Oh, wow – is the first week of October already done? Guess it is; the pension got paid, and all the bills are lined up like dominoes. The biggest one is for the roof replacement, and the Magnificent Catio, which will not be completely paid for until after the end of the year. Still, I don’t regret the expense. The roof was about three or four years past it’s ‘best if used by’ date, and the Magnificent Catio, now houses full-time those cats taken on by my daughter whose careless toilet habits render them unsuitable for indoor residence. Seriously, they are the feline equivalent of guys who cannot hit the urinal, prompting the lament, “Couldn’t you just stand in it and aim out?” The Catio makes it easier to keep the house clean and ready for visitors at a moment’s notice, and at some day in the next decade, given the fact that the oldest offender must be almost twenty years old already (he’s one of the cats we inherited from Mom), we will have a very pleasant covered screened-porch patio, although we might have to have it pressure-washed hard enough to take a layer off the concrete brick flooring materiel.

The oldest of the dogs, Connor the Malti-Poo is now twenty or even more (he was an older dog when we found him, dumped in the next neighborhood over, and that was some years ago), and beginning to fail, so that is another sorrow to face, in the very near future. I have already determined that I will not coax out another few months of existence for him through heroic medical measures. He is already half-blind, mostly deaf, sprinkled with excessive moles, getting senile and with a slightly diminished appetite for food or walkies … Sometime in the next few months, I think, while he still has a little joy in his doggie life, rather than torment him with endless and futile trips to the vet. I wish that I have – as Dad did – those means of doing it relatively painlessly at home, but Connor has always been a very social little dog, and he will likely take considerable enjoyment out of that last trip to the vet, and we will stay with him to the very last. But enough of that.

Luna City Lucky Seven is done – out to the volunteer alpha-readers. And I had an impulse, once I was done with my work for the Teeny Publishing Bidness today, to scribble a bit on one of the proposed next books, the one set in the lead up to and in the Civil War … but here it is, almost time to start fixing supper. The Teeny Publishing Bidness client is coming tomorrow, to collect the most recent installment of his manuscript, now with even more pictures which he judges worthy of inclusion, and the first version of the cover design, which was the Daughter Unit’s artistic inspiration. The Daughter Unit has also taken on – with insane thoroughness – a paid research job for a mutual friend who has real estate property interests in what amounts to an underdeveloped portion of the city. The Daughter Unit describes this as administering a community-based colonoscopy – sorting out the things that would work, and what real estate development would best work, plus a myriad other interesting stats, like the registered sex offenders per square mile. This actually involves going and talking to people in the targeted neighborhood and drafting a prospectus for potential investors. This is a job that came out of the blue – and the Daughter Unit is making the most of it. So far, the client is pleased. It’s a short-term assignment, but we hope that it will lead to other assignments of this kind, for this client and others.

For myself, I am now onto the second chapter of the Civil War novel – with a fortyish heroine who becomes an abolitionist lecturer before the war and a nurse during it. (Great-Aunt Minnie Vining, who appears briefly in Sunset and Steel Rails.) Overall plot is still a little unfocused, but I am starting to be drawn into the world of mid-19th century feminist activism, possibly as a strong reaction to the current version. There were so many strong, passionate, nonconformist women involved in the abolition movement – and other social movements – who did not seem to be the least constrained by Victorian conventionalities; Julia Ward Howe and Clara Barton were not singular curiosities. They had plenty of company.

I had – rather optimistically – decided to begin with the first couple of projects on the Five Year House-Improvement Plan at the beginning of the year, before the Daughter Unit even left for California. I had hoped to see the Catio done early in spring, and the small bathroom completed in the time she would be away. As it turned out, those two projects and the new roof as well, were all done in a rush, throughout the crowded month of May. However – I cannot make any substantial move at the next projects – that is, a new garage door, and renovating the master suite bathroom until the roof and the Catio are paid for. This will take until late fall; the company I contracted with is being enormously generous about this. There are some advantages to being one of the company owner’s old neighbors, and a previous customer vis-à-vis a roof that had to be replaced in 2004 after the mother of all golf-ball-sized hailstorms. Also, I have lived in the house since 1995, and it is just not something that one can hitch up and take to another state. And I have rebuilt my good credit rating … All that helps enormously. But the remaining projects will all be done on a ‘me buy the materials and have Neighborhood Handy Guy do the work’ basis or paid up front to a specialist. I’d rather not refinance, as I only have two more years to go until the mortgage is paid in full.

We will not be sitting on our hands in the meantime, though. The rest of the garage needs to be cleared out and reorganized. A lot of stuff from the Daughter Unit’s hold baggage is still out there, plus some odd bits of furniture. Some of the furniture I was holding onto with a thought for eventually furnishing a Hill Country weekend retreat, or possibly the Daughter Unit’s separate establishment. Having concluded that neither of those things is likely to happen, may as well have a good clear-out. We already did a run to Goodwill with the first installment of “Stuff No Longer Required.” There will be a good few more trips, as we clear away even more. The embarrassing thing is that we do have empty shelves and spaces along the walls … but we can’t get to them for all the stuff piled up in front! When the garage is cleared out enough that they can get in to replace the door, I’d like to be able to keep at least one of the cars inside, as well as the pavilion and the market-event things, rather than have to haul them back and forth from the shed in back. The Daughter Unit wants to be able to have a workspace in the garage for doing stained glass, since she brought home all the stained-glass tools that Mom used in her studio. I’d guess we have most of the summer to get this done. We might very well have a small glass window and an AC unit put in, to make the space a little pleasanter for working in.

And then there is the renovation of the master bath, to plan and consider. I want a vintage Victorian look, with tiny hexagonal times on the floor, blue-figured wallpaper and antique-looking fixtures. All in good time … all in good time.