Three Years Ago

Taking a pause from the chaos to update you, my faithful readers. (More about the why of the chaos later.)

PS - this Breyer's Fried Ice Cream Overload is amazing. I don't know why they don't pair the cinnamon and ice cream flavors more often. I like it. And it was on sale.

I'm not even sure if I still have any readers after the last month or two. We have reached the "Ah crap, summer's almost over and I HAVE to get this done before cold weather gets here" portion of the summer.

PS - there will be lots of PSes in this post.

So three years ago this week marks the anniversary of - not Hurricane Katrina, but something far more important in my life - (and I said MY life, not that it wasn't important, it just didn't impact me personally) - buying this house.

PS - I bet the media loved having the "Hurricane Gustav" excuse to not give the Republican National Convention the coverage it deserved. And don't even get me started on how I feel about the way that journalists are jumping all over the news about the GOP Vice Presidental Nominee's teenage daughter being pregnant.

Anyways. We've been here three years. And we are just now doing all sorts of projects that should have been done THREE YEARS AGO. We didn't have a baby then. What did we do with all of our time??

Earlier in the summer we cut out the ugly cedar trees blocking our view of the road.

Then we pulled some obnoxious stumps.

Just this last week, we finished removing a stretch of fence that was sagging and ugly and a pain to mow around. I know, it looks better in the picture with the fence (probably due to the fact it was a gorgeous sunny afternoon rather than a cloudy muggy morning), but trust me - it looks much better now without it. More open.

PS - while going out to take the "after" pictures, we encountered a mama crawdad (crawmom?). We're assuming it was a mama anyways, due to the fact she was carrying about a thousand baby crawdads on the underside of her tail. And I thought that crawdads breathed through gills anyways - why was she walking through our yard??

This last Saturday, Paul knocked down the shoddy treehouse in the elm behind the shop. It was one of those that looked like it had been built out of scrap lumber by someone who wasn't an expert with a hammer and nail (you know - like me). We weren't sure how stable it was, so to reduce the temptation (and risk of injury) to young visitors, we got rid of it. He also pulled a row of fenceposts through the middle of the behind-shed yard that had no fence on them. I helped. (And by helped, I mean watched. And by watched, I mean cat-called. He's such a stud.)

Now, to the chaos.

I am sitting at the computer desk, which is in the middle of the floor in the front room/office/computer room/fireplace room/den/we don't know what to call it room. For all of the three years we've been here, I have wanted to paint this room red. But painting a room red is a bold move. It can't be too orange (like a tomato), and it can't be too purple (like wine). But it's hard to tell by a little 2-inch square sample how it will look on an entire wall. So I put it off. Because I didn't want to go to all of the effort of painting only to not like it. And then I would be too cheap to buy paint to re-do it, so I'd have to live with not liking it.

I'm not good with major decisions.

But this week, I decided to just DO IT. I bought tape to tape off the edges, Mom came over, and we got started. We washed down the walls, which we haven't done since we moved in. In fact, because of the time constraints on our actual moving in, we didn't even do it then. So it's probably been 5 years since they've been washed. And you can tell... Now. Instead of the dingy gray-ish tan I thought they were, they're actually a cream color. Amazing. But still badly in need of a paint job.

I went outside to get the spackle (joint compound) to patch all the staple and nail holes and cracks in the walls, only to find that there is mold in the compound bucket and it looks (and smells) like poo. No idea why it did that, but there is no way it can be used. I even tried scraping it off the top, but even underneath the spackle is streaked with black. Gross.

Well, Nathan is on hour three of a nap (amazing), so I should probably get on it and wash the walls down again.

Or.....

If I'm going to be spackling, I'll just have to wash them down yet again. So I think I'll hold off and do it after I go in to town to get more "mud."

So maybe I'll go take a nap.

PS - Adorable Nathan pictures coming soon. And pictures of the Red Room of course. (Ooh! Maybe we'll FINALLY have a name for this room!)