This and that

Hannah and John still have a week of vacation, so to combat all the loafing around, he took her down to the basement and made her help him clean out our storage area and move everything into the space vacated by our downstairs neighbors when they moved a couple of months ago. Our stuff in cardboard boxes had been sitting on an earthen floor for 7 years, and the boxes were moldering. The neighbors' space was at least lined with some kind of rough tile, and they left behind a storage rack (minus shelves) that I think John was able to get some use out of. He also found a few bottles of mead that he had made back in the day, maybe 5 years ago, and one beer. Unfortunately, he also found a couple of framed items that I could have sworn were with the other framed pictures behind the desk in the study. I guess they got left in their box from when we moved here because they were relatively big. One is a drawing John's high school friend made for him and seems to be in ok shape; the other is the cross-stitch my mother made us when we got married. It looks a little moldly around the edges--I just hope I can get it clean. Any tips, LMIL?

I managed to get a decent amount of work in today, even though I slept in this morning after a less-than-decent night's sleep. The cherry on the top was checking my bank statement and finding out I had been paid for my last 2 jobs. Whooo!

I've been saving up my veggie scraps in a freezer bag to make broth, and I had a full bag, so while the soup for dinner cooked yesterday evening, I had a pot of broth simmering on the back of the stove. Then I got busy doing something else after dinner while it was cooling, but Hannah was kind enough to remind me on her way to bed that I needed to strain my weeds.

I also made goose broth from our xmas dinner carcass, but it might be a bit strong for soups and such. Maybe in rice? That carcass also provided some nice grease, with which I made a crust and the rue for a sauce to go into my chicken pot pie a couple of nights ago. Yum!

Last year, John started keeping track of all the books he had read for pleasure since we moved here, and he started an account at Shelfari (sp?) for this. I wasn't willing to go that far at the time, because it would have taken me ages to enter all the books I remember, after learning how to use it, but I did make up a list in Excel. Which I lost during the great computer debacle of my own making of 2010. Alas. But I am going to start from scratch for 2011, seeing how I got some books for xmas and all. So if I manage to get it set up, I will try to add a gadget (widget, whatever) to the side bar so you can see what I am reading.

--Nee in Germany didn't seem to mind the snow as much this winter