S&C: October 31-November 2

 Monday was a self care day. I ended up cutting off a couple inches of my hair to get rid of some split ends and make the heat a bit more bearable in the coming months. Then I put on a face mask and relaxed until Partner brought home the package my mom sent. The package had a bunch of my soap bars, some nail polish, some decorations for the house, and some wax! It's been so long since I've been able to melt some wax and make the caravan smell nice. I popped in some Sweet Lavender Marshmallow Cake from Sniff My Tarts and enjoyed the smelly goodness while hanging out with the chickens. I did end up washing the last set of linens I had been holding off on. Besides that, Monday was a really relaxed day.

Tuesday it rained, so I took advantage of that and spent the entire day decorating and organizing on UO.

 

I'm nowhere close to done, but I'm very happy with the progress I made.

I decided to ignore the date and decorate the house with a Halloweenish theme. Hopefully I won't run out of steam and will finish up this house before Thanksgiving so I can enjoy the early holiday season color scheme before adjusting the house to fit winter and Christmas more. This has been a fun experiment as I've figured out some of the idiosyncrasies of a ServUO server vs OSI servers. I also got stuck several times when I knew of a specific object I wanted to use, but did not have on this server. In any case, the castle isn't as empty as it was looking before. Trick or treating is still active through the end of November as far as I'm aware, so I may go trick or treating and get more spooky decorations.

Tuesday night we were plagued with high winds that ripped a bunch of palm fronds off the palm trees that litter the property. We're used to fronds falling occasionally, and they're an eternal source of stress for me due to their size and weight and general danger when they fall, but that night was something else. It felt like every time we finally fell asleep yet another frond had fallen and managed to hit every possible piece of tin roofing within a five mile radius on the way down.

Wednesday, yesterday, started off great. The Babies and Roostyboi were very polite when I let them out, and Roostyboi went into his daytime coop with no issues like he normally does. Kookie and Crumble didn't give us any trouble when we let them out for the day. I stripped the bed completely and started a load of laundry.

Instead of grabbing food for the flock immediately, we made the mistake of moving all of the fallen fronds into a pile out of the way. This upset the flock, and they all went running to find a place to hide. Initially we weren't too concerned, but after I finished feeding the wild flock and returned to Partner to help finish letting the Cheeps out he informed me that he couldn't find Kookie.

I ended up finding Kookie hiding in some of the lean-to structures built along the back of the sheds, but when I went to retrieve her she ended up running deep into the underbrush near the water way. That was my fault for not waiting for her to stop being so freaked out from the fronds. Normally she doesn't run from us, and if anything she ends up attached to our hip until we give her our contractually obligated Lap Time. Her running off wasn't great for us, though, as we now know that if Kookie gets her silly butt stuck or lost she will do absolutely nothing to remedy the situation.

Thus began an hour long trudge through the sheds and underbrush to try and find her. Eventually Partner had to head off to work and I needed a moment to hydrate. While I was inside, I put on a healthy heaping of sunscreen (no repeats of Friday's burning, please!) and clipped my hair up in a hat to prevent it from getting caught in everything. I also grabbed a set of gloves and shears, because the pathway to behind the sheds was overgrown and painful to slog through in my search for Kookie.

After about an hour of going to town on the underbrush, Kookie poked her head out from whatever hiding place she found and started happily foraging around. I was able to walk up to her and pick her up with no issues. Kookie happily trilled in my hands while I carried her out from behind the sheds and brought her over to Partner to say hi. We ended up putting her back in her bin as she needed to lay an egg.

While Kookie sat in her bin, I hopped into a voice and video call and showed my Mom a video game Partner has been working on in his free time just to get the hang of game creation and have some fun. I also showed her the work I had done in UO, and told her about my eventful morning. We chitchatted a bit and I ran some treasure maps in the game while we talked.

After Mom got off to get ready for bed, I thought I would return to UO and continue decorating. More laundry needed to be hung, though, so I did that instead. While I was out I refilled the water containers. The mattress cover was dry by this point, so I started making the bed. Once the bed was done, I realized the weather was ideal for finally cleaning the floors. While taking some trash out I also cleaned up some of the eggs that have piled up on our counters. 

The rest of my day was spent cleaning. I cleaned baseboards and moved every piece of furniture to sweep, vacuum, and mop the floors. I wiped down walls and windowsills of dust that has become a fact of farm life. One of the windows was extra dusty as the wind has blown in a bunch of dust and crap from outside, so I took an hour to thoroughly clean the window and blinds. By the time Partner got home from work, the entire floor was clean and I was very much done with doing anything that required movement or thought. I took a quick shower, we ate a bit, and I stayed upright for my hair to dry enough to lay down before I succumbed to exhaustion. 

I feel a lot better now that stuff is a lot more clean, but I keep getting distracted by what still needs to be done. I'm not unfamiliar with needing to dust and clean; Yellow Dust season in Korea was nasty. It seems like it's on a whole new level here, though, and at any moment it always feels like there's something that could use a good dusting or tidy up. Since I've cleared a walkway to the area behind the sheds, I may take a whipper snipper back there to help tidy up the overgrown grass. We've been wanting to do that for a good while, so this might be the best opportunity to get started. Who knows if that'll end up happening though; as Deb likes to say, it's always something. LOL