is this thing on?

We’ve moved!   Well, mostly. Last year, moving into the loft was a traumatic experience for me and I did not enjoy it. Maybe it was the combination of moving all of our stuff on a busy street, up too many stairs, to an open loft where there was stuff piled everywhere and there was nowhere to get away from it all. This time, I was pleasantly surprised and the moving experience was 100 times better. I highly recommend moving only 4 blocks away, having your parents help, and hiring a nice, young man fresh out of college who majored in music and needs money. He was a lifesaver. More specifically, he saved my life and did all my heavy lifting. {Uh oh, I think I’m about to get long-winded…} I read something this past year about figuring out what your ‘thing’ is. I wish I could remember where I read it so I could do it more justice but I’ll do my best (it might have been about how introverts tend to have a 'thing'). Your ‘thing’ is the element in your life you are...

I learned a valuable lesson this weekend:  Installing ceiling tiles and painting a boat-ton of wood paneling is a lot like climbing a 14er (mountains over 14,000 feet high). Actually, it might be harder. We got our first access to the house on Thursday night. It was very exciting and as soon as we got off work we picked up some Jimmy John’s and went over to frolic. Then we started prepping for the projects, covering the floors with paper and taping windows. A 'before' shot of the living room. Ah! My eyes! Could they have put in any more different kinds of wood?                               Here was the plan: Friday : I had to work so Brian was going to put up crown molding and start putting up ceiling tiles Saturday : Finish ceiling tiles (and caulking them) and start priming the wood walls Sunday : Finish priming and paint the ceiling Monday :  Brian would pain...

I have a little advice. Let’s say one day you decide to open a hospital and a medical center in a small town. If you put them on the same piece of land, right next to each other, with buildings that look identical in design, they’d better be connected. If you don’t connect them, you end up with patients who start off at the medical center and then have to have a procedure at the hospital, and your patient thinks the check-in station at the medical center is the main check-in station for the hospital too because it’s a small town- how resourceful! What happens is that patient goes to the medical center to check in, explains why she is there and they check her in and send her to the lab where she sits for 30 minutes before someone finally figures out that she’s actually supposed to be checking in at the hospital; and by this point she’s very late for her appointment. That may or may not have been my experience this morning (it was) and I was so embarrassed about my mi...

**This is an indulgent, whiney post. You are excused.** Do you ever have one of those days? I know you do. It was kind of a rhetorical question, mostly just to get the post started. I had my “one of those days” yesterday and today I’m beginning to think it might turn into “one of those weeks”. I really just want to go back to bed and stay there for a few days. Yesterday was Monday. In the wise words of The Mamas & The Papas: Every other day, every other day, Every other day of the week is fine, yeah But whenever Monday comes, but whenever Monday comes You can find me cryin' all of the time I was tired and I hadn’t slept well because I had apparently squeezed a bottle too hard the day before which caused my hand to ache all night long (Reason # 2,968 getting old is for the birds). Let’s take a moment to re-cap: ·          It was Monday ·          I didn’t sleep, th...

**I don’t have any pictures for this post. For today, words speak a thousand words; not pictures. ** Our house buying journey started when we signed the contract in April. For the first 2 weeks after that I couldn't sleep because my head was buzzing with all the things I wanted to do. I was so excited and happy, I felt like my heart was going to explode. As you can imagine, that got old really fast. I had to learn to push all that excitement deep down so I could get through each day without dying. But that didn't mean we stopped stalking the house. It became a nightly ritual after dinner to take the dog on a walk so we could walk by and make sure it was still there.  Yep. Still there. Still not ours. In order to help my brain feel like some sort of progress was being made, I put a countdown app on my tablet only to gasp in horror when I entered the date we were working towards and saw '135 days' appear. 135 days?! That’s an ETERNITY. Will I even sti...