I am a blogger. I blog. If something comes up in my world that would be a good blog posting, I try to post about it. My blog follows my life and my interests and my activities. I hope you all are interested in genealogy, ’cause you’re getting a lot of that right now.
Good blogging involves a certain level of visual interest – photos, maps, scanned images, etc. I’m pretty lame at this aspect of blogging – I’m a lousy photographer so I don’t bore you with a lot of bad pictures.
So, what makes for a good picture? What could even a bad photographer make look good? Well, a cream colored carpeting with clearly visible sooty black paw prints frolicking from one end of the room to the other, that would make for a pretty amusing photo. I am aware of that. It’s not that I don’t know that. It’s that sooty black paw prints are not amusing. They are expensive. So the only shot you got the other day was of the most damaged section.
It’s a second time around boys and girls, second time around.
The morning after the carpet cleaners came and steam washed the soot out of the cream colored carpeting in the basement family room I get up as usual and make my way to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee.
All over the kitchen countertops are – you guessed it – black, sooty, putty cat paw prints. ALL OVER. We make this little joke, ha ha, hee hee, that the cats take over the house when we’re at work and probably – oh isn’t this cute – sleep on the stove. Well, they don’t. I can tell you that because I know exactly where they spend their time on my kitchen counter tops – EVERYWHERE BUT THE STOVE. THE CATS WERE EVEN UP ON TOP OF THE FLOUR CANISTER AND THE CEREAL CONTAINERS.
There is no cat food and no cat treats on top of the flour canisters and never has been. And yet, they were up there, way up there, way up under the cupboards:
No, I didn’t take a picture of the paw prints. I sprinted down the stairs to see what the basement looked like. It wasn’t as bad as the day before, but it wasn’t good, either. Sooty paw prints all over one end of the cream room, out onto the linoleum, up the stairs, up onto the counters. Of course there was soot cat vomit. TMI? Yeah, for me, too.
The two big containers of craft materials that we’d used to block the fireplace were pushed casually out of the way. I scrubbed down the kitchen while the coffee started. I didn’t take pictures. Yes, they would have been amusing. This situation is not even remotely amusing.
From the kitchen I went on a kitty hunt, looking at paws. Candy is the culprit. Little orange-and-white soot-eating monster that she is:
This weekend we decided to take care of the soot situation. We emptied, vaccumed and washed out the fireplace. Ever washed out a fireplace? Yeah, down on your hands and knees with bucket after bucket of not-ever-going-to-come-away-clean water it feels pretty much like that. And no, soot does not come out from under your fingernails or in the cuts on your hands very easily.
As I write we are waiting for it to stop raining outside so we can wash down the grate in the backyard, then put the whole thing back together again and wire-tie it shut. We wanted to drill it shut but the metal won’t support that so wire ties it will have to be. We don’t use the fireplace so it won’t be a loss. In between now and then, even though it’s been thoroughly washed down, here’s the state of the fireplace:
I can’t guarantee we’ll take that chest away even when it’s wiretied shut.
Plum Librarian LLC 
oh, my. oh, my. that candy is not sweet.
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