Wing 9 rules!

I finally got around to checking my email, and found a sweet letter from John, my RA back at Loring Job Corps. John is the best RA that has ever been there and probably ever will be. John rocks! He's a total sweetheart, too.

Anyhoo, I've been sporadically sending wing 9 postcards. (I just realized I have a backlog of three postcards and a letter sitting in the glovebox of the van...oops!) I promise I'll mail them soon! They've been checking my blog, so I figured I should squeeze in the time to write something.

Today we had our first yard sale. We've been here at my grandmothers for exactly one week. She just had to go into a nursing home, so we're here to sell every last thing in the house, the house itself, and her car. I'm beat. It was 85 degees out today. I carried 95% of the stuff out of the house until help arrived in the form of my aunt, her two kids and husband. I had to eat a couple of creamsicles just to stay alive. :-) We've rented a 20 cubic yard dumpster. What we can't sell, goes in there. It's good for up to 5 tons. The sad thing is, we've only been here a week and it's almost half full.

The past week has been a blur of cleaning. This house is a hellhole. You would not believe the amount of pure crap that resides here. We literally had to carve a path to walk through the house....there was just so much junk, you struggled to find a piece of bare ground.

Speaking of crap....I've gone through 3 pairs of heavy durty gloves and about a gallon each of ammonia and bleach cleaning up the place. My grandmother's husband (Dick) is incontinent. When we got here, there were dirty old people diapers all over the house, and shit smeared across the entire toilet bowl, lid and base, shit in the shower, on the floor, etc.... I had to tackle that the first few hours. It was vile. Pardon my french, but it really was quite disgusting. Dick is now in a home and is being well taken care of. He has Alzheimers and has to be locked in, unfortunately.

Upcoming projects include painting the water-stained ceiling, shampooing and vacuuming the entire house, installing a new screen door, painting the front porch and a myriad of other things. Mom and I have been working every day from 7am until late (sometimes midnight) at night. It's one way to burn off the calories! We have another yard sale next weekend - in fact, every weekend until everything is sold.

I told mom that when we're finished here, I'm running off to be a cowgirl. I figure ranchwork is way easier than what we've been doing here :-) Seriously though, it's always been something I wanted to do. I grew up on a vegetable farm, now I want to get into cows. A big part of it is the allure of riding a horse, wearing cowboy boots and a suave hat. :-)

Gotta go, more work calls. I'll try to update semi-regularly now. The first week was a blur. It has to calm down a little now, right?