Cadet toilets, and the master bathroom tub that's too shallow to get a decent bath in.

On the list of smaller, non-contractor maintenance/replacement issues, I already rebuilt my reloading bench and the towel rail that I accidentally broke a couple of days ago; I need to build a ladder up to the storage attic, my desk still needs its top completely rebuilt, my reloading presses need to be stripped, cleaned, lubricated and reassembled and then mounted on the rebuilt bench, basically every desktop computer in the house needs to be replaced with current-generation hardware (two probably with dual-core Atom boxes, the rest with probably-quad-core Athlon-II machines), cymru's car needs new outside mirrors, we have a bunch of chairs needing reupholstering...  And curtains! Real curtains to replace the ugly, office-chic vertical blinds that we never thought would be still up NEARLY this long.

And that's just the beginning of both lists.