Spring cleaning: I don't do windows

I know there are those among you who consider me a neatnik, but, believe me, my brand of cleaning is nothing compared to the way my mom (and her cleaning woman) cleaned the house when I was a kid.

There was weekly dusting that involved the removal of anything that wasn't glued down and moving most of the furniture. An electric broom deployed daily in addition to weekly vacuuming. Bathroom floors (tile) scrubbed on hands and knees with sudsy ammonia. (Just the thought if that last one makes me stop breathing.)

And seasonally my mom would clean out every closet and cabinet in the house, replacing the shelf-liners and draw-liners. Each spring, blankets and sweaters were washed (and occasionally shrunk beyond recognition), aired, and stored with mothballs (again with the breathing) in massive steamer trunks and padded, quilted garment bags of a sort that can no longer be purchased (and neither can the mothballs, thank gods).

These days my spring cleaning consists of sending a bunch of winter sweaters and wool coats out for dry cleaning and throwing the down and fleece clothing into the washer and dryer. Once the stuff is clean, I store it in labeled boxes in the attic along with packets of some herbal moth-discourager.

My big splurge is having all the windows cleaned by a fellow who's insured if he falls off the ladder into my rhodies. After he's done, we haul the screens out various storage nooks and install them. Ready for summer!

I used to take my car in to be detailed every May, but that's no longer urgent because my mom no longer comes out to Seattle for the summer. So the car's exterior is gray-on-gray and the back seat is full of needles from the evergreens I bought at the garden center two months ago. Shhh! I think I can live with it.

Deadlines

I am looking at deadlines for a series of commitments...it's not so bad now that the first one — a board retreat I was organizing — is done.

The next deadline is for a major-donor "thank you" party I'm organizing (May 11).

After that, it's a deadline for a magazine article (new publication, major article) on May 30. (Yes! Folklife weekend!)

Then there's a deadline for a short story for a writer's workshop later in the summer (due June 15).

I think it says something that I have been completely freaking out about the entertainment events but am actually looking forward to doing the writing. Writing doesn't require cleaning the house, subduing the cats, mowing the lawn, getting dressed up, being diplomatic. In fact, quite the opposite.

Contest: The Mystery Room

Below are five photos taken in a room in Naples, Florida. If you can guess what this room is, you have your choice of being taken out for espresso or gelato in Seattle or being sent a bottle of Italian olive oil. Have at it! (By the way, I don't expect anyone to get even close to the answer.)

HINT: The room is not in a private residence. And, yes, that's a waterfall in the first photo.

How deep is my swamp?

My iPad 2 arrived Friday and I haven't unboxed it yet.

A great weekend

What  great weekend! Friday I went out and pressure washed about 1/3 of the hardscaping, getting covered with wet moss (which smells like seaweed). I came in, took a shower, and can't remember what we did Friday night; apparently I was very tired. Kate arrived for the weekend.

Saturday morning Kate and I survived two mediocre yard sales, thanks to the restorative properties of croissants from Besalu. She went off shopping with a friend while I ran a record number of errands, picking up a blue fescue at Swanson's, visiting the dry cleaner in Wallingford, picking up a replacement outlet cover for a patio outlet, dropping off two ancient laptops at the computer recycler near Gas Works Park, picking up a special trellis for the grape arbor at the Fred Meyer garden center sale, and getting an aggregate paver at the stone yard. When I got home, there was time to install the blue fescue and the paver and dig a lot of weeds out of one of the garden beds. My neighbor Jeff came over with some scary power saws and removed the pear-tree stump, right down to ground level. Impressive — more than payback for taking care of their cats at Christmas. Tom got home from his continuing education class around 6:30. We went out to dinner at Fu Man Dumpling with Kate and Janna, then came home and collapsed.

This morning Kate packed up and headed off to a knitting confab. After the Sunday check-in with my mom, I braved light rain to make yet another foray into the garden. This time I dug up a huge rhodie to make room for a high-bush Legacy blueberry bush. This was one of the rhodies I'd transplanted from the south side of the house 8 years ago, possible the one whose transplantation resulted in the need for wrist surgery. This time I approached it with caution. I cut off the branches, then went to work on the stumps, which had apparently once again sent a tap root down into bedrock. After I dug down two feet, the damn thing still wouldn't budge. Tom, on his way to a Potlatch concom meeting, came by and stomped on the stumps. As a result, I was able to pop them out, in two pieces, about five minutes later, and plant the blueberry.

