The office has been emptied! This is very exciting! My dad and I spent this afternoon transferring their office stuff from the farmhouse to the spare bedroom at the fun house. It was three not very full truck bed loads with the worst thing being dad's desk which could and was disassembled for travel and the countertop that was mom's desk. That was a custom cut length of particle board countertop with a backsplash. 

They set up a temporary office in the spare bedroom because they still haven't finish the actual office but honestly, that is not my problem. I mean, it is kinda. But they said they were willing to do it like this and I believe them. 

But we got everything over there and they are currently over there setting up their computers and all that jazz.

I have been contemplating the room. 

The house layout is a C with the backdoor/main entry into the kitchen at one end of the C, then my future office + bathroom, the living room with the wood stove and then the old office at the end of the C. It will be my crafting room. Wait, let me MS paint this for better view


beautiful, I am an architect.

this house layout is so nonsensical because the original house was actually only the sections labeled "my future office" and "living room" and they slapped on the left half later with a proper concrete basement instead of stone farmhouse basement, and the back porch/pantry/bathroom again later but they (previous owners before my parents) only put an uninsulated (literal) crawlspace below that so the bathroom is in danger of freezing pipes when it gets below zero even if the rest of the house is warm enough. 

The room is a good one for crafting because I will have my loom there and that takes up space and also my many spinning wheels. Very pleased with it. I don't mind my office being a through fare because it'll just be me for now and desks can be set against walls. I wasn't planning to make any changes to the crafting room because I wanted to get things in there but now that almost everything is out of it, I think I want to make changes. Sigh. 

The walls are a tan color that has changed to more of a peachy cream. They haven't been painted since we moved into the house in 2000. We had dogs that clearly slept against one wall because it is brown. It is dinged up all over. And also I don't like the peachy cream. So I guess I need to paint it. And I kinda knew that. I have picked out a light purple/blue that looks nice. But I'm also looking at the carpet. And the carpet is nasty. And worn. You can see where my dad had his office chair. The desk feet have left indents that much have fully compressed the carpet and under carpet to mush because the vacuum couldn't get the dust out of the indents. 

I don't waaaaanna tear the carpet out and sand the floors and refinish them. But the only thing in the room right now is a big shelf and if I'm going to do it, now might be the time. Arg. 

Someday I want to make big changes to the whole thing including tearing out the rest of the carpet, refinishing all the floors, making a pathway directly from the kitchen to the living room through the basement stairwell (only a problem because there's a chimney in the wall there somewhere), the entire back addition of backporch/pantry/bathroom needs to be torn off the house and rebuilt with insulation and turn it into a mudroom/bathroom, wall off my office so it can be accessed from the mudroom without going through the kitchen.

But for now, maybe just painting and getting the carpet out. 

For some reason I thought I had made a post for September but apparently not. I wouldn't hold my DNF books against them during this time, I was very tired and not feeling books that might have normally been decent, so probably most of them are perfectly good reads. I re-read a lot of books and fanfiction during this time including the entirety of the HOTE Ao3 tag, twice at least. Then I started on re-reading the Goblin Emperor Ao3 fic. Then I started going back through Murderbot fic. So you get the gist. New books had to be incredibly good for me to finish them. 

Read

•  Bad Company by Megan Greenwell - a book about private equity. I didn't technically finish this book but I got the gist. private equity is so fucked up and shouldn't exist. library e-book
• At the Feet of the Sun by Victoria Goddard - this was the first time I read this book, I re-read it about a month ago again. physical book I bought
• Lakelore by Anna-Marie McLemore - decent little book, really liked it. library audiobook
• Hemlock and Silver by T Kingfisher - hey what the fuck. it was good. but what the fuck. I wasn't at all bothered by the demon horse in the last fairytale retelling but the leggy guys are fucked up in this. you should read it. library ebook
• Queen Demon by Martha Wells - not as tightly timelined as Witch King but definitely got me in the feels more. physical book I pre-ordered
• Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz - cute little scifi book, just chill. library ebook
• Portrait of the Wide Seas Islander by Victoria Goddard - little novella in the HOTE series, very good, enjoyed it. physical book I bought. also re-read
• Petty Treasons by Victoria Goddard - little novella in HOTE series, very good, deeply in the feels about it. physical book I bought. also re-read
• The Return of Fitzroy Angursell by Victoria Goddard - little novella in the HOTE series, fun and funny and in the feels about it again. physical book I bought. also re-read
• Those Who Hold the Fire by Victoria Goddard - little novella in the HOTE series, very good. physical book I bought. 

