I mentioned in my last post that the wind picked up the porch roof, blew it over our house (clearing the yucca tree, most of the chimney, and the Direct TV dish) and dropped it in the street in front last Friday. Didn’t even hit the mailbox.

Cody slept through the whole thing. But the neighbors across the street rang the bell to let him know what had happened. They all dragged it into the front yard until the insurance guy could get here.

He finally came yesterday so I took some photos since I was standing around in the front yard staring at it anyway.

The porch roof flew a long way in that wind. Our house is a lot deeper than it looks from the front. We have about 1600 square feet of heated space and a two car garage, not a mansion but a good size for two people. But it looks like a tiny cottage from the street and people are usually surprised by the size when they come inside.

When the roof took off it bent the exhaust pipe for the water heater a bit, knocked the cap off the chimney which hit edge of the roof a bit but no damage to the yucca tree or the satellite dish. Amazingly, I had a glass water jug sitting on my big worktable on the back porch that never even moved.

So the porch used to look like this:

Now we feel kind of naked and exposed when we look out the kitchen windows and the den glass doors during the day. Some of my chimes actually survived. I found the copper bird feeder in the street gutter the other day too.

My absolute favorite part of our porch was (and will be) the birds’ nests in the spring.

Some holes had gotten punched in the skylights a few years ago during all those hailstorms so we were going to replace it anyway. This saves us a little demolition trouble. I just keep wondering if anyone saw it take off into the sky.

woke up (very important)
cleaned house (not as important usually but damned important this week)
drove to Wal Mart (how very American)
rented a Rug Doctor (tres tres American)
steam cleaned carpets
cleaned
steam cleaned carpets again
cleaned
slept (it changed to July fifth somewhere in here)
pulled weeds and trimmed junipers and trees in the front yard
cleaned
steam cleaned carpets
panicked (always very important to get the last adrenaline push for the final cleaning)
cleaned
showered
went to dinner with my parents

The public areas of the house are actually quite impressively clean and stink-free now. Let’s see how long that’ll last.

It’s muggy today. Lots of water in the air. Which is very happy-making for the drought sufferers but not very good for people who depend on an evaporative cooler to keep their house cooled off. Especially when they’ve been steam cleaning carpets. Blergh.

I’m just busy knitting tiny mittens and socks for the annual aunts’ ornament party. They’re having it early this year. Really early. Like a week from this friday when they usually have it the weekend after Thanksgiving. The one aunt who lives out of state will be visiting so they wanted to have it while she’s in town. But that put a bit of a crunch on me since I was planning on handknitting the ornaments. So I’m busy knitting ornaments and chenille washcloths for the present exchange instead of knitting in fun autumn-y colors like I want to. But I’m almost done!

It’s been a fairly quiet week other than that. Had some tooth pain a few times and had to take a few prescription pain reliever-induced naps. One of my crowns came in early and I went to have it put in yesterday but one side wasn’t as flush with the other tooth as much as it should be so back to the lab it went. The temporary crown is working fine anyway I can chew on that side without getting stuff stuck in that little crevice. But the other side is still a pain. God I hate my teeth.

I had a lot of fun on Saturday though. The Knitters Not Quitters group is so much fun the way it expands and shrinks every week. Always interesting people and conversations. And the Napoli people are so nice about us moving furniture and using our spinning wheels.

Beverly and I had a great time chatting about books and knitting and taking a short roadtrip to Good Fibrations on the other side of the east mountains in Edgewood. She and her sister are going to be in Rome at the same time as my sister and her husband so hopefully they can all go out to dinner. Those with higher English degrees unite! Odd, isn’t it that I’m surrounded by word people? My husband, my sister, her husband, Erin, her husband, and now Beverly. Even one of my favorite online buddies is an English professor. Not something you’d expect from a slightly verbose visual arts chick.

I found out we’re going to have visitors from San Francisco the week of Thanksgiving which is exciting. So we’ll have to do some tidying and clean up the guest room - which is the usually kitty room so it’s full of hair and scary cat emanations. But I’m not going to worry about that until after the ornament party. I’m not sure but I think I’ll do the half-assed Furr’s precooked thanksgiving meal kind of cooking. All I know is I’ll be delighted to see Jocelyn (whom I haven’t seen since March) and get to know her boyfriend better (I’ve only met the guy once before) and have someone to eat turkey with since Cody will be working that night, as usual. So that’s exciting.

There’s the episode of The History of Britian with Eleanor of Aquitaine on the History Channel and my first try at knitting lace (a scarf using this pattern) with Rayon Boucle seems to be going fairly well.

All I need to do now is persuade Mr. Man into making a pot of coffee and this will be a perfect Sunday morning. Ok, so I haven’t totally given up coffee I just don’t like to make it myself anymore. Which certainly does cut into how often I have it.

And I found a possible pattern for the scarf Scarlett Johanssen was knitting in Lost in Translation!

Laundry. Shopping. Dishes. Making little baggies of food for the dog and hedgehog. Going out of town in three days eeeek!

Hey have you seen the screenshots of when I made a replica of our house in “The Sims”? I really wasn’t exaggerating about the laundry piles ya know.