Done today

-All the furniture that was going to be stripped has been
-The sanding has begun
-Vicky's two big walls have been painted
-One teenage temper tantrum successfully dealt with
-Meatloaf is in the oven for dinner

Still left to do:
-Bring the dresser from the middle of the driveway back into the garage
-Finish cooking dinner
-Collapse with a big glass of wine and a chick flick. Tonight: The Notebook. Thank you, Netflix!

See y'all tomorrow

Stripping

Furniture--two antique beds and a dresser. For the record, I am not a professional. I don't get paid to strip.

It's slow going and not much fun, but at least it's not hot today. It's a whopping 61* and sunny; my brother would say it's perfect fishing weather. The bad news is I'm on my last sheet of 100 grit sandpaper, and I still have a headboard and a footboard left to do. They may get started with 120 grit and be shorted a sanding. The last thing I want to do right now is go back to True Value for more.

We're also painting Vicky's room; allegedly one wall (the big one) is done, but I left her to paint while I went down to work on her furniture, so I haven't been up to check. Whatever is up there is most certainly dry by now. That could be bad.

My ankle is better now, but it put me behind a couple of days and I haven't gotten near as much done this week as I'd hoped.

Time to get back to it.

Gracie strikes again!

A friend of mine is getting ready to move, so I went to help her today. While walking in her yard, I found a hole and twisted the crap out of my ankle. I walked it off; I knew she'd freak out if I was really hurt. Honestly, after a minute or so, it felt fine.

A couple hours later I had a little twinge of pain.

When I got home, another hour after the first twinge, it was throbbing. I sent Vicky to root around in the medicine cabinet; I was hoping for some left-over Demerol, even when I knew there wasn't any. She found a bottle with two prescription strength Motrin. (Vitamin M for you military folks.) The Motrin dulled the pain enough that I can hobble instead of writhing on the bed in pain. I have been alternating heat and ice and keeping it elevated, I can wiggle my toes, and there is no swelling or brusing. My neighbor is a fireman, and he thinks it's just pulled tendons. I'm inclined to agree, but it hurts like the dickens, and I only have one Motrin left.

Needless to say, we won't be making it to church tonight, and the Pizza Hut guy will handle dinner.

Me in Florence

Thanks, Tambo, for posting the Lego link! That was fun!

At the end of the rainbow...

Courtesy of Aunt Shirley!

Liquid Sculpture

This is a very cool site! It's all photos of drops of various types of liquids. I'm not sure I'd have ever thought to do that, but the pictures are very cool.

I'm ruminating over my NaNo novel for this year. I've done a few notes, and I hope to be notecarding in a few days. Right now, I'm in the 'what all can I do to make my characters miserable' phase, in which I imagine the worst case scenario, make it worse, and burn my fingers while I'm cooking. *L* I sometimes get a little too absorbed and temporarily lose track of reality! The mustard worked, by the way. This is the beginning of the fun part. Slogging through edits is usually where it becomes work, unless writer's block kicks in, which is what I'm trying to avoid.

All I have to do now is not think about torturing my characters while I'm playing with open flames or sharp objects; loss of fingers makes it tough to type.

Why??!

How is it that a teenage male who has previously shown signs of higher-than-average intelligence forgets to put a new trash bag in the garbage can three days out of five? And how does he have the audacity to be irritated when I make him pause Stargate to put a trash bag in so I can throw away a dripping coffee filter?

Freakin' Stargate junkie.

It's his dad's fault.

Just giving credit where it's due. I'm going upstairs to read about murdered children; it's preferable to watching Stargate or compulsively checking e-mail.

Just call me Gracie

I burned my fingers cooking dinner, so I'm giving Dad's home remedy a try. Currently I'm typing one-handed; the other has two fingers and the thumb doused in mustard and wrapped in wet paper towels. Sounds crazy, I know, but the buddy that told him about it got his local ER to start treating burn victims this way. So far it seems to be working.

Speaking of lost minds...

I had mine at some point. I'm just not sure when or where I lost it. Maybe it's in one of the 25 boxes that never got here from Italy. We're still trying to figure out everything that was in them.

I had an epiphany the other day. Eric and I have lived in eight houses since we married. That's eight houses in eighteen years. Of those eight and eighteen, four houses and ten years were on base in houses that were too small by at least 1/3. I've battled clutter for eighteen years, but it didn't occur to me until recently that every room of every house was multi-purpose. We had living room/dining room/offices. You get the picture.

Now, finally, we have a house with enough space, and it dawned on me that every room doesn't have to be multi-purpose. There are times when the purposes will overlap, like when I have sewing to do and it's convenient to leave my stuff on the dining room table. My plan is to get things into the rooms in which they belong and find homes for them so that I won't have to battle clutter quite so much. This will be combined with donating and selling things I don't need. It will be a prolonged process, but now I have a plan, and for me, that's half the battle.