More Cleaning Up, Organisation & Storage -- & LAPIS!

Lynn McLean came again yesterday morning to organise me and help me with cleaning. I should have taken before shots, but oooooh, boy, nasty. The kitchen table was piled a foot deep with the detritus of pricing and restringing beads for the show -- gee, a week and a half ago. I was and still am typing like a mad fiend since and hadn't touched the table. Here are pictures of my (temporarily, I assure you) tidier place.

Yeah, yeah, a plug for Royal Canin -- Max developed massive hair loss all over his back and sides in an extremely bizarre pattern in the spring, and instead of plunking down several hundred more dollars for a second round of blood tests, the vet suggested changing his food first. Now, I had noticed that my previous dog food company had changed their bag designs, deleting the particular dog food version entirely that I had been buying and feeding Max with no problems for, oh, ten years maybe? After the bag change, he started losing his hair. Maybe they also changed the formulation, d'ya think? I shudder to think where the ingredients came from and I wonder if Max was the only one to suffer this type of hair loss. In the meantime, I had had him shaved for the summer so it was very easy to see that within a few weeks of starting him on the Royal Canin his hair was starting to grow in and now there is only one tiny half-baldish spot remaining. I am amazed.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my almost pristine table at 5:42 a.m. this morning...

Doesn't take long, does it? 8:15 a.m. after photographing lapis beads...

My somewhat cleaned up bedroom. No before picture. It was grotty to the Max... Poor Max, gets blamed for everything. Silly I guess to have a white duvet with a mostly black dog living in the country, no paving, just mud as far as the eye can see. The little staircase I'd bought at a flea market, and were stairs for the owner's late dog to get up onto their bed. Alas, Max is too gimped up for them, so I keep my mattress on the floor and now the stairs make for even better bedside storage, far more useful than the table I had there previously.

Now we're back to normal. This table had been almost completely clear about three weeks ago.

But this is still pretty tidy and working well for me. Note there are ever-more bins...

Oh, all right, just a couple of lapis pictures. This is pretty much the true colour of all the lapis here in this first picture. As with my turquoise pictures, I'm finding it almost impossible to get the blue right. It is a true dark ultramarine with plenty of pyrite.

And Max again, just 'cause he's so beautiful...

Thanks for looking!