When Sophie writes her posts she begins with Dog here. I thought I would begin with a confession for an a self-made sloth. Waiting for the house is not cleaning-inducing. You keep thinking it won’t be much longer so you still are camping so you only have to clean a little.

Even with having all of our stuff burned we have a lot. Some of the things that we have now belonged to us or my mom originally, were given to friends as gifts and they were re-gifted to us. Some thing are new-to-us things friends brought us to help get started again. Some things are new from friends and some are new from the insurance replacement money. We pack a pretty big load at this point. Add to that the house where we are living is furnished and I don’t need to complete the thought because you get the point. There is a lot of stuff.

Cleaning this house is a huge effort. Thank goodness there are only the two of us. I quiver at the thought of having children in this house. They could get stuck down in the deep pile shag carpet and you would not even know they were there. Beyond that it would just be too much trouble. Imagine Cheerios all over the place when it takes over an hour to vacuum two the three floors. We don’t use the third floor much which is actually a nicely finished walk out basement.

I told my sister that we went down there so seldom that there could be squatters living there and we would not have known. My spouse reminded me sweetly that he is keeping his wine stash down there where it is cool and the area gets checked at least once a week. Seems like we are clear on that squatter worry. I am glad there are not extra reasons to go clean in the southern part of the house.

I was thinking today that we are getting boring all ways talking about the fire. There must be something else. Well,right now, there is not.We hope to take a good long break with family over the holidays. It will be good to visit with them since it will be in failiar places with familiar things. I know where to put the plates when I unload the dishwasher at my sister’s house, I still have to think about it here in this temporary house. After Christmas and New Year, we will then back in this temporary house to wait until the end of winter. We will have time to finish planning and getting permits and such so we will be able to hit the ground running in February when we can start building again. Of course Februrary may be March but that is up to the weather.

For once I am relieved to not be pressing to hurry. I am also greatly relieved to know what we will start in February, not some undefinable “soon” time. I can try to be a decent sloth and parse out my house cleaning so that I only have enough but only a few more goes at the whole house before I can clean my own house.