Creeping right along

Sheeesh.  This past day has been a day of catching one stink bug after another.  One landed on my shoulder!  It is so creepy I am sleeping with the light on, and the cat with a proven ability to suss out any stink bug, is sleeping with me.  It isn't enough.  This is because the high today was 61, where the low on last Thursday was one degree.  The bugs love this warm weather, they are very active when they find their way in; when it is cold they seek warm places like lightbulbs, and the kitchen (ick!).  Either way the weird fluctuations in temperature are driving the bugs indoors.

On to a topic of less creepiness~
I have been going through my fountain pens and cleaning any one that is stubbornly dry.  I managed to get ink on my favorite jeans.  They are a faded (but new) red, so of course I couldn't have been wearing blue jeans where the spot of ink would be invisible, oh no.  Rats.  Indelible too.  But the pen writes very well now.

When I was working, I kept a large flowerpot filled with pens on my desk.  Probably 200 pens.  A lot of them were advertising ones that you get for free at various businesses, nothing special.  The rest were any one that wrote especially smoothly, but obviously I couldn't write with all of them, so whenever someone needed a pen, maybe a red ink one, they were welcome to take whatever I had.  I would get kidded a lot about them.  Now that I am home pretty much all the time, the pens that came home with me, languish now there is no one with which to share them.  I also kept a candy jar in the outer office and refilled it regularly for every one to enjoy.  Now I buy "treats" and although they get eaten with surprising speed, it doesn't feel the same.  Retirement changes a lot of things, things I never thought it would.  But still I am thankful I did retire, even though I was a mere 55 at the time.

I took the day off knitting to tidy up my knitting place, and put away the yarn I bought.  Yes, I know, I have yarn I haven't even touched in several years, but it gives me a lot of pleasure to get new yarn.  Anyway, I got it all squared away, sat down to admire it, and there beside the light was a stink bug.  I grabbed for it with a tissue and it evaded me, and the ensuing search took about an hour before it was dispatched with prejudice.  A swimming lesson for the bug.  But searching for the thing messed up my careful organization, and so tomorrow I will be re-re-arranging stuff.

But I did get the bathroom cleaned ~ N scrubbed the shower, bless him, it kills my knees to do it.  I hate to nag about it, but I also hate soapy and toothpaste-y stuff, and thus the 
need to do this regularly.  Years ago, before retirement, I had for many years had a cleaning service that came every two weeks to dust, vacuum, scrub, change sheets, do windows, and so on.  There would generally be 3 or so of them, and they would fly through it all, and because they came all the time, the house never got dirty.  I cancelled it when I was home full time, but now I am thinking of having them come and do a "spring" cleaning just to catch it up.  I'll have to think about it.  Whether the job would be worth the hassle.

One of the things in the master bath is this gigantic whirlpool tub, easily 6 feet long inside.  We had it put in when we built the bathroom, thinking it would be a big help in keeping me pain-free.  I have read that homeowners no longer put these in a new bath, because they turn out to not be used very much.  But I use ours a lot, candles (electric), music, bubble bath.  I guess the "youngsters" don't have time to relax this way ~ their loss.

Thought for the day:   "A recent study has found that women who carry a little extra weight live longer than the men who mention it."