one thing leads to another

You know how you decide to do something, but before you can do it, you have to do something else, which in turn, makes you have to do something else until your life looks like a huge Rube-Goldberg contraption? That would be my life. As you know, we live in a really old house. Our living room has the original painted wood floor. I painted it blue before we moved in. I chose blue because that's the color the old wood floor in my grandparents house was and it brought back good memories. Old houses should just have blue floors, I think it's a rule. But, that was back in July and the floor was swelled from humidity. It's now March and the constant heat running in the house has dried out the wood and we've got some pretty big cracks where the wood meets in some places. It makes sweeping and scrubbing kind of difficult. I mentioned to hubs that we should probably caulk up the cracks while they're there so the caulk can contract and expand with the wood, making my floor a little easier to keep clean. He bought some caulk and yesterday and today, there was some major crack caulking done. Of course, now my blue floor has white caulk lines all over it.

Not only has my blue floor taken a horrific beating with all the critters running around, the moving of furniture and the remodeling, I've realized that as much as I love my blue colored floor, blue doesn't match the color of dirt very well. So I've decided that as long as the white crack lines (that sounds drug related, doesn't it?) need to be painted, I should do the whole floor and I'm going to paint it a different color. Dirt-colored. But....before I do the floor, I might as well do the walls first. I painted the living room trim before we moved in, but I left the walls alone. They were kind of a dirty tan color and while I wasn't crazy about it, I had more important things to worry about last summer, so they stayed as they were. But if I did the walls now, before doing the floor, I could paint without needing to use a drop cloth, so it was obvious what I needed to do. I wasn't sure what color I wanted to paint the room, but then I remembered the random gallons of paint we've got piled up in the basement. Someone gave hubs a bunch of paint they'd had made up, then decided they didn't like the colors, so they just passed them on to him in hopes that he could find a use for them. Since I'm not too picky, I've already used one gallon to paint the laundry room and pulled out another gallon today to do the living room. The color was called Georgia Peach. Not something I would have chosen, but it's not too bad, it's more of a slightly orange tan than a peach, and it brightens up the room a bit, besides, it was free and free is always good. We've still got a gallon downstairs called Bluebird and it is beyond obnoxious. I don't think I'll ever get desperate enough to use Bluebird on anything that I'm going to be exposed to on a regular basis. Maybe if we ever have to paint the basement or something. Now, I've got to get some floor paint so I can finish this room up and have something else crossed off my list. Painting a floor is not going to be easy when there are 3 cats and a dog wandering around the house. I'm going to have to use my imagination and come up with some kind of barrier.

Human error RE smoosher thing

Okay, I found the missing smoosher thing, turns out I moved it into a different cupboard a while ago and just forgot. So, we can't blame Adeline the ghost for that one. We've been having the mysterious flying plaster again in the kitchen though. You know, where the broken chunks of plaster from the unfinished kitchen ceiling come flying 2 feet out into the room at random times. It hadn't been doing it for the last couple weeks, but it started up again. I got sick of cleaning it up, so I risked putting my hand up into the dark, dirty unknown of the ceiling and I pulled all the loose plaster chunks out that I could and threw them away. Hopefully, this will stop the random flying plaster issue. Hubs lost his glasses last week. He only uses them for night driving and usually keeps them in his truck. They were MIA for a while, but he found them today, lying under some junk behind the freezer in the basement. Why were they under junk in the basement when, to my knowledge, hubs has never done any basement night driving? I have no idea. But, since they were down there, I thought maybe our other missing stuff was there too, so I searched the basement with a flashlight. I'm sad to say I had no luck, no Mouli, no salad bowl cover or PoC dvd. I did notice that we have a really nasty old basement though, but I already knew that, so no surprises there.

All last summer, when I was busy working outside in the garden, canning veggies and all that other busy summer stuff, I kept looking at the kitchen cabinets, wanting to paint them. But, being busy, I knew painting them would be a winter project. Well, the beginning of winter I painted the upper cabinets but ran out of steam before I could do the lower ones, so I just left them. This week, I realized that it was March already and I still hadn't done the lower cabinets. It funny how you get so used to things, you don't even notice them anymore, like the fact that my upper kitchen cabinets are a dark melon color and the lower ones were bright yellow - also that there's no drywall on my kitchen ceiling and hasn't been since we moved in, but that's a whole 'nother story. So I got down there and finally got my lower cabinets painted this week and I'm really pleased with the result. The melon color looks awesome with the turquoise walls. Someday, when I find the camera, I'll take a picture and post it here for you so you can see see the wonderfulness of it. Now...if we only had a ceiling. Hubs did hang another sheet of drywall up there today, which brings us to 2 sheets. At the rate we're going, 1 sheet hung every 6 months, I estimate my kitchen will have a complete ceiling sometime in the fall of 2014. Then, it'll be on to the bathroom, which also doesn't have a ceiling.

missing smoosher thingy

The black hole of Adeline the ghost apparently strikes again. The wooden smoosher thing that smooshes tomatoes, berries, etc, through my cone-shaped metal collandar is MIA. It's been lying there, unused in the unheated storage room upstairs in my house all winter. I know it's been there, I see it every time I go in that room, which is a couple times a week. But today, I was going to use it to smoosh up some dried bread to make crumbs and do you think that thing would be around? No siree-Bob. So, unless it shows up fairly soon, I'll ad it to the ever growing list of things that are mysteriously disappearing at my house and never show up again. Did I tell you about the blue lid on the salad bowl? About a month ago, we took the lid off, set it on the counter and put the salad bowl on the table for supper. We ate, cleared the table and the cover was gone. No one was even in the kitchen, we were sitting in the dining room eating, and the dumb thing disappeared. We searched the garbage, under the fridge, inside the fridge, all over and over a month later, the dumb thing still hasn't shown up and, in the meantime, I have to put a plate over the top of my salad bowl. Even hubs is starting to see my ghost stealing logic. He looked at me the other day, and dead seriously, asked where in the world I thought Adeline was putting this stuff. So yeah, it's getting annoying.

Yesterday, Angel #4 participated in the solo & ensemble and did wonderfully. Turns out she had 4 different performances, 2 drum solos, a musical solo and a musical duet. She scored 1's (the highest score) in all 4! Due to the chaos of the day, hubs and I only managed to watch 2 of her performances, 1 drum and the duet and we were impressed. We had no idea we had such a musically talented daughter. The duet literally brought the woman sitting next to me to tears and a couple hours afterward, a man came up to #4 and told her what a beautiful job he thought she did - which I thought was a nice thing for a perfect stranger to do.

We got quite a bit of snow over the weekend and I have to say, after the brown winter we had, it's actually kind of nice to look out the window and see the world covered in white. People were sure happy to finally have a reason to get their snowmobiles out of the garage as well. It's been a pretty pathetic winter, snow-wise. Things are going to warm