Sunday is Fun Day!

The librarians asked me yesterday what we planned to do on this, my day off. Assuming we would go somewhere exciting or do something exotic, I suppose.

We had planned to go to the Ho Chunk Nation Pow Wow nearby yesterday evening with John, Judy and Matthew, but that got cancelled at the last minute. So we decided to go eat in Reedsburg and do our grocery shopping on the way home. That would leave all of today free for fun and edutainment.

Sadly, a thorough search online and of the area print events listings showed nothing particularly attractive. It is a sunny, dry day and thus Tom was moved to have us shampoo the large rugs in the dining and living rooms. We moved furniture, he rolled them up and took them out to the pad outside the garage and got to work. I swept and mopped the floors, straightened up the kitchen a bit and scoured the cutting boards.

At first our carpet shampooer did not want to work, but Tom got it going and went at it. Here he is doing his due diligence:

While he was doing the first rug, he realized we were going to need more Bissel Fiber Cleansing Formula for Carpets and Upholstery For Use in All full Size Cleaning Machines and Containing Scotch Guard. (Whew!) I headed off to Home Depot to restock while he finished up.

To my surprise and dismay, Home Depot did not have this product, which I would have assumed was the standard for all etc. I looked first in the cleaning materials area, which I located after discovering that it was no longer located near the sign that said "Cleaning supplies". I then tried over by the carpet and rug area, where we had purchased said rugs some years back. (I thought we got them from Kohl's, but that was the rug in the library. Kohl's did not have rugs large enough for the dining and living rooms.) No luck there. Then I tried by the actual carpet shampooers and steamers. There were some cleaning products, but no Bissel Etc. Frustrated I did what no male likes to do -- I asked for help.

And they told me they did not carry it.

This meant I needed to go next door to Walmart -- a thing I hate to do on any occasion -- to see if they had it. Wetry to avoid Walmart if we can, but living out here in the back of beyond, in the Waterpark Capital of the World (registered trademark), sometimes Walmart is the only place you can get things. So I went in and discovered that I was to be spared the ignominy of giving them any of my hard-earned cash. They did not have it either. In fact, they had nothing except the spray on foaming spot cleaners.

I called Tom and explained the dilemma. He told me to get whatever I could get, as if we had any option, being unable to get whatever we could not get pretty much by definition. So I bought some Zep stuff and brought it home. Not that I have anything against Zep products, but seriously, is that the best name you could come up with? Zep? Makes me think of old cigarette lighters or one of the Marx brothers.

As I write this, Tom is out working on the second rug. And I am noticing how lovely the floors are without the rugs. Here you see the dining room opening into the kitchen. Of course, the table and chairs are not there, but you get the idea. (Those old coffee cans stacked in the corner contain bird seed.)

And here is a view of the mostly empty living room, looking through the door into my room where some of the furniture has been temporarily moved.

I think these photos make the house look tiny. But the kitchen/dining area/living area/library are all one big open space divided by bookcases and a buffet Tom built. The rooms all have over- sized windows looking out onto the back yard and woods. The ceiling in dining area/living area/library is a sort of cathedral thing, so it feels spacious, light and roomy.

Plus we have great art on the walls, most of it done by Tom. That painting you can barely see over the stove in the kitchen photo above is one Tom's father painted. We have several of his things, too.
.
This 4'X4' [1.22 m x 1.22 m] painting hangs on the wall in the living room. It represents the house Tom and Helen had in Hyde Park next to Helen's parents. When it hung in our apartment in Chicago, people waking down the sidewalk would stop and peer into our window to look at it. I apologize for the angle of the shot, but it was the only way I could avoid a glare spot.



More typical of Tom's work are the monochromatic portraits. They are of a variety of people, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, a homeless street vendor who sold Streetwise down on 57th Street and so on.

They are also rather large.



Well, Tom has finished the rugs and now they have to lie out there and dry for a few hours. We are trying to figure out what to do for the afternoon. But as you can see, it can be entertaining just walking around our place.