Back from World Con Everyone...
Hi everyone,
Well, just when you thought you'd never here from Kilmurry House again, here we are back home and more or less functional. The Wolf and the Cat survied the two weeks in the UK, including the World Con Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow Scotland. Meanwhile, The Lizard and the Bear had a surprise for them when they got home. An amazing, newly painted hallway, complete with framed scrolls and hallway chandeliar. It looks stunning, though of course they had to stop paiting at the top of the stairs. That's where the landing of doom starts, though they did manage to move out the large industrial sewing machine and surger. You can almost find the wall up there there now. In a couple of weeks, we hope to did it out, and finish the painting job.
Now, the down side to a lovely new paint job, is that it shows up just how bad everything else looks. Which has folks looking around, trying to figure out which job to tackle next. Sadly, for the house renovations, the outside work needs to get done first. This is because no one can call us on the telephone anymore. Yes, the tree branch situation has gone critical and our local phone company has told us not to bother calling them until they are down. Not to mention, our house gutters are growing a lawn on top of our house. Now, lawns on houses are used in someparts of the world, but Ireland isn't generally one of them. Not to mention our roof isn't really ment for that sort of covering. The problem is, we need a huge machine, which until now, no one has had outside of Dublin.
Our friends at the phone company found that out the last time they were force to repair something for us. When their own telephone pole came down. For nearly three weeks, they kept telling us the problem would be sorted "tomorrow." At the end of it, I got a nice young man who said, "you won't believe this but..." and proceeding to tell me about how they had called each town and been told they had such a machine. Only to show up with a work crew to find out it didn't really exist. Which is exactly what happened to us, and the reason the house gutters have not been cleaned in several years.
Well, I guess some local has seen a money making oppurtunity, and they have bought one of the six thousand euro rigs and have started renting out to people like us. So, next week, weather permiting, we are going to be living the high life; or rather the Lizard and friends will be. Way up high in a the trees, sniping down brances, cleaning gutters and replacing broken windows. We havn't been able to get anyone to replace an upstairs window here over the last nine years either. Seems the job is just too small for the local Celtic Tiger construction teams, who want to make lots of money putting in new houses. So, each year, we have more and more windows covered in tiny bits of paper and tape. Which is not too bad in Summer, but really nasty during the Winter Months. I'm also looking forward to having the upstairs windows cleaned, again for the first time since we moved in, nine years ago. We couldn't rent a pressure washer, until all the windows had glass in them again. I'm looking forward to seeing the world outside my bedroom without many layers of dust and grime.
Then, after all that gets sorted, maybe we can get back to the landing of doom. Followers of the Kilmurry Saga will remember my mentioning this, back in the days when Disaster Cat experimented with the Fly Baby self-help site. The experimentation may have only lasted about a week, but the guilt I get from looking over the landing still remains. On the other hand, much of the junk has been sorted and moved around a bit. Which is a gratifying feeling at the time, though still depressing a week later when it looks like nothing has been done about the mess at all.
Still, we continue to march on, in hopes that one day our period house will look a bit less lived in and somewhat more lived up. Not that we are gong to take things too far. But we've got a long way to go before Kilmurry House is mistaken for an historical meseum. And, plans that anyone in the house is even thinking about joining the local "Georgian Society" are completely false rumors....and will be quashed with a very large swatter if they are even mumbled about in polite company.
And, I finally got around to buying my own website, even if there isn't very much on it yet. Friends of Disaster Cat can now to go www.disastercat.com and find her. The website content, for the moment, is the same as the old yahoo one, but will be updated shortly. As soon as tecchie friend brings down the webtools and shows her how to use them. Why the .com? Am I selling anything? No, but I've noticed that most people these days, outside the geek world, expect a website to end in .com If you don't end it that way, they will spend hours looking hopelessly for you, and then give up. So, .com it is, at least for now. Who knows, maybe I will sell something on it someday. Though getting people to invest in a company with a name like: Disaster Cat Corperation, might be a bit of a hard sell. So on second thought, maybe not.
Well, that's a catchup blog from here and I hope to have more over the next several days. My life as a psychic reader continues to develope a life of its own, over at the planet Starz website. I am now an "assistant manager" and about to make my debue tonight on the StarzInternet Radio show: The Starz Psychic Hour. I've always wanted to be on radio and here is my chance. I'll try and report tomorrow on how my first night goes.
Until then, I guess I'd better go and practice my lines....
More later,
Disaster Cat