Sylvia's Journal

It’s hot here today, the kind of hot that makes waking up difficult, and chores even more difficult – luckily we had some visitors today who brought some good company and a new batch of delicious cold gazpacho! Sylvia was carted off for another visit with her hubby and Tess and Steve took a much needed break during the day to take care of a million personal things – and to try and sort out a way for Steve to get back up to Ontario (if anyone knows anyone who is headed north, let us know. We’re looking for ride shares or cheap bus/plane tickets). I have been busy updating the nurses station (will take a picture of this very helpful improvement to the house and post it on my Flickr site later), and I am pleased to announce that we are slowly checking things off the list (although as soon as a space is made on the whiteboard, another thing takes it’s place!). So, as Joe mentioned, we are trying to organize ourselves so that in the coming weeks and months it will be easier for folks who want to help to know what needs to be done. We have divided the work into groupings as follows:
1. Housekeeping: This covers the daily/weekly chore list of things to do around the home including, but not limited to things like laundry, dishes, trash, vacuuming, general clutter management, meal preparation, grocery shopping, fish and animal care, and most importantly yard maintainence (this may be where some help would be appreciated). Ted has done an amazing job watering the flowers and garden everyday, but there is still a lot of stuff that might be good for people to sign up for. Here is the list:
Weeding/flower maintainence (deadheading, etc)
Lawnmowing (this needs to be done once a week – let’s say every Thursday, since Steve just did it yesterday)
Lawn watering (with the sprinkler that seems to have vanished – this obviously requires not much work after all the sprinklers are in place – but currently we have none). If anyone has extra sprinklers that we could borrow that would be amazing – and if anyone has passion around setting this up/helping us find some sprinklers, we can make a chart here at the house that has info about when they need to be turned on, so anyone who is visiting can just turn the hose on, then turn it off. Simple. I think my father said (since the grass is rapidly dying) that once a day for 20 minutes should do it for now.
Then, coming in October we will need to start thinking about winterizing the property, which is going to be a lot of work – but we can deal with that later.
Another thing that we will need to start thinking about sooner than later is getting the house ready for another patient – which will require some more furniture moving/organization including bringing down the other twin bed from upstairs, or taking Diane up on her offer of the extra queen bed that she and her husband have. Either way, there will need to be some more clutter removal and heavy lifting (maybe taking some of you up on your storage offers) that will need to happen soon (in the next 2 weeks it looks like).