I then prepared an area for the new trellis, but the rain started in earnest before I could make any significant progress on screwing together the various pieces of tress. That may have to wait until after the trip to Florida.

So, I'm now at my desk looking at all the office work I didn't get gone. And not particularly caring about it.

Pressure and Pressure Washing

I woke up this morning with the urge to go out and pressure wash the hardscaping in the garden.

It's not going to happen, unless I get a lot of other stuff done first. I can't believe the lists.

This is the year that I'm spending 50% of my normal work hours and about 99% of my normal dancing, gardening, yoga, etc., hours working with the boards of two non-profits that are in the midst of exciting growth, repair, and transition.

The work isn't a pain; it's fascinating. The brainstorming stuff is, of course, energizing. The people are great. I'm learning to anticipate how people will react, how people will react with each other, and how to create experiences that bring out the best in people — which often means challenging them with responsibility and trust.

I'm also learning how to ask people for help and for money — large amounts — which I find exhausting.

All that said, this is not natural work for me, and never will be. I'm tired, and it's frustrating not to have time for the activities that restore me: aimless wandering around the neighborhood, pottering around in the garden, reading books that I have no idea if I'll like or not, and writing stories that might not pan out and that never have to be posted on a blog. I very much miss demolishing structures, digging up deadwood shrubs, and pressure washing moss off the patio — big, messy, projects that are measured in hours rather than minutes.

I am promising myself: Next year. Please let me get to next year.

Meanwhile, off to write a book review, run a round of errands, and condition the wood on the antique dresser Tom brought out of The Magic Storage Locker.

Antibiotics

Thank you for all your notes of concern.

Group Health gave me antibiotics; within 6 hours of the first (double) dose, I felt like myself again, and I continue to improve. The goal is to get myself to the presentation tomorrow afternoon.

I have only the vaguest memory of what I've been doing between March 9 and yesterday. I hope I didn't offend anyone, do anything embarrassing, or give anyone else bronchitis.

I do, however, seem to have committed to a really scary amount of activity through the end of June.

Still barking

I've spent the past two weeks sick with bronchitis, and last night it got worse. I came home from a board meeting hallucinating...I actually have no idea how I drove from Seattle Center to the house. I got here with fever, chills, and the miserable cough that I'd thought was getting somewhat better. It's as if we'd rolled the whole thing back to March 9, and started all over again.

This relapse gets me in to see a doctor at Group Health this afternoon. It's not that I'm particularly sick — if something started out this way, you'd say, hmmm, the flu, big deal — but having been exhausted for two weeks and then getting hit by this is really discouraging.

I'm supposed to be speaking to a IT industry group on Friday, and am hoping that I'll get some kind of medicine that will enable me to deal with a two-hour panel discussion. At the moment, I can't even imagine driving to the event!

Fortunately, I have only one major client project in the works this week, and it can all be done (ghost blogging) from bed. And, fortunately, Tom got better so is able to bring me liquids and take care of the cats when he's not at work.

Unfortunately, the part of last night's meeting at which I committed to organizing and hosting a strategic planing event in April and a cocktail part at the house in May turns out to have not been a hallucination.

Mostly, I'm sorry to be missing the non-rainy weather today. I have five blueberry bushes that need to get planted!

I thought I heard a seal bark

I get colds a few times a year, but it's been a very long time since I've run a fever. Somewhere along the trip from Seattle to San Jose to Washington, D.C., I was exposed to a bug, and now I'm incredibly sick.
Tom does quite a good job of taking care of me when I'm sick, and I, him,  but that doesn't help much -- because we got the same thing at the same time.

After dinner with family this evening we went to a drugstore and I got all the right chemicals (I like chemicals, Tom doesn't) and we took them. Much good it did.

We are both barking like seals, and feel like someone is grinding our joints to dust. The last thing you want, of course, when you have aches from a fever is someone barking like a seal in the bed next to you.

Because it's an inflammation, the aches seem to be focusing on the ankle I chip fractured in October.

It could be worse. We're staying at a very homey hotel and our room has a refrigerator and microwave and coffee maker that is capable of making tea that doesn't taste like coffee. The hotel is full of vending machines with inexpensive name-brand sodas and sparkling water, plus snacks like pretzels. The heat is easy to control, there are plenty of blankets, and a pretty decent bathtub for when the chills get really bad.