Re-read

• Network Effect by Martha Wells - library audiobook. the narrator is excellent for this series and I love murderbot so much
• Witch King by Martha Wells - library audiobook - I finally learned how many of the characters names were actually pronounced
• Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells - library audiobook
• System Collapse by Martha Wells - library audiobook, clearly I was on a roll
• Hands of the Emperor by Victora Goddard

DNF

• When the Tides Held the Moon by Venessa Vida Kelley - not sure why I wasn't into it, but felt decently YA in a way that was irritating me even though I think the protags were supposed to be in their twenties maybe. I dunno, this was back in August. Library audiobook
• Dark Moon, Shallow Sea by David R Slayton - no idea what I didn't like about it, probably just wasn't feeling it. library e-book
• War Girls by Tochi Onyebuchi - I might try this one again later. library e-book
• The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami - not feeling it, library audiobook
• Apprentice to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer- I remember the first book being decent and funny, found the first chapter of this extremely irritating due to love-sick POV character. library audiobook
• Lies We Sing to the Sea by Sarah Underwood - decent story, I could see where the romance was going and I didn't like it. library audiobook
• Motheater by Linda H Codega - really really liked this one's story and got through 2/3 of it, but the romance was annoying me, will probably go back and finish it. library ebook

my parents are Making Progress

thank all the gods

it does help that the farm is basically asleep and I am working on those things but really only get 4-6 hours of work done each day on outdoor tasks, so everything is taking a lot of days there. so now all my dad's free time is on house stuff plus he absolutely loves deadlines to work to and my mom is only stressing about moving instead of about everything including the farm. 

so yesterday before I hit the road, I helped my mom load and move three large bins and two small boxes over to the fun house and she thanked me so much for helping and how it was so difficult and she couldn't have done it without me!!!!

in my mind I am thinking "dear god moving isn't this difficult, it truly isn't that hard, this was so little stuff and so easy" but I am trying to remind myself that I have moved six times in eleven years and I have practice moving. They moved twice in 33 years. Wildly different experiences. It is a skill that needs to be developed. My mom is very good at losing her mind about things. She also is pretty clearly procrastinating on actual important moving tasks by having me help her with other stuff (we forked two cabinets from the front porch where they have sat in their boxes for literal years, which they may actually set up for use in the garage) or suggesting I fix unimportant things (the upstairs hallway light doesn't have a fixture and she wanted me to work on it). I am going to have to kick her out when it comes time to actually set the house up for guests because our ideas of housekeeping are very very different and I will lose my mind if she comes over here to clean more before guests come over. The front porch is an example, she wanted to start cleaning the front porch off because the cardboard boxes look terrible but I won't be able to host guests at all if the fucking guest bedrooms aren't empty of their stuff. We come into the house via the back porch, the front porch steps don't even work. PRIORITIES

I just got back after 24 hours away (drove to MD for continuing education credits for sidejob) and my dad has almost fully emptied his work desk of things, plus the giant shelf next to his work desk (they are leaving me the giant shelf, I am SO EXCITED about it for crafting supplies, it is HUGE. It is floor to ceiling, four feet wide, 2 or 2 1/2 feet deep with four shelves. It will be the perfect shelf for roving and fleeces). Now it's all piled on the couch, but it has been sorted at least. 

The order of operations currently is: finish laying new flooring in the rental (currently around half done), do all other repairs in rental (new renter is moving in Jan 1st), then sand and finish flooring in fun house office so all office supplies can be moved directly in (due to computer/server/network things I know nothing about, it is easier to move offices only once), their bedroom moves to fun house, (once those two rooms are emptied, I can move a bunch of my stuff from shed to here, and set up guest bedrooms for christmas and I can start cleaning and organizing the house to my liking), they move either to the fun house or to the rental temporarily, I don't really care which, they do the rest of the flooring in the fun house and all the other renovation things. They may have to move back into the guest bedroom here temporarily while they seal and finish the hallway floor but if we get to that point, it will be a minor miracle. They would also still be using the kitchen here to cook. I just suggested to my mom that she use the church which would be closer but she didn't seem thrilled. Can't imagine why. 

The couch will remain until after christmas which is fine by me, it's a very nice and comfortable couch, so I don't mind borrowing it. I will probably rearrange things so we have more space and can fit things. I did send around the christmas gift list but my asks were help moving things after christmas day and not much in the way of physical gifts because I need help with tasks, not stuff. 

I did get the indoor woodstove working, I did not clean the chimney out, I got up there and started the attempt and gave up but! the actual up/down part of the chimney was mostly smoke and the pipes to the stove were full of creosote, so I cleaned the pipes and top of the stove out, plus the basement cleanout and started that bad boy up. it's so so so nice to have the woodstove to warm up next to after working outside, I warm up so much faster. 

anyway, so many parentheses and I'm very tired after my drive home, thank you to the moon for being so bright for the drive.