I got a few things done today.

First, I finished sorting through the last soil samples. What this means is, I still have to count and score the "critters," but at least they are all preserved and if necessary, the preserved samples can wait a couple weeks. Which is good; I think I'm going to wait until after Thanksgiving to even think about these.

The second thing I did was went out to Lowe's and set the process in motion for getting new windows. The installers (the people I've worked with before on other things, so I know/trust them) are going to call some time next week. Which means I need to get the terrible clutter in my bedroom and the guest room out of the way, and at a minimum sweep again and scrub the kitchen floor. (I have this horrible vision of someone coming into my house and reacting like it's one of those houses on "Hoarders" - and, mind, my house is no where that bad, but I find that people who live in the bare/spare houses, who don't do crafts, who read one book at a time and that is checked out from the local library...well, they don't always understand. So I have issues about how people see my house. Having a small house with not much storage space does not help).

It may be too late to get them installed in the few "flex days" I left between exam week and going home for Christmas break, if they have to be special-ordered (or especially if they are not a standard size). But I also have a few days when I get back in January before classes start, so that would work too.

(Really, my bedroom is the only room where the windows are not readily accessible - I have low bookcases right in front of one set and also have a couple of stash-boxes stacked in front of those. If I just move the stash-boxes to my big closet it should be OK.)

I also bought a big tarp. Because they are saying on the weather that today is supposed to be the last warm dry day for a while, and I wanted to get the leaves out of my front yard.

In the past, I raked them all into piles, and then spent what felt like hours of punishing work trying to pick the leaves up (salad-tongs style, using a second rake) and dump them into the wheelbarrow, and then take them out back and dump them on the leaf pile (over the course of the year, they rot down to soil, so it seems really wasteful to me to send them to a landfill).

This year, I was smart - the tarp made things SO much easier. What I did was rake the leaves onto the tarp, and then when there were a bunch on there, I rolled it up into sort of a leaf-burrito and just carried the rolled up tarp to the leaf pile and dumped the leaves. The other nice thing about this was that when I raked the last pile of leaves and dumped them, I was DONE - no raking and raking and then realizing I had what seemed like endless piles of leaves to try to pick up. So I'm definitely using the tarp method in the future. (It also seemed to get done faster. I never timed things in the past so it's possible it wasn't faster, but it just seemed so because it was easier).

If anyone wants to replicate it, I used a 6' by 8' tarp, 5 mil thickness. Thicker than a painter's dropcloth but about the thinnest tarp that Lowe's sells, and it held up fine. It might have been a bit easier with another person or two to hold down the edge of the tarp while the leaves were being raked on to it (and to keep it from wanting to fly away on the breeze when it was empty), but even doing the job alone, it was not too bad.

I've also decided on the house cleaning that I am not going to kill myself by trying to do it all this afternoon or tomorrow; I have an easier schedule next week so I'm going to try to do a half-hour or an hour every afternoon until it gets done. Which should happen about the same time as the contractors call me to come out and measure for windows, if things work like I hope they will. And then, next weekend, I am decorating for Christmas. Yes, it is still early, but I will be gone over Thanksgiving.