Tomorrow night is when we are supposed to go to the events at the Italian embassy. I'm hoping that if we rest and drink lots of fluids from now until then we'll be able to get to the art exhibit opening and lecture and enjoy it as much as we enjoyed the tour of the Canaletto exhibit at the National Gallery this morning.

Flying home on the plane Friday? I am so trying not to think about that.

A few things

Catalog photo of the "Script" fabric roman
 shades from Smith & Noble.

The painters have come and gone, with remarkably little fuss — once they discovered the local Benjamin Moore store had made a mistake mixing the trim color for my office and got that fixed. (Queen Anne Painting; highly recommended).

Now the bathrooms have new (white) paint after 10 years, and all sorts of minor damage to the walls got repaired. Best of all, my office is no longer a sterile, cold white: It's a pale sage green with beige/cream trim. The wall with the large window is done in an accent color: A sunny hacienda-style yellow. The colors are all part of the Cabana color palette from Color and Space, who did the colors for the living room and dining room three years ago and then gave me the rest of the palette for future projects.

When I get back from San Jose and DC, the challenge will be to fill the walls with art. No, actually that will be easy — the challenge will be to do it in a way that looks good. I'm will be, literally, following directions from Martha Stewart Living.

I also want to splurge on an attractive, cat-proof shade for the window. That means no metal or plastic blinds they can bend, no clawable fabric, and no snaggable weaves. I'm thinking either a very sturdy bamboo shade, like the ones in the living room, or this amazing linen roman shade (see photo, above). The shade, from Smith & Noble, is hideously expensive, so it'll likely be either the bamboo — or get a plain linen shade and hire a calligrapher to write all over it!

* * *

Today's weather was the usual mix of sun, snow, rain, sleet, high winds, with the occasional rattle of hail on the roof. I watched in delight as this foul weather tormented the roofers working on the house one block down from us.

Why so sadistic? Well, this was the crummy rental house that, three years ago, had its perfectly nice roof torn off and a shoddy "second story" with a (I love this) metal stove-pipe chimney slapped on.

Apparently that original roof job was so crummy that just three years later they are having to tear off all the asphalt and the plywood and start over again.

It has always been my dream to win a small lottery and use the money to buy that house so I could rip off the second story and that ghastly chimney and reinstate the original roofline — along with it the very pretty view of Puget Sound that I used to enjoy from my kitchen table.

* * *

Sheba. She gives new meaning to
flying toasters.

No update would be complete without mention of the cats. Sheba the deaf white cat is now about 13, and definitely looking older. Yet she still dashes madly about and leaps onto high shelves. Recently she has become even fussier about food — something I associate with age in cats. She used to eat only one flavor of fancy feast; now she won't eat even that, and yowls and throws things (like the toaster oven) off the counter if she isn't given treats, freeze-dried salmon, or baked chicken for her meals. Sheba is such a lovely cat when she isn't yowling or throwing things that this is less annoying that it sounds. After all, baked chicken is good for all of us.

Kaylee, the high-strung little Abyssinian has finally settled down. For the past several months, she's been sitting on my lap late at night when the house is very quiet and I'm wearing a fleece bathrobe. She now comes in and ambushes me when I'm getting out of the tub or shower and she knows I'm about to put on the robe. It takes her several minutes of stomping around and kneading before she sits down to be petted, but this morning she actually skipped the stomping around and relaxed immediately.

Kaylee's half-sister, Zoe, the huge striped non-Abyssinian, is just as clownish as ever. I've never been able to get Zoe to stop clawing me in the face in the middle of the night unless I wake up enough to blast her with a squirt gun. Instead, I've just resigned myself to getting her claws clipped professionally on a regular basis — so I get pawed, rather than clawed, at 3 a.m. (We tried clipping Zoe's nails ourselves but sustained way too much damage. It's a job for the pros, and we take Zoe in along with Mabel, who I wouldn't even dream of trying to clip.)

Mabel, the Bombay, is a lovely, extremely sage cat who treats people as if they were her kittens. She, also, has extraordinarily long, sharp claws. Unlike Zoe, she can retract them. Mabel doesn't seem to have very strong back legs, and she uses her front claws to haul herself up on things, like the bed. Or your lap. OUCH. Mabel sharpens her claws on the cedar posts of the back porch. Zoe has been working on one of the posts for years, but Mabel has been able to demolish her target in just 15 months.

