Ten-Finger Exercises

Monday rip-off

I think I've succeeded in writing a headline that's more interesting than the blog it relates to. Is there a contest for this? Maybe there should be.

No, I haven't been ripped off. I've been ripping off more wallpaper tonight, in preparation for someone to come tomorrow-- I hope-- and begin several jobs around the house. He said he'd start the outside ones first, and that he'd be here this morning. Bill, who found him in the first place by reading the sign on the side of his truck as they drove the highway home, said that he told him we would both be at work this morning. The only evidence that he's been here is a pile of purchases, including paint, outside the back door. I guess that's a good start.

The first two jobs are to replace a small piece of the outside wall where a dripping faucet has rotted the wood, and to remove a window style air conditioner and replace it with a window.

After that, the fellows will be ready to dry wall around a piece of furnace pipe in the guest room that was necessitated by our putting in central heat and air last summer. We also have baseboard heat units that need to come out of all the rooms, and all the rooms need paint. Only the ones that were papered or are new dry wall need texturing.

I'm really not looking forward to rounding up everything in each room and moving it elsewhere. I'm starting with all the little, easily transportable things, putting them in boxes and taking them to the basement. That will leave just the furniture to huddle in the middle of the rooms, covered with tarps, I guess.

My daughter is in the middle of the same process, trying to get her house ready to sell. They need to find a much less busy street to live on, now that the twins are old enough to want to be riding their bikes around.

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On an entirely different subject, the social workers at hospice have been visiting various programs in the northwest that focus on children's grief. Today we talked a little about it in a group. I'd assumed that this was a project directed by the board as part of their future planning, but it is not. The director would like to have a needs assessment done. Two of the social workers want to just jump in and start. They know what they want it to look like, and seem oblivious to the fact that if there aren't enough kids of similar ages in the area, there won't be any groups possible.

Since we've had some difficulty getting adult grief groups for fall and winter, and the spring group is very diverse, I'd think a needs assessment would have happened prior to sending anyone to look into other programs for children. The current adult group, while all the members are dealing with loss by death, includes widows, mothers, and siblings. Some of the deaths were by suicide or murder. How easy is it to have a group where one loss is a child, another a murdered husband? Not very.