Flooring is almost finished, and it looks great. Today, the last ten feet of hallway and two small closets get floored, and all the quarter-round will be installed upstairs. Basement was done last week.

The cats are now in residence, and Watson is settling in well. Isobel is still skittish and tense, spending much of her time under the bed or the sofa. Their baskets and feeding station are in the basement until the stampage of workboots and pneumatic hammers is over, and right now they are locked down in their bunker until the flooring crew finishes for the day.

All cooking is a darned nuisance while we adjust to less than half the work surface we are accustomed to. Laundry takes place in what I have decided to call the "laundry hole", a corner of the basement that has been closed off from the main hanging-out area. Drip-dry clothes have to do their dripping and drying in the second-best bathroom or on a folding rack in the bedroom; the laundry hole is just barely big enough for the washer and dryer, and a crappy old shelving unit where all the cleaning materials are currently stowed.

Repairs on some of our battered old furniture are well under way, as the Mennonite communities around Stratford are full of people who build and fix furniture, so the skills are fairly thick on the ground around here. The time to get all this done is now, while everything is all of a chaotic doo-dah; once a bookcase or a desk goes into service, all loaded with stationery and pens and books and work-related doohickeys, it takes a major system failure to get it out of commission again.

The next thing to do is buy some new IKEA bookcases, not the easiest project as the nearest IKEA store is in Vaughan, some 90 minutes away on the 401. Kitchener has an order centre, but even that is a substantial expedition; the round trip is about 75 km. The IKEA bookcases we brought with us are comparatively new, but some of them required major re-assembly. Have I mentioned lately how much I hate chipboard construction? Give me honest wood every time.

Himself just went downtown to visit the Legal Aid office in search of information about getting on the Perth County panel and earning some dosh. Apparently, despite its bucolic charms, Perth County has plenty of the problems associated with despair and isolation; right now, crystal meth is a Big Thing.

Bell Canada's internet service is DSL only, which sucks if you're accustomed to fibre-optic broadband, so I'm on the hunt for something better. I also have to book an appointment with the allergy doc in Kitchener for my magic needle. Consequently, I have to find a quiet spot (hah!) in which to get on the phone and stay there.