One step forward, one step back

Or, a nice round of Musical Chairs in my future.

So, I've spent a lot of time this week trying to get the living room to a state where I won't be embarrassed with the HVAC guy comes for the annual furnace checkup tomorrow. It's starting to shape up actually, helped by moving a little bookcase into the living room for all of El Burrito's books, and boxing up some figurines (Breyer horses, to be precise) that had been under the coffee table for lack of space. It was looking presentable last night, until I saw the forecast in the newspaper. Predicted low last night was 33 degrees. Which means that the houseplants had to end their little porch vacation, and move back inside.

Given the fact that I've got way fewer plants this year than I did last year, it's odd that they seem to take up more room. Part of that is because I've got fewer "safe" places for them. This time last year, El Burrito wasn't even crawling yet, so the plants were okay. Now he's walking, and flat-out insisting on trying to walk through spaces that he won't fit through. Joy joy. And thanks to the bonkers floor plan, there's only three rooms that can be easily closed off without turning the condo into a cave. Two of those are the tiny bathrooms, with no windows, and squat for counter space. The third would be what was supposed to be El Burrito's room, but which is actually mostly the "other" room where everything gets shoved, with his crib and things in 1/3 of the room. It's easy to close off, and doing so doesn't block off too much natural light. Closing off the other bedroom makes the place feel like a tomb, since that's the window where most of our natural light comes from.

So right now, there's a sad-looking Chinese evergreen sitting on top of the washing machine, and the avocado and Madagascar Dragon Tree in the bathtub. All of those will have to be moved to another location, because the Furnace Guy will need to wash the filter off in the bathtub (it's a permanent filter), and he has to basically sit on the clothes dryer in order to get to the furnace, which is shoe-horned into a cranny beside the dryer. Everything else, I guess, will be wedged onto a plastic shelf in front of the window/door in El Burrito's room. And that means that I've got to come up with a place for the things that are currently on that shelf. And find out where the sticky stuff all over the amaryllis came from. I don't know where the redwood will end up, though. It's too big for a shelf, poor thing, but at least it survived the summer. It needs repotted badly, but it's already in the biggest flowerpot that Walmart had, and I'm hoping to move before I have to repot it. Then I can stick it in one of those half-barrels and be set for a while.

On other topics, someone sent me this picture from the fires in California. Gives me a chill.