GNoM Housekeeping -- helpful illustrations

Sometimes a woman gets down about her housekeeping. She looks around at the rooms she's tried so hard to keep organized, and sighs. "I just cleaned it, and it's all messy again!" she wails. Well, ladies, as a public service, I offer you Guilt No More Housekeeping over here at Castle Bessy.

Here is what my daughters' bedroom looks like.
Don't you feel better? Is there any room in your house that looks even half as atrocious as this? Come on. You know this photo makes you feel better.

Superguy, in a yet further attempt to help the girls organize their heaps, put up useful shelves. The girls crammed everything on there. And still it looks like it does. (By the way, I was the one who stacked the books upright like that. Had I not done so, those books would be under the laundry on the floor.)
Yes, this is our 18-month-old Honeybee. She's brushing her teeth. In bed. Note that this is actually a bunk bed, with two singles shoved in sideways on the bottom. This is how we fit four girls in a 10 x 12 room.
Lest you think that the girls are at all unusual in the family, here's Truckster's dresser.


We're here for you. We want you to know, here at Guilt No More Housekeeping, that whatever you're doing, it's way better than what we're doing.

Now go look at your reasonably clean bedrooms and pour yourself a cup of hot tea. Messy Bessy has to go sleep for about 35 hours to get over the shame of all this chaos.

Crap Chairs -- Black Hole

This is where you end up, when you begin to collect crap chairs:If this chair were a sickness, it would be psoriasis.

If this chair were architecture, it would be Communist Block High Rise.

If this chair were food, it would be Vegemite.

It now resides in our living room and has already garnished two (2) apparently sincere compliments. If only I could tap into that mindset, the one which appreciates this type of furniture: the 60's wayside motel kind. People might just have been kind so they didn't have to say their real feelings, however.

Updates on Casper

You may have been wondering about Casper, our invisible Bassett hound. What does he look like when he's not invisible? Well, he's just your regular Bassett hound, and has a droopy sweet face. Fifi illustrates:Isn't this cute? Casper and Bootsie, curled up together. They're best friends! Amazingly, Casper jumped right up there, onto Buster's top bunk. He's got skills.
But this is even cuter, isn't it? Here's Truckster, snuggling with Casper under the blankets. You'd think he might mind the bad breath. But Casper seems not to mind anything!
Casper is also a very intelligent dog. He uses Truckster's electronics set. Look at that. He's completing a circuit! Arrf!

Perhaps someday Casper can show us how to get grass to grow in the mud yard outside.

Guilt No More Saturday!

You can see that we are busy, busy people here in the Land of Origin, where the skies are deep blue, the soil is always rich, and the yard is always a mud pit from Hades. Below, view the latest home improvement that Superguy has been working on: enclosing what had been the weedy, rocky, littered, rutted ruins of a garage apron. We hope that having this enclosed will give us a few more feet for our Mud Reclamation Project.Saturday is when the hearts of all women turn toward baking. At least, in this house. And so, Sweetums and Kewpie are at work making two loaves of healthy, yummy banana bread. These are currently perfuming the household while they bake.
Meanwhile, you may wonder, is Thrifty Frugal Cheap-Like-Scrooge Messy Bessy doing anything to help her family eat well, and if so, does it only involve the grocery store? Mais non, my little friends. Here you can see that we have transplanted the seedlings that began life under the grow lights in the basement. These are pumpkins.
Disregard the weeds. (This is a GNoM garden anyway. We've got weeds.) Instead, focus on the tulips, which predate us in this location! They come up year after year, to gladden the heart of Messy Bessy as she stands gazing out the spattered window at the Guilt No More sink, washing a mountainous pile of nasty pots and pans.

Also, note the two rhubarb plants. An older lady who lives down the block had a massive number of the plants and knew that I love rhubarb, and so she gave me a couple. She wanted me to take more, but frankly, I don't have any more room! And I myself, with my trusty shovel, went over there and just dug these babies out of her dirt and inserted them in mine! And they grew! It's like a miracle!
Anyway, I ended up running out of steam, and furthermore, there is always laundry, like my evil familiar (instead of a black cat, I have a basket of filthy socks). So Fifi went out and showed how much her paternal grandmother's talents have found a home in her: she planted our pea shoots and strung twine for them to climb, she planted nastertiums and tried to revive our sorry little tomato seedlings. Wow. The yard looks great!
Saturdays are so happy when there's sun and a lot of kids to just work. At the end of the day, we're going to have a clean yard, banana bread, and a semi-planted garden.

And my input? Moral support!!!!

Feeling down -- let's have photos!

Isn't this a lovely photo? This is a quite common sight in the house. People eating and reading all at once. We have such nice light in the morning.This was one of the Bataan Death March of photos on Easter morning. Truckster just could not resist the temptation to make faces, and Fifi has her maternal grandmother's trick of always having her eyes closed (or almost closed) for any photo. Here is a pretty good one. Check out Buster's tie -- it's not a clip-on!
Easter eggs drying.
The choristers getting ready to go praise God with their voices. And boy, was Our Lady of Many Large Families packed! It looked like a Chevy Express convention in the parking lot. (As a side note, from where I was standing, this appeared to be the Easter of Women in Tight White Dress Slacks. There were three just in my view. Why was I not alerted? I just wore a beige sweater skirt. Hopelessly unfashionable. Of course, Tight White Dress Slacks would look ridiculous on my pregnancy-mashed figure. But it would have been nice to have gotten the memo!)

Happy Easter to the Family of Origin Diaspora!

Guilt No More laundry -- Lenten edition

This is not a joke.The ironing board stack.


Go away for the weekend, avoid menial work on the Lord's Day, and this is what you get!
Happy Holy Week. If you want to find me, I'll be praying in the basement.

Crap chairs, part 3 -- oh yeah, baby

If this chair were a car, it would be our old Vanagon: faint traces of style, underneath layers and layers of misery.This is one of the few pieces of furniture -- oh, OK, the only piece -- that I ever refinished myself. It used to be standard 70's brown, and I updated it! It had a fuzzy pink seat, which used to look halfway nice when it was owned by my long-suffering parents. What you see here is blue vinyl (cheap!) and black spray paint. It never looked VERY nice, but at this point, we're just hoping that the arson fairy visits soon and takes JUST THIS CHAIR. Even the smoldering heap of blackened sticks will be preferable to what this is now. And Sweetums can sit on a pile of phone books, since we get a new stack of them every three weeks here in the City Where Nothing is Allowed.