Memo To Me!

This is a more comprehensive list of the stuff I plan to do sometime between now and midnight on 31 December.

We'll see how things go.

Aside from things like the work that goes into writing, editing, publishing, and marketing my novels, I have other stuff I really ought to do.

My list of around-the-farm projects includes:

• Hatching the bantam eggs, while trying to avoid buying pressed-foam incubators.  Pressed-foam ? Really? For animals that PECK the instant they shake off the last shell fragment?  Pressed-foam ... you know, the crap you throw OUT to recycle from packaging?  And yet two different farm-supply store employees looked at me as if I was daft when I asked about "bowl and bulb" incubators.  Go figure.
• Build a compost cage of leftover project lumber and leftover chicken netting or hardware cloth.  Have you SEEN the price on the "compost bins"?  Gooooood grief!
• Finish re-doing the overhead of the lanai, so that it can begin to function as a trellis for climbing roses -- specifically for a cutting I plan to beg from my brother-in-law -- a yellow John F. Kennedy that he and my late sister grew at their front porch.
• Fix the falling-through floor in Cat's bedroom, including replacing the sub-flooring, adding under-flooring (it looks like a cross between iron-on interfacing and vinyl flooring, it's neat stuff), and finding a neato vinyl remnant, or some neato self-stick flooring tiles.
• Rip out the living room carpet and the hallway vinyl (or what's left of it after almost 20 years of animals, kids, parties, and life in general) and check the subflooring for soft spots, fix them, lay under-flooring, find some remnant boxes of sticky-tile for the hall, and find inexpensive but actually NICE looking wood-grain or bamboo "hardwood" flooring.
• Force the people in my house to go through their clothes and sort out what can be given away (tee-shirts from high-school, anyone?  When the last person graduated more than 10 years ago?), what can be cut up into household rags, and what can be re-purposed into patches, other clothes, or memory quilts -- and what's actually wear-able.
• Find some kind of headboard/footboard cover for the guest-bed that resides in my bedroom beside my waterbed.
• Find some way of transferring a bunch of ancient VHS tapes to DVD, for space considerations, as well as keepability considerations.  I'll probably end up having to buy one of those converter thingies, as well as RCA-type cables to connect things and actually do that.
• Get some Reellee Cheep thin lattice, and more of the leftover lumber, and build a sort of "cage" round the ugly air conditioner units, the propane-regulators, the trash bins, and maybe, who knows, even round the ugly, needs-painted, propane tank.
• Continue my apparently permanent war on the honeysuckle, as well as kind of clean up various small junque heappes round the farmhouse area.
• And last, but not least, sort through my incredible mess of projects and things to do and recipes, and start, you know, doing them! and photographing them!  and posting the how-to-do-it instructions in here!