Again.

My Dad's in the hospital again.  I'm really worried.  He's really not feeling well at all.  Please pray and send warm thoughts. 

The Extra Terrestrial.

Hollywood's version and our version.

Bargaining.

My daughter has gotten so good at this painting thing. Last night I asked her how much she'd charge to paint our bedroom all by herself and she said "One hundred dollars. Or fifty." She really drives a hard bargain there, doesn't she? :-) I may take her up on it, but then I'd help her ... still, while we are in the painting mood, maybe we should.

I'm going to give that some thought.

Done?!

We are finished painting the walls and the countertops!  This picture shows a little bit of the tan colored wall, a bit of the white wall we were covering up and the blue countertops.  (In my defense, when we built the house and I chose these countertops, I was choosing the lesser of several evils.  There was nothing I liked.)

The countertop paint smelled horrible, but if it works and stays on, I'll forgive it.  It certainly looks better.  In fact, it looks like chocolate, which isn't what I was going for (I wanted black, but it wasn't available in the countertop paint!), but I like it.  Hopefully, it won't make me crave chocolate more than I already do.  (Is that even possible?)   In this picture, it's still wet looking and there's still painting tape up and the outlet covers aren't on.  I didn't do any panoramic shots of the whole room, because it is a total mess.  

Anyway, we're done and just need to decide what to do about the floor.  It's another one of those builder choices where I didn't like any of them.  11 years later, I could not hate it more.   As you can tell, I left the wallpaper border up.  I kind of wanted to take it down, but kind of didn't want to work that hard, so I left it up.  It's kind of country, but hey, we are too.  (Also lazy.)

Anyway,

we're done!

Ahh.

Working on it again today.

We're getting there.  I'm so excited to be getting this done, you just would not believe!  I'm so glad my daughter is such a trooper and so good at painting.   The boys are helping too, but since the paint on the ceiling incident, have not had rollers in their hands.  Actually, the oldest has avoided painting all together preferring to do other things to help.  After this is done, maybe I'll be able to concentrate on home school planning, but right now, I'm obsessed with getting done.  It's funny how that works. 

Finished for the day already.

We did the one wall, 2 coats and then we ran out of paint. We'll need to go to Lowes and get another gallon. The good news is that now we can move the microwave and the homeschool shelves back where they belong. That will help the morale around here a lot, getting everything out of the middle of the floor. The boys taped off the cabinets today, took down the curtains and did a few other things while we girls painted, so that area will be ready for us when we are ready to tackle it. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in a couple of weeks. Who knows? Probably sooner rather than later, although if we get the furniture moved back, the drive to finish, finish, finish, will be a bit less.

I'll get the paint this afternoon and then we'll see how we feel tomorrow (at least one of us has a sore arm and knees that do not want to climb in chairs anymore!) We're supposed to go see the Harry Potter movie some time this weekend, but probably Sunday rather than Saturday, which would give us all day Saturday for painting.

Another day, another wall?

We haven't started yet.  We're tired from yesterday.  It's really cloudy and overcast which kind of makes a person lethargic for some reason.  Anyway, yesterday we painted the biggest wall with no cabinets on it, the first coat.  So today, we need to do that wall completely again and then we'll only have the 2 walls with cabinets.  I'm hoping they'll go pretty quickly.  I'm ready to be done.  The mess is getting to me.   When I get done with this one, I'll still have 2 rooms in my house that need to be painted.  One is the master bedroom, which has 4 huge walls with no cabinets on any of them and the laundry/mudroom, which is always full of junk.  Neither one will be any fun.  I don't know when we'll tackle those.  Next summer and the summer after that?  Maybe we will and maybe we'll just decide we like builder's flat white paint.  Hey, we've lived with it this long. 

As I was typing this, my daughter, who is my number one helper, said she's ready to start.  A nice breakfast of fetticini alfredo with chicken and broccoli and she's raring to go.  Maybe I should try some of that stuff?

Progress.

My daughter actually put the second coat on that wall last night, so it's done, except for the very top that she can't reach even when standing on a chair. I'll get that today and then we'll move onto the other walls. My boys will probably be helping today too, because they've discovered that if they're not helping with the paint, they're doing "other duties as assigned" and they weren't really fond of the chores they were assigned yesterday. LoL.

I'm excited about the project now. It's funny how just getting started changes your attitude about things. Now I'm pushing to get DONE!

One day, one wall, one coat.

Yes, I realize it looks awful. The wall was dark blue at the bottom and white at the top and neither got covered well with the first coat, but anyway, we got started. At this rate, it will take at least 8 days, 4 walls, 2 coats each. I'm not going to focus on that though, I'm going to focus on the victory of finally getting started.

Getting something done.

Maybe today is the magical day I'll actually get something done.  It could happen!  My husband has been doing great on his to-do list this summer, getting a couple of really big projects done, but I still haven't.  I'm thinking of sliding a couple of my things over onto his list.  Do you think he'd notice?  ;-)

Good day.

We had an event with our larger homeschool group today, the one in which I am a leader for the teen group.  We had a water day with squirt guns and water balloons and a water balloon slingshot.  The kids also started just throwing coolers and buckets of water on each other after a while.  It was a hot day and a good way to cool off.  They had a lot of fun. 

Meanwhile, the moms of the group sat in the kitchen and planned activities for this group through December.  We're trying to do one educational and one social activity each month.  I'm excited about this group.  The kids really seem to be hitting it off and the moms do too, so it's all good.

In other news, I kind of volunteered to do the music for VBS.  It's probably going to be quite entertaining.  I can sing, but all those complicated hand motions, forget it.  I'm pretty much always 3 steps behind.  I'll get 2 or 3 right, then get all excited about that and miss the next 5.  My daughter is going to help me and she has a gift in this area, thankfully, so it should be okay. 

Why?

I posted on Facebook yesterday about how much I hate my job. It was kind of a spur of the moment post. I didn't think about it before I posted it, but it's true, at least at the moment. I know I quit another job this year to take this one back and I don't hate this one as bad as that one. But losing my familiar accounts has been really difficult for me. I had those same accounts for 8 years. I only had to type a couple of work types on those accounts, leaving me pretty rusty when it came to all of the other kinds of reports. Now, I've got 2 different hospitals with 2 very different formats, new doctors, new place names and worst of all, report types I haven't had to do in 8 years. The other day, I had to type a multivessel bypass of the leg and I realized that I'd forgotten a lot of the leg muscles names. It's just really hard for an old dog to learn new tricks. I'll be okay in a couple of months. Or maybe 5. Or 6.