March travels

I hope that our surprise trip to D.C. in March will be worth the last three hours I just spent on the computer and phone canceling plane reservations to San Jose, making plane reservations from San Jose, to D.C., to Seattle, canceling hotel reservations in Berkeley, extending hotel reservations in Sunnyvale, and trying to make hotel reservations in Washington, D.C., for the week that thousands of people are descending on the city for parents' weekend at George Washington University. (We finally found a hotel with rooms left in Maryland, on the Metro line to D.C.)

Now, for the fun of packing a suitcase, half with casual clothes for San Jose's temperate climate, and half with business and evening dress for what will probably be a late-season blizzard in D.C. (Alarmist? Not hardly. I grew up there, and remember the year that the cherry trees froze in March — oh, wait, they did that again in 2010.)

Why are we going to D.C.? The Italian embassy is opening an art exhibit featuring Italian prints from Tom's late grandmother's collection. Unfortunately, the opening comes right on the heels of our trip to Sunnyvale for Potlatch. Flying back to Seattle for 20 hours just didn't make sense.

Facebook weirdness

I'll bet you are expecting me to write about Macworld 2011, where I've been all week, but I'm going to write about Facebook instead.

This afternoon my Ballard next-door neighbor, Gwen, commented on Facebook that she'd just seen Green Hornet and it was horrible. I left a comment agreeing that it was awful. A couple of hours later I got an email from Facebook that contained a subsequent comment in the Green Hornet thread, left by a friend of Gwen's named Sasha.

Here's the weird part: I realized when I saw her last name that Sasha is someone I already knew...because she was my next-door neighbor when I lived in Wallingford 10 years ago.

Good grief. I mean, what are the chances of your next-door neighbors from two different neighborhoods knowing each other?

The bad and the good

Bad: Steve Jobs announces he's taking a health-related leave of absence.
Good: All my Apple and ex-Apple friends are worrying about him together.

Bad: My biggest and best client gets acquired by a foreign company and the executive I report to gets laid off.
Good: I have more time to work on book-writing projects for my publisher, which I've discovered I like to do.

Bad: I have less reliable income.
Good: My partner suddenly has lots of work coming in.

Bad: My volunteer work seems to be full of urgent stuff and people with communications issues.
Good: I'm finally learning to prioritize and to deal with difficult people.

Bad: It's rainy and gray and soggy and cold.
Good: I have waterproof gardening boots and gardening gloves.

Big improvements, small repairs

It wasn't until we went to clean the house today that I realized how much has changed around here in the past month.

There's a beautiful new window in my office. It's not just a much nicer view of the garden, it's got insulated glass, snug fittings, and an insulated frame. No more drafts at my desk! No more closing the curtains to get insulation!

The basement den has been completely rearranged to create a 7-foot deep area in which to use the XBox, Kinect, and Dance Central. There are probably a few more changes yet to come down there that I'm in denial about, involving large bookcases.

The living room is now in its post-holiday configuration, which is more spacious than usual.

All that's the good news.

The bad news? We're in one of those weeks in which things break. Not badly, and not irreparably, but in annoying and time-consuming fashion.

It started with the annual visit from the oil company to tune up the furnace yesterday. The upstairs is always chilly when we wake up, but this morning it was exceptionally so. The seriousness of the situation became apparent when I went down to the kitchen and discovered it was 52 degrees. All attempts to revive the furnace failed, so I called the company. They apologized and sent out the serviceman, who discovered that some new equipment he'd installed had malfunctioned. He put in yet another piece, and, well, we'll see what the temperature is tomorrow morning.

In the midst of the furnace follies, I went to take a shower and the plastic handle on the shower valve shattered. There is now no way to control water flow and temperature without grasping the metal stem with a pair of pliers. I was reluctant to get scalded, so went dripping upstairs to the stall shower. We didn't get out to the plumbing store today, but "replace faucet" is at the top of tomorrow's to-do list. I sure hope it is a realistic do-it-yourself task and we don't end up having to bring out the plumber.

These things tend to happen in threes. I am now eying the refrigerator, dishwasher, washer, and dryer suspiciously — though they are all four under extended warranty. Clogged drain, anybody?

