Making hay while the sun is shining

Aunt B arrives in 7 days, and in 8 days we're off to Lithuania for two weeks. In addition, some other planets have aligned all together to light a fire under my ... to get things done. Namely:

- Flight back to philly for the december holiday booked using USAir miles that were reaching their expiration date. They put me on Lufthansa going out and USAir on the return.

- Ordered new contact lenses which I can leave in all the time for up to 30 days. As an added bonus, they were ordered on Friday and arrived by DHL on Monday. If nothing else, I cannot fault the efficient Germany transport network. The very sweet 80 something year old granny in the building signed for and accepted the tiny package as it came during the workday. I live in a strange utopia of an entire apartment building of very nice Germans.

- Ordered a small countertop dishwashing machine from Plus. The chore I most despise in the world is washing dishes, it even ranks lower than toilet cleaning for me. I am finally biting the (cheap) bullet and buying an improvement.

- Cleaned out the car as I need to drive around American work colleagues this week. (OK, excluding the trunk so far.)

- Cancelled my Newsweek and Economist in advance of them rolling over in October.

- Charged up the handheld vacuum in anticipation of the "last weekend before Aunt B comes so I need to do major cleaning" weekend.

- Scheduled D to come over to put together the TV table I picked up a few months ago from Ikea.

- Started to clean-out some of the dead balkon plants.

- Am around 75% done with some logistical work paperwork that must be done every 6 or 12 months in relation to staffing. It's the kind of paperwork that there is no positive for doing it, but there is a negative if it does not get done.

- What's still on the list to do? A heck of a lot more and then some.