My Blog is Worth...

My blog is worth $3,387.24.
How much is your blog worth?

Cribbed from s-p, whose blog, according to these yahoos, is worth nothing. I suspect that their monetary value is based on how often one blogs -- s-p, having a real life (unlike yours truly), rarely blogs.

In other news, the visit with Father Costin went very well. We got the place tidied up sufficiently to look like civilized folk; he went from room to room, blessing the house (I didn't open the door to the porch, which is still full of boxes that we are gradually throwing out, and I didn't let him down into the basement -- he just "threw some holy water down there," as Jim requested), and then we all sat down to lunch. As he was blessing the food, I happened to glance over towards the corner, where I have a small sideboard, and spotted...

...six cans of Campbell's Soup that Jim had put there and forgotten to put away.

So much for gracious living. ;-)

Update to this post: I forgot to note that Father also blessed the outside of the house, something no priest had ever done before (probably because at the time of the usual house blessing, there's about a foot of snow in the backyard). I wash a load of clothes every day, and on Thursday, I wash my "whites"; and since we don't have a dryer, being Crunchy Cons, my laundry hangs in the back yard. So there's Father, traipsing all around the house, including the back yard, and there's my laundry, keeping time to "When Thou wast baptized in the Jordan, O Lord." At least the underwear was decorously hidden behind the T-shirts.

We had a nice visit, and the food was good. And he left his Trebnik book here, so I guess that subconsciously, he wanted to come back. (But I brought it over to church the next day.)

I can't help wondering what the nuns next door made of this guy in a black robe sprinkling water all over the place, including on their hedges...

General Nuisance

When my kids were little, they were big on Richard Scarry books. I can't recall which of the many it was, but one of them featured a minor character named General Nuisance (I seem to recall him saying, "Won't you please get up, Mr. Soldier?" at reveille. Yeah, right.)

Well, I have the feeling that General Nuisance is about to visit our house, only it isn't really General Nuisance who's coming -- it's mild-mannered little Father Costin, who's coming to bless our house on Thursday. Nothing drastic, this is just his way of introducing himself to his parishioners and getting to know them better, and I think it's very sweet of him to want to visit everybody outside of the normal visitation cycle at Epiphany.

Here's the rub: Jim and I don't do a lot of entertaining, so our really-very-small house gets cluttered easily. All it takes is one or two pieces of paper, and, "Oh, I'll take care of this later," and inside of 24 hours, the place looks like a bomb hit it. Now, I cannot clean around a mess -- things have to be tidy before I can see the grime -- so there's also quite a bit of, well, grime around.

And Father C. has a reputation for being immaculate.

And Jim learned his cleaning skills in the military, where they did white-glove inspections once a week, and used to strip the floors and re-wax them on a weekly basis.

You see where this is going?!

I am very sure that my mild-mannered little priest would be horrified to think that he was causing so much Uproar in my house, but on the other hand, this is what happens when you get so busy with taking care of an old man's affairs that you Let Things Go. The kitchen table is still cluttered with various kinds of paperwork, and I remember my in-laws' house looking very much like ours does now, full of paperwork that they didn't want to lose track of (these people have never heard of, hello, FILING PAPER?!?!?!), so I shouldn't be surprised that their son has adopted their crummy habits.

So we will get our house in sufficient order that a civilized person can enter it and not run screaming to the Board of Health that he's about to come down with MRSA as a result of having set foot in our house. And it will promptly get as cluttered and grotty as it was before we cleaned it.

Sigh.