I talked about Casper knowing Chloe, because that's easier to explain (and it turns out Louis attended the kids' school for a year, so we gossiped about the teachers.)

Doug, like Lou, is unbelievably gregarious. They're the nicest family in the world.

Yikes, Lee, I'm glad you're okay!

I'm lost in the wilds of Home Depot kitchen planning. Someone take the hand-scraped faux-distressed bamboo flooring away from me...

But bamboo flooring is an excellent choice. Durable, beautiful, and sustainable! (Memories of searching for flooring come rushing back...*twitch*)

After careful self-experimentation, I've determined that prescription diuretics make my feet and hands swell and give me neuropathic pain in my feet. Having discontinued them, the swelling has gone away, I can walk again, and the pain is receding away from my knees and out through my toes, leaving the way it came in. They also gave me horrible acid reflux, which is also gone now. I can't wait to tell my doctor that the diuretic worked in exactly the opposite way it was supposed to. He already thinks I'm an alien.

I am doing absolutely nothing today. Well, ok, I went to market, will do a quick run to buy my friend beer, swim and then go to his house for dinner, but other than that, I am parking on the couch. The weather is demotivational.

Tartlets...tartlets...the word has lost all meaning...

I am always so disappointed when other people don't say that!

But bamboo flooring is an excellent choice. Durable, beautiful, and sustainable!

Man, my parents' bamboo floor looks like crap now. The finish is scraped up, I think, so you can't get it super clean-looking.

Man, my parents' bamboo floor looks like crap now. The finish is scraped up, I think, so you can't get it super clean-looking.

Ooh, noted. Good to know!

After I put the expensive no-VOC vinyl plank flooring in my kitchen and one bath, and then discovered it shouldn't be cleaned with bleach solution, I felt like a dummy. You're supposed to buy the companies' special cleaning formula! The hell I will. I'll clean it the same way I clean any other vinyl floor, and if it disintegrates, I'll replace it with the regular vinyl sheet flooring I wish I'd picked in the first place. I told my sister I was tempted to just put vinyl sheet flooring throughout my whole house and be done with it. She sympathized.

My parents' bamboo floor looks good (they put it in, let's see, when we went to Glacier? So 7 years ago?) but it is a small area doesn't get a lot of traffic most of the time.

I am annoyed that the allergies I expect to hit in the Spring and am resigned to starting in February actually seem to be ramping up now. Or this might be a more seasonally appropriate cold. Either way, I do not think I will be getting much done today. I have a fluffy bathrobe, a couple of types of broth, and plenty of tea. And magazines and a fire. Could be worse.

Today is a good day to stay inside....I nearly bit it twice in the liquor store parking lot (ice unde the gravel, I suspect) and on the way home had to detour because it looks like a water main burst under my primary intersection. The pavement has swollen to a nearly 3' high volcano, about 6' in diameter. And people were driving over it! That's a sinkhole forming, a damned easy way to lose your car! There are already multiple 311 calls in, but I can't believe people on that corner have dry basements...

Will have to remember alternate routes this week. Can't see this will be a quick fix.

It's entirely likely that my mother cleans the bamboo floor with whatever, when it's supposed to be specially treated. Who knows!