Big scary projects

This week is the week of tackling big scary projects:

• The bathroom drain. Our bathroom drain is specially designed to trap the maximum amount of hair in a position where it can neither continue down the drain nor be reached by ordinary means. Up until now, I had not dared to try to get the drain apart myself, but with postpartum hair loss, the problem was reaching critical proportions. With only a little damage to the tub finish (matches the scratches from the blinds at the other end of the tub), I managed to get it apart and back together all by myself. And now there is a drain setting that actually drains.
• The pumpkin. I figured it would be a waste to let fall pass without trying to process at least one pumpkin. I escaped with minor injuries, and the pumpkin is good and pureed. For full details and to offer your own helpful squash insights, go to the Martha blog.
• The leaves. I have little previous experience with leaf-raking, since a) I lived on a farm; b) most trees there were evergreen; c) I had lots of brothers; d) they had lots of powered equipment. But I've decided to put in a little leaf-raking exercise every good day this week, after bundling D1 up so she can sit in the sunshine and watch me. Now I have a large mountain range of leaves along the property line, which the beagle from two doors down likes to burrow through. I'm hoping they won't blow away before I can bring myself to shove them down the hill (over the next-door condo's spanking-neat lawn) to the street, where DOB tells me some beneficient creature will come and pick them up.
• The office. This really is the project which the others are more-or-less excuses to avoid. Particularly dreaded is the pile in the corner, the pile of papers and miscellany that has been sorted out all the previous times and left to sit because we didn't know what to do with it then either. Paper sorting is only fun if you have a relatively low stumper-per-inch ratio. The ratio here is very high. But I hold fast to my vision of a tidy office and slog on.