Thanksgiving at the Shady Rest

Most people will spend tomorrow dealing with a 14-pound bird; I'll spend it dealing with a 14-pound cat.

Two days ago, as the temperature plunged, Tom and I went to check on Smokey, my cat who adopts elderly people. Smokey has been living 7 blocks north of us, in the greenhouse of an elderly Norwegian woman, for the past three years. We went up last month to make sure the barn heater we'd installed for him two years ago was plugged in, and we found Smokey terribly thin and frail. As was the little old lady. She was confused; the cat was unhappy.

Her son was in the process of moving in to the house to take care of her, and we impressed on him the important of taking care of Smokey -- he'd apparently never had a cat before. The cat has since regained the weight he'd lost.

The woman and her son were pleased to see us Tuesday and they seemed relieved that we were going to take the cat to spend a couple of days in a warm TV room. The reason they don't let the cat inside is that she has severe osteoporosis and has, over the past few years, broken several bones -- including her hip. If she trips over Smokey, she's done for.

Smokey's getting on in years, and less able to survive extreme cold in the greenhouse with just the heated pad in his box. So we brought him home, and he's in the TV room, having a ball with lots of cat food, water, and petting (in the greenhouse, his food is often grabbed by raccoons and other cats). To our delight, the Bombay, Mabel, was very welcoming to Smokey and they get along as if they'd known each other for years. Upstairs, the tabbies are pretending nothing is going on, and Sheba, the deaf cat, could care less.

When it warms up tomorrow, Smokey goes back to the greenhouse -- along with an apple pie for the woman and her son.

I talked with our vet today -- and followup call about Sheba -- and told him the latest in the Smokey saga. I bring Smokey in every year for shots and flea meds, so the vet knows the back story. He predicts that some day Smokey will decide to live with us again.

His first winter in the greenhouse, Smokey walked 7 blocks home every night to sleep in our basement, returning to the greenhouse at 6 in the morning. We're pretty sure he still knows the way home.

Weather nightmares

I guess this winter storm qualifies as a weather nightmare, as it woke me up in the middle of the night. Wind howling, metal vent for the upstairs shower fan rattling, and the whole upstairs shaking. The view out the kitchen door is weird — gigantic bright white clouds looming in the east, moving slowing southward, and one star visible above a neighbor's fir tree.

The heater kicked in around 3 a.m. — something that almost never happens, as the house retains heat well and I set the thermostat to 62 at night.

Last night I spent two hours driving four miles to pick Tom up from work at Westlake and Denny. While most of the drivers on the city streets knew to go slow (10 miles an hour) there were enough people trying to whip around at 20 that when they hit their brakes they went out of control, spun, and slid off the street. I was astonished by a bicyclist who rode onto Leary Way, a few yards in front of my car. I braked slowly, then applied my horn. He was astonished to realize that I couldn't just slam on the brakes for him -- and that he couldn't just speed up on the sheer ice. When I crossed the Fremont Bridge and got on to Westlake, traffic was going less than 1 mile an hour. For entertainment, we had pedestrians darting across the street in front of our cars, several of whom promptly fell flat on their backs on the ice, in front of oncoming traffic in the opposite lane, causing those cars to slam on their brakes, fishtail, and go up onto the sidewalks (if they were lucky) or into other vehicles (if they weren't). Fortunately, no one hit the pedestrians.

I'm supposed chair a board meeting downtown tomorrow night, and trying decide what do about that. One weather site says the sun will come out tomorrow, all the ice will melt, and road conditions will be back to normal by evening — albeit about 12 degrees. But I find that hard to believe. I need to decide in the morning whether to cancel the meeting, or try to hold it online or by phone.

The situation here is incomprehensible to folks from back East, where a city crews would have strewn the streets with sand and salt hours ago, and it would have been a normal, if gritty, commute. But in a city where snow and icy conditions occur only once or twice a year, buying a large enough fleet of sand trucks, maintaining a network of sand and salt supply yards, and keeping this system on standby would be too great an expense.

I hope everyone has the sense to stay safely at home tomorrow. In weather like this, I always think of my insane employer from 15 years ago. In the far, dark, past, the company had been involved in city emergency services, and it had required all employees to report for work, even in severe storm conditions. By the time I joined the company, it was primarily an insurance firm, and the vast majority of employees were clerical staff who worked in administrative buildings. Yet the company still required all employees to attend work during storms, and to arrive within one hour of their usual start time — or else the day was counted as an unexcused absence and charged to their vacation time. Of course, by this time the company had employees who lived as far away as Tacoma and Issaquah, for whom a storm commute would require leaving home at four a.m. or earlier.

