Janitor Mode

A wedding on Saturday, then a mid-day brunch concert on Sunday. On Monday we reappraise the Carters, expert coming in from Chicago. I'll be there on Monday, but Pegi insisted she and Trish had Saturday and Sunday covered, and that I should stay home. We'll see. Anyway, full janitor mode to get the facilities up to snuff. Cleasn and stock the bathrooms, sweep and mop the various floors. First problem was the five giant dolls, sitting on blankets in the back hall. No place to put them. Three of the offices have two guest chairs, so I put one doll in each extra guest chair, another just outside D's office on a chair there, and the last one I put in the chair that flanks the office space in the center of the common space. It looks like she's doing a job interview. The ladies all loved the idea and rearranged the limbs of all the dolls into much better poses than my merely dumping them in chairs had produced. Spent several breaks in the library, reading about dolls. This show examines the grotesque. Batted ideas about hanging the dolls. An interesting challenge. D has a problem with the stairs, in the new old house, we'd been talking about it for a couple of weeks. They had been carpeted, and the old pad was now an integral part of the structure. He had tried everything including some industrial grade orange cleaner that we'd used to get up the adhesive residue in the basement. The ultimate cleaning product. Didn't work. The only thing that worked was taking off a thin layer of wood with a giant chisel (called a 'slick') and that would take forever. I explained to him how to secure runners down stairs, with those cute, usually brass, rods that held the carpet, at the back of the tread, against the bottom of the riser. In the trade these are called, in a mind-numbing flash of obviousness, stair rods. You have to love it. The way things are named. Churned mud surrounded salt lick, ten thousand hand prints don't mean a thing, what you thought you were saying. Is that three things? Is someone counting?