Big Ass Task

The biggest task of my life begins! Irregardless of when I end up living in my family's home in Riešė, I have to begin its upkeep now, lest it face dilapidation. My wife and I are the only two contestants in the Olympics of spring cleaning this year; here are some of the events:

• Fixing Both Driveways
  Driving into the yard is impossible: one gate must stay closed because the concrete gate posts are cracked and in danger of collapse; the other gate is locked because someone did a terrible job of paving the driveway, and apparently you can no longer drive off of the pre-fence part onto the inner-yard part without damaging it.
• Taking Care of Septic
  There is an option for us to get connected to the local sewage system which has just been installed in our neighborhood. However, the cost is steep, and while I'm sure it's necessary, at this time there is some ambiguity as to whether we can get connected and still maintain our well, which we need; city water is too expensive, and of course shitty. Unfortunately, Silvija doesn't know much about it, and she's the only person there who doesn't give me a headache. Intriguingly, we had to emty the septic tank twice in two months with nobody living in the house: seems like somebody's sabatoged the tanks so that we'll be forced to sign on to the sewers.
  
• Reorganizing Basic Storage
  Too many books and movies! Wait, let me rephrase that: not enough space for the books and movies. And that's as it is. When I move in someday I'll triple the movie collection and increase the library by 30%. That makes it sound like I'm an illiterate, but I'm an above average reader: almost everyone's an illiterate compared to my voracious reader of a mother, though (Probably noone ever timed her, but I'm sure she read 100 pages an hour: if she had a few hours free she was done with your average novel). The question is what to do about it. The answer we've come up with is this: move all the books out of the office (office = tv room), since they're not in bookcases anyway, but simply in cabinets that used to be unnecessary. Now they are necessary for the movies. But we'll have to buy a few more bookcases--we would have had to buy another one or two anyway for the overflow from the current bookcases, plus we got a half dozen boxes worth of books from her office. And for anybody who know what a pregnant wife is like, if we're going to do this goddam it we're going to do it in an orderly fashion: we have to sort the books by topic and arrange them by height (I still say arrange them by author--my grandmother was a professor of librarianism). We emptied, dusted, and refilled one bookcase that way this weekend...it took two hours and we ended up with several piles of books on the floor that have no place in the bookcase: nonfiction, poetry, literature, children's books, and books on education. If you're wondering what did make it back into the bookcase, the answer is cookbooks (at least fifty), horticulture magazines, history books, and reference books, including a surprising number of books on mushrooms. One of the reasons it took so long is we came across so many books we wanted to read and had to take a look at immediately.When we move there we could read for an hour a day for ten years, I bet.
  
• Improving Liqueur Storage
  The liqueur cabinet: she needs reorganizing and a backup storage area. I went ahead and combined my liquor cabinet with my mother's, they were just two compartments of one chiffonier. I removed the wine to a little standing wine rack I got for Christmas, and removed duplicate bottles. I have one question to everyone who ever had a drink at our home: wtf were three open bottles of Metaxa doing there?! They each had about one centimeter of booze left, incidentally. My mother was wont neither to drink nor to waste space. Did these belong to my siblings, or their booze bag friends? Wine is now kept in an adjacent rack and duplicate bottles are kept...wait, I'm not telling you...who knows who the Riešė thieves are? They've been in the news lately. It might be one of you!
• Repairing Household Heating
  Several of the radiators are broken and the heating system is catastrophically wasteful. As it is, I couldn't possibly afford to live there paying for the utilities. This spring we'll hire a specialist to tell us how to heat the house more efficiently. There are several options, some more expensive than others, but all paying off in the end. One really interesting one my wife told me about is an furnace that runs on logs and the natural heat of the earth: it's buried deep enough to harness natural heat; as a supplement it has a log burning system that you add a few logs to no more than once every 48 hours, that's how long they burn for in the very low oxygen furnace. It costs about $12,000, but as it is now, the anual oil bill is about $2,000, so the furnace would pay for itself and be almost free afterwards in six years. We'll see what the pro says.
• Paying the Bills
  We got a notice that our telecommunications bill was overdue. The phone/internet bill was automatically paid from my mother's bank account, which has since been blocked. I went to their office in Klaipeda to rewrite the agreement we have with them. Guess what? That'll cost me fifty lits, plus they'll raise the internet rates because they don't have such low rates anymore. What! Well then, I'll just cancel the service and order it anew, how about that? That'll cost me 200 lits. What! Alright, then I'll just keep paying my mother's bill until I move there and want to increase the internet speed. Okay. Now, I heard anyone with land line internet can get public wireless access for 11 lits a month. No, they can't issue that access to a deceased person. I said, "wtf do you care, I'm paying for the internet service, and I'm willing to pay you more, and you don't want it? You won't let me pay you more?! It must be pretty hard for you guys to make a profit with all the hurdles you place before you customers!" Wanna know what her reply was? "Hey, you just be glad we allow you to keep paying the bills without rewriting the service agreement." This is the Lithuanian customer service mentality after a decade of every dumbass I know and his brother getting a bachelor's degree in business management: just pay us and be glad we don't fine you for doing it.
• Removing the Unnecessary
  To end on a less caustic note, my wife went through all my mother's clothing to separate what fits her from what doesn't. She looks very nice in a bunch of the outfits, though she looks older; I'm not sure if it's the style of the clothing or the memory of my mother wearing them. Most of the clothes don't fit, though. She thinks they'd be too small even for Liepa. We're not sure what to do with them. We have maybe one relative who can fit in them, Jūratė, but what do we do with the rest? Almost none of the shoes fit either my sister or my wife. I'm a pack rat, so the idea of discarding perfectly good clothes is anathema.