23 June 2009

Birthday feast

Tomorrow is Libby's birthday, but we're going tomorrow afternoon to stay at my sister's so we can go to Lagoon (amusement park, about 140 miles from here) on Thursday. So tonight is Libby's birthday feast! She wanted mashed potatoes, sausage gravy, and corn on the cob.

I'd never done oven-roasted corn before, but it was so easy I doubt I'll ever do anything else from now on. No soaking required. Fantastically delicious. Easy. Shucked right at the table as we ate it (silk everywhere, ha!).

Happy 12th birthday, Libby Loo!

----------------
Now playing: John Denver - The Eagle and the Hawk
via FoxyTunes

Beetle the Bard

The Tales of Beedle the Bard (Harry Potter) The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling
My review
rating: 4 of 5 stars

The kids got this book for Christmas, and they all had read it by December 27. I wasn't into it then, for whatever reason.

Picked it up last night when I decided I was going to reread the Harry Potters and book 1 was MIA. (Down in Jackson's room, it turns out.) I really enjoyed this little book. The stories are cute, even if they don't have wider applications for Muggles than educating us on wizarding lore; and Dumbledore's commentary is pretty great. Definitely worth 40 minutes of my time.
View all my reviews.

11 June 2009

17 Years

Coldplay wrote a song about my walls, because they're all yellow. The painting is done! The only things that remain to do in the kitchen are hung up in process, so I suppose today is a house cleaning and kitchen-reclaiming day. We're almost done, yay!

Today is our anniversary. I got Blaine a pneumatic brad gun and other rad tools, and he got me a beautiful new kitchen. And some flowers.


And note the yellow wall! :) Here's a flashback to seventeen years ago:


----------------
Now playing: Coldplay - Yellow
via FoxyTunes

10 June 2009

Bottom of the ninth inning

Last night we got a lot of cupboard doors on. I still have plenty of little projects and one big one for today, so I can't show you the whole thing done. But I can give you this little teaser of before and after. :) (Click to see bigger pictures.)

Kitchen: before

Kitchen: after

09 June 2009

WHEW!

By 6:45 a.m. Blaine, Christian, and Jackson had to be at our church for cub scout day camp. (Blaine's the cub leader.) By 6:45 a.m. Libby had to be at a different church for a week of girls' camp. Emma left yesterday morning at 7:45 for the fourth year campers six-mile hike-in, where they have to pack all their own food and stoves and tents and everything, and she'll hike into the girls' camp this morning.

It's 7:02 and I feel like I've already done half the day.

More kitchen painting for me today—and it's just me and the three littlest here. :-/ How do you think that's going to go? Two more days of painting, and I should be done. *crosses fingers* All the knobs and handles are on the freshly painted cabinet doors, but I need longer screws for the drawer pulls. Blaine's put up all the beadboard trim. It's really coming together, and at least the counters are somewhat functional again. :)

----------------
Now playing: David & David - Welcome to the Boomtown
via FoxyTunes

05 June 2009

It's always darkest right before the dawn?

Taking a night off and going to the movie really helped my psyche. I'm back at it today with none of the pressing weight of yesterday. I'm alive and kickin', and I'll do the best I can as quick as I can and be thrilled with the result.

It also really helped that when I got back home the tile grout was completed (good man, B!) so today I've been able to move back into my kitchen a bit.

Would love to do a picture post to let you all see what I'm doing, but I really should take time out for uploading and constructing. Not this morning. So I'll just store up the pics and let you see 'em all next week when it's complete. But for now: tile done! *ticks checkmark*

----------------
Now playing: U2 - No Line On the Horizon
via FoxyTunes

04 June 2009

Getting desperate

I know I'm only a week and half in on this kitchen project and I should have more stamina than this, but booooooooy am I getting tired of living in the disarray. And booooooooy am I tired, period. B gets home from work about 7:30 and then we start our big project of the night, wrapping up around 11:00, midnight, or even 1:00 and dragging our butts into bed. Then Macklin, who has a timer on his wee bladder, comes into my room at about 5:00 a.m. needing to go potty (which is a two-person task at that time of morning, and I'm the second person) and about half the time I can't get back to sleep for thinking of all I need to do. The other half of the time I get back to sleep, only to be reawakened with the alarm at 6:00 when Blaine gets up, and I go make him breakfast and lunch and then start my working day with the little tasks that don't require his strength or expertise.

So I'm simultaneously physically working all day long on things like painting (which requires me to clean up all the equipment completely when I stop, even if I've painted as little as 20-30 minutes), sanding, scrubbing surfaces to prepare them for paint, etc. And I'm juggling seven children, some of whom can help me, some of whom create more problems than they solve. And I have to stop three times a day whatever my momentum might be to make meals. And I have to try to keep a torn-apart kitchen tidy enough (!) to cook in and eat in, despite it being Project Central.

Now I have this pressure from my mortgage company. My appraisal didn't come in as high as we wanted it to, so we're going with a different loan—an FHA, which requires additional things evaluated. So the appraiser has to come back and check things like whether the furnace works, whether we have adequate water pressure, whether there are cracks in the foundation. Somehow, for some reason I'm not understanding at present, my kitchen being torn apart and in an unfinished state will affect whether or not I get this loan, despite the fact that he's already appraised the house and he's not doing a full reevaluation and there's no way the value will go up even if I've improved things in the last two weeks. If they're not going to give me extra points, why will they dock me?

So even though I'm working constantly on this and burning out, I now have to push even harder to get done before the second appraisal or whatever we want to call it. And I have to solve all sorts of little problems, holes or missing trim or a light fixture we've partially removed—things we've already begun because hey, it's our house—because now the cosmetic things matter to our funding.

And it's dinner time, so I'm stopping again.

But I'm taking tonight off to go to the drive-in with Emma and Christian and see Star Trek. They've worked hard too, and they deserve a little reward.

I just hope I can stay awake through it! *yawn*

----------------
Now playing: Jethro Tull - Thick As A Brick
via FoxyTunes