The Mice Are Away, So the Cat Will ... Scrub Floors?

Above: The quilt I'm currently quilting. It's called Sit-In.

Speaking of islands (as I was last week), Will is off on his own island vacation. His friend Henry spends the summer on Harker's Island, which is an old fishing village in a part of North Carolina known as Down East. If you want a great shrimp burger or a wooden duck decoy, Harker's Island is the place to go. Henry very kindly invited Will to come visit for several days, and Will left this morning.

While Will's gone, I'm going to clean the floors in his bedrooms. Yes, that's right--Will has bedrooms, plural. He started out with just one, but it's a room that's flush against the walk-in attic and gets super-hot in the summer. Many years ago we started moving his bed across the hall into my (mostly unused) study when the weather got hot. Come mid-September, we'd push the bed back into his old room, which had cooled down by then.

At some point, Will permanently relocated to my old study, his former summer-only bedroom. Soon after, I found a pretty nice Ikea table by the side of the road and installed it in Will's first bedroom to make him a nice study area. Two summers ago Will and I painted the walls a very mature and sober dove gray. I found a futon couch frame on Craig's List for a hundred bucks, bought a futon and a small dark gray shag rug, and--voila!--a guestroom/study was born.

Will almost immediately moved back in. Yes, it was steamy, but the room looked so good he just couldn't resist. And somehow instead of being a guestroom/study, the room became part of Will's upstairs suite.

He actually keeps his study pretty clean. The bedroom? Not so much. One of Will's summer projects is to really, truly weed out his old tee shirts and socks and underwear from his dresser so that he can fit the clothes he actually does wear inside the drawers.

One of my summer projects is to empty all my old junk out of the closet and the desk drawers. I want Will to start high school with a clean and very organized slate.

To that end, I'm sprucing up the floors in both rooms. This involves hands and knees cleaning and then the application of mop-on floor polish. It will probably take three coats, but I just did Jack's room a month or so ago, and it really makes a difference. Not exactly like you've had the floors redone, but close.

I hope I'll get both floors done before Will comes back on Saturday. It's still so much easier to get work done in the boys' rooms if they're not around.

Here's something fun: The Man and I are going to pick Will up from Harker's Island on Saturday, and on Friday night we're going to spend the night in Kinston, NC, home of the somewhat famous Chef and the Farmer restaurant (and halfway between here and Harker's Island). Have you watched A Chef's Life on PBS? It's all about this restaurant and its wonderful chef, Vivian Howard. You can check it out here. I'll give you the report when we get back!