Painting

The good news is that I like the new color in the dining room and so does Mac, it really brightens the room up and makes the crown molding stand out.  The bad news is that after 2 coats of primer and 2 coats of white paint it looks like the bottom half of the wall may need another coat.

We thought we'd be through today (Mac, bless his heart is helping with the painting), but it's 3 o'clock and we're calling it a day.  

Didn't get home till late last night, and I do mean late.  It wasn't that we kept dancing, we only danced 2 sets, but we went to eat afterwards, and it took forever to get our food from the snarly cook (the rest of the staff is great, can't be fun working with someone that hateful---she was throwing dirty looks everywhere and making ugly remarks), then when we got it it was inedible.  The meat was hard as a rock and the french fries were cold.  That cook went off duty,  YEAH, and our waitress Teri,who always takes good care of us,  took the food back and the regular cook made us a great meal.  But that all meant that it was about 1:30 before we got to bed, so tired, tired, tired!

Hopefully all will be done tomorrow, and no more projects until after the first of the year.

Fighting With the Classics

For the last week or so I have been fighting with Pachebel, in particular with his Canon in D.  It's not that I haven't played it before, oh so slowly, it's that I've decided that it's time I began to learn it properly.  I don't mean memorize, I don't memorize anything, I'm too old and too lazy.  What I mean is that I'll learn the pattern of it so I can play it smoothly and not need to read every single note because I'll know what's coming next.

Well the bass part was easy and the treble coordinates well (which means my brain likes the pattern) with it.  My problem is the finger extension required.  I have little stubby hands with even smaller stubby fingers.  I can reach the notes but my fingers aren't yet comfortable doing so.  That's why instead of playing Pachebel we've been fighting and that's a shame because I think this is such an incredibly beautiful piece of work.  It was originally written for 3 violins and it is wonderful when played by them.  The strings draw the notes out so much longer.

But I'll keep plugging away and maybe my cat will stop moaning when I play it for the 19th time in a row.

Finally

It's finally all done, the fireplace arrived today, we put it together and the results are wonderful.

Of course, it makes the rest of the upstairs look shabby as h**l.

Sitting in the Garden Waiting for the Georgian Rain

It looks like Ida is finally coming ashore in Alabama.  Late for a hurricane, but she's not that anymore, not even a tropical storm, just a low, but my oh my, a lot of rain is forecast.  We won't get the worst of it, they're saying only 2-4 inches over the next couple of days.  But after the rain we've had this year that's more than we need.  I don't think the ground has ever completely dried out, we've seldomly had to to water and that's unusual for here.

The chance of rain is 100% for today  and Wednesday, so I guess it's time to get the paint brushes out again.  I need to prime the dining room and considering how dark the paint is I'll probably have to prime it twice.  The plan is to prime the bottom half of the room and then paint it white, then  paint the top half a pretty shade of blue (not a color I ever use, so I hope

 I've picked the right color).  Right now it's white and the bottom is , well it's hard to say what color the bottom is.    I thought I'd like it, but I hate it and after having had Mac paint this room 3 times it's now my turn.  This is the color I've picked,  so cross your fingers.

Closet Wars

We bought three cheap bookcases and this afternoon, if Mac gets them put together, I will do battle with the closet.  I stuffed them full on Friday, they erupted twice on Saturday and they must be tamed.  I have my whip and chair, so here's hoping.

Quality Control

Several months ago we bought a new Sony CD/DVD player to use with our upstairs tv, but we didn't open it right away.  Well this week, as we put our Bonus Room back together we got the new player out of the box and set it up, very slim and modern looking.  Only one problem, there was no remote with it.  I figure someone forgot to put it in the box when it was shipped from the factory, Mac figures someone lifted it from the box, but then he's much less trusting of his fellow man than I am. 

 It has been so long since we bought it that neither of us could remember where we bought it, either Walmart or AAFES (Army PX).  If we could find the receipt on it that would tell us, and we do save  all receipts like that,  we just don't save them all in the same place.  So instead of fighting with a store about something we'd bought months ago I contacted sony.com and they had loads of remotes, all I had to do was give the model number of my missing remote in order to buy a replacement.  But of course I don't have the model number, so I sent them an e-mail, and in less than a day I had a model number, which of course matched none of the remotes on their website.  So I ended up doing business the old fashioned way, I called, placed my order and in a week to 10 days we'll have a remote.  In the mean time it's like old timey days, we operate the DVD by hand, how quaint.

Reconstruction

The bonus room is done, except for putting stuff back in it, and that's going to be a long process because what was in there doesn't fit any more.  We've taken out the entertainment center that housed our old tv and about a million books  and all that stuff has been dumped, and I do mean dumped, into the two upstairs bedrooms.  

