Where did the time go?

First off, I want to thank you for your kind words, Jeannie, it's a little overwhelming if I think of my little boy in such a scary place, so I try not to think about it. Then, when I do think about it and start to feel helpless, I just think of those poor mothers who live there and are trying to raise their children in such horrible circumstances and it puts everything else into perspective.

On a cheerier note, I've been really painting up a storm lately. It all started a couple weeks ago when I decided that I'd been avoiding painting my kitchen long enough. I had intended to just do the trim on the walls, so I took out my 1 1/2 inch brush and got to work. Well, one thing led to another and I just kept going until I'd painted all my kitchen walls with that tiny little brush. It's now an awesome shade of turquoise. Well, after my walls looked so cool, my gross cabinets looked worse than ever. We'd taken the doors off the upper cabinets before we moved in because the previous owners had removed the ceiling and only replaced half of it before giving up. We took out the cabinets, ripped out the nasty looking boards they were putting up for the ceiling and got as far as hanging 2 sheets of drywall up. We put them on the north side of the room so we could replace the cabinets there, but never got around to putting the doors back, figuring it would be easier to paint them if they were off. BUT, I'd been avoiding the whole painting thing, so I had ugly yellow, doorless cabinets since July. Well, that's changed now. I sanded them down and put primer and 2 coats of paint on over the course of 3 days. By then, I was sick of painting for awhile, so only the upper cabinets got finished, the lower ones are still yellow while the uppers are this great shade of dark melony orangey-pink (salmon??). I retired from the painting business for a bit, but then hubs and I went to the REStore on Saturday. The REStore has got to be my new favorite place to shop. Saturday was 50% off day. We got upper cabinets for the laundry room, more linear feet than what I've currently got in my melony orangey-pink kitchen cabinets, all for under $20. Before we could hang them up though, I needed to get the laundry room painted. Someone who lived here at one time a long time ago, really loved the color pink, it looked like Pepto Bismol exploded in my laundry room. NOT attractive. I searched through my collection of random paint that's piled up in my basement. I found white for the ceiling and trim and a sage green color for the walls. It looks great, but after painting the room from top to bottom, then helping hubs hang the cabinets, I was pretty pooped out. Today, I put contact paper on the shelves and put all the laundry room stuff that had been sitting in boxes since we moved in onto their very own shelves. Old houses are cool, but they sure are short on storage space. But slowly my little castle is catching up to the 20th century (getting it up to the 21st is waaay beyond its capabilities).