As the editor of the employee newsletter, I had been told to "explain" this policy to employees, an assignment I found...difficult. When I challenged the HR representative who wanted the policy explained, I asked how single mothers with toddlers who lived in distant suburbs were supposed to make this commute at 4 a.m. when the day care center was closed because of snow and Metro bus service was cancelled. His sneering answer: "Well, these people should have thought of that before they stopped using birth control."

I still think of this jerk during severe winter storms. He lives, childless, in a condo in the city and is probably one of those pedestrians darting out in front of cars.

Please drive carefully anyway.

Heading home tomorrow

Today is my next-to-last day in Florida.

It's been a good visit with my mother...we got huge amounts done, from handling legal stuff to putting up shelving, visiting friends, shopping at Coconut Pointe (that's how they name things down here), going to pool and beach, figuring out her new TV controls, updating the firmware on her modem, and discovering that the dust buster does, indeed, work.

I've been walking two miles a day, doing ankle exercises, and was even able to do some skipping tonight. I think my sprained/fracture ankle is nearly healed.

I gave a presentation to her Mac users group (about my iPhone ebook) and I worked on several projects for clients, Folklife, and Clarion West. I don't think anyone in Seattle would have realized I was gone if I hadn't told them. Except, of course, for Tom, who was home wrangling cats, working his new Westlake massage studio gig, repairing furniture, hauling junk to Goodwill, and otherwise keeping the home fires burning.

The schedule for next week is somewhat scary. It even includes dinner with a cousin I have never met, who will be in town for a conference.

Holiday (shopping) tradition: Best of the Northwest

For some people, the holidays begin after Halloween; for others, it's after Thanksgiving. For me, it's whenever Best of the Northwest happens. (Nov. 12 - 14 this year.)

It's without a doubt the highest concentration of top-quality arts and crafts in the region — the stuff not only looks dazzling, it holds up for years. (My favorite evening bag, made from the shaft of a designer cowboy boot, with beaded fringe and a beaded, strap is a Best of the Northwest find, as are my copper pine-cone earrings.)

This year I'll catch only the tail end of it (on Sunday afternoon). Save something for me!

(Note: it's moved yet again. This year Best of the Northwest is at Pier 91, near the Magnolia Bridge.)

Somewhere, there's a schedule

OK, I'd like to know how the cats do it.

How do they decide whose turn it is to sleep on the bed at night? How do they know who guards the front window, and who goes out at 5:30 a.m. to patrol the property? How do they determine who gets to sleep on the bathmat at night, and who gets to wake me up in the morning?

There has got to be some kind of schedule, because they trade off. The tasks get done, but it's not always the same cat doing it.

Loving technology, hating website analyses

Marketing the ebook for the past two weeks has given me the chance to do what I've loved to do for the past 30 years — muck around with technology.

There are a lot of little backroads with the iPhone, and it's fun to see the solutions people come up with when they get stuck in the mud. I already have some updates for the ebook, which will initially appear on the publishers' blog.

The book itself is not selling as well as I'd hoped — the publisher markets to tech-oriented audiences, and those folks don't buy "basics" books. I am discovering that the iPhone newbies who are curious about the book will click through from my marketing pages but don't buy — I suspect they are wary of buying it through the publishers' website, which does not have PayPal or other familiar payment options. I am hoping that when the book is available through iBooks and some other ebook publishers, that payment barrier will be eliminated.

I was fortunate that as I worked on the book marketing and dealt with my injured ankle, my main client had two weeks of downtime.

I was able to complete two small business website evaluations and have decided that I don't want to do them any more. They involve educating the clients about technology, about marketing communications, about online communications, and about SEO — plus breaking the news to them that they need to divorce the web designer who saddled them with a cutesy, out-dated website with no content management system and start from scratch with a WordPress-based site. No fun at all, and I find that I spend too much time trying to make the reports I send them diplomatic as well as informative — so it's not even very profitable for me.

It would be fun about now to take a couple of weeks off to work on jewelry or cooking or furniture refinishing. I tried gardening, but my ankle didn't like it, and I don't dare try digging anything up!