I've spent the morning cleaning out a closet in one of the spare bedrooms and attempting to move some of the books into there.  The plan is to buy some cheap, really cheap, bookcases, put them into the closets and store the books there.  In the mean time I can't stand looking at the bedrooms, and our daughter is coming for Thanksgiving, so I'm hiding books, and a ton of other stuff. 

Both rooms look like an explosion took place.

We have a 32 inch tv, small refrigerator, and a microwave all looking for a new home .... SOON!

No!No!No!

My neighbors are putting up Christmas decorations!  It's bad enough when the stores do it before Halloween, but now my neighbors are putting them up the day after Halloween.  I remember when stores first started putting decorations up  before Thanksgiving and people complained, is putting them up before Labor Day coming?

I absolutely refuse to put Christmas decorations up till after Thanksgiving, of course then I go hog wild, but that's a different story. 

I've been surveying my  family to find out what they want to eat for Thanksgiving (it's down to ham or prime rib, we're not a turkey family), not what they want for Christmas.

My house was decorated for Halloween, now all the little "scare" bears are put up, but the autumn/Thanksgiving things are up till the end of the month.  I LOVE Christmas, I love buying for others and watching their faces as they open their presents, I love the smell of Christmas, I love the feelings that Christmas brings and having my family together, but I refuse to be rushed into it.

So thank you to all the Veterans out there who've served our country, including my husband, be careful that you don't get ran over in the rush to Christmas.

HD TV

It was bound to happen, cheap though we be, we have finally joined the 21st century and now own an HD TV.  We bought a 37 1/2 inch Vizio to go in our bonus room.  We hadn't planned on doing it, but the old tv just looked God awful so we had  to.

DirecTv, who we've had for years, is coming out tomorrow to give us a new satellite dish, receiver and DVR.  We'll be ready to view the world, in High Definition.

Think TV will look any better?

Halloween

Halloween has gotten sad.  I remember being a child dressing up in a home-made costume and watching the window waiting till it was dark enough to head out in search of candy.  When we were young my sisters and I went together and then as we got older we went with friends, I don't remember our parents ever going with us, not as many weirdies out there then.  And no one checked my candy for foreign objects or tampering, we'd probably eaten a ton of it before we ever gotten  back to the house.

Now parents take their kids Trick-or-Treating, examine all their candy and as often as not find something else for the kids to do instead of Trick-or-Treating.  Many churches and neighborhoods hold Fall Festivals instead.

Fewer and fewer kids go out into the dark night in search of candy, we only had 3 come to our house and now I have to find something to do with the candy I bought in order to keep me from eating it.  If I were a kid I'd have earned all that candy and enjoyed every bite of it, now we'll just pass it on to a friend with kids.  It's sad.

Oh, the Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men ...

 We had it all worked out, new floor, new table to put the tv on, pack up some books, room will look beautiful.  Great plan, good in theory, but somehow it just didn't work out.  

The floor is mostly done, one thin row plus quarter round to go, and looking incredibly beautiful, a new table had been purchased (and delivered) to set the tv on, and that's when it began to fall apart.  

First of all the new table was much too pretty to take upstairs and stick a tv on, so we decided to take the bookcase that we'd  had made out of solid wood a couple of years ago and put the tv on that.  That sounded ok, would have looked ok, but we have one of the old boat anchor tvs that are deep and heavy and it just plain wasn't going to look good in the room unless we stuck it in a huge surround that camouflaged it. So  the more we  thought about it, we realized  that though we'd have liked to wait for it to die (the tv) a natural death, that we'd have to  replace it with a flat screen tv. So that's what we did and it looks so much better.   We got a beauty,  37.5 inches,  and it's now sitting upstairs on the bookcase.

Then becuase we'd  swung the bookcase around from the long wall (so it would be in front of our chairs) it had been on we now had an empty wall to the right of where the chairs will be. We thought about how we use the room, knowing we use it  a lot in winter  and that we usually use a small heater up there, because  it's better to heat one room instead of the whole house.  Our last heater had died quietly last year and so we knew we'd need a new one, but Mac had a brain stoke and decided that we ought to  put a fireplace in instead, that would be a much better look than a puny little floor heater.  We had put a fireplace in our bedroom  a couple of years ago  and we love it, so that's what we've decided to do and I ordered it today and it should be here in a week or so.

So what started out to be a new floor and tv stand has now turned into a new floor, new tv, new sofa table (which is now going behind the coach downstairs),  new rug and a fireplace, which is bad, but not quite as bad as the couple whose review of the fireplace I read.  They liked the fireplace so much, and it made their old furniture look so bad, that they sold their old furniture and bought all new.  

I think we're through or at least I hope so.