As you may recall, Susan is getting ready to leave everyone and everything she loves and relaunch herself in North Carolina. She approximates that 75% of her current possessions will not be invited to come along and has been casually shedding what she owns. There is always an open box into which she may deposit a rice cooker or her entire collection of dinner plates, minus two. If you say you like her earrings she may take them out of her ears and hand them to you. Or, she may just invite you in and ask do you want this or this or THIS?. 

She has adjusted her soft departure date from January to February, March the latest. Definitely not April. By April she is going to be someplace brand new. Until then she is trying to keep the little things in her house working without having to pull out any cash. Specifically she's referring to a sliding screen door.  She's already replaced her front storm door, an unavoidable task for which Cousin Greg was pressed into service (read the exciting story HERE) but she just needs to squeeze a few more months out of the screen door. It leads out back to her deck & sees a lot of daily action. On the weekend that thing might get slid back & forth forty times. 

The trouble began with the door getting knocked off the track and not replaced correctly. Susan marked, in pink nail polish, the exact spot at the bottom of the door where the wheels & the corresponding stationary track should meet so that one only needed to align them to achieve success. 

Anytime Susan returned from a trip during which one of her wonderful keyholding nieces has stayed at her house to care for the dog, she returned to find the screen door scraping atop the wrong track. Small children named KiKi are also known to extend their arms & push through as if they were Frankenstein looking for a way to the backyard. Even the dog has figured out how to nudge open the screen door & knock it on top of herself.

Susan has no such issues with her sliding screen door. If she feels the slightest resistance she looks downward, matches up the two pink spots of nailpolish & gets on with her day. Unfortunately, now a structural problem has developed as the wheels get shoved up into the framework removing Susan's ability to slide her door anywhere. Usually one to give up immediately, instead our plucky heroine embraced the challenge and jury-rigged a pretty effective solution using a bit of plastic & a hammer. 

Hooray for Susan!

Also, as she's done in the past, Susan is going to observe November's NaBloPoMo (National Blog Post Month) and post every day during the month. Once again she wants to remind her modest fan base that they should not expect quality during this period, just quantity.

Susan's got lots of stuff to tell you but she wanted to make sure you caught her current domestic situation; 
Susan is ALONE. She is the solitary human resident of her house, just her &  Lucy the four legged squirrel killer. 
Susan is no longer raising her family, she is one hundred percent nobody needs her ALONE.
Does she miss having her family sitting at the dinner table like they did every night for 18 years? 
Duh, yes. 

Susan is nothing if not adaptable. 

Being home without any hope of someone walking in and interrupting her simple train of thought is really kind of FRIGGIN' AWESOME. 
Underpants only dress code, awesome.
Cleaning the bathroom & finding it still clean the next day, awesome.
Cooking or not cooking, awesome.
Sleeping alone in her kingsize bed, well that's not so awesome although she likes the option of piling everything she's reading over on the empty side. Susan still sticks to her side of the bed which surprises her because back in the day she'd spread out across its entirety if the husband was not available to take up his half.

Susan is still talking about the husband.

It's been a while since she's calculated how long she's endured without him; 1042 days. This number, while impressive, is only a portion of the 20 years, 2 months & 15 days they were married. And that's not even close to the full amount of time they spent running around with each other prior to their legal union.

Anyway. 

Without her kids in the house Susan has to do all the chores that she would have previously pawned off on them, like taking out the garbage. However, this small domestic drudgery has already rewarded Susan with being in the perfect spot at the perfect time to watch Mrs. Drunk lurch up her front steps and fall through her screen door into the house. This was followed almost immediately by the detached screen door sailing through the air out onto the front lawn.

Susan actually had to put her hand over her big mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

If you have a minute CLICK HERE or HERE or HERE or HERE to read a few stories about Mr. & Mrs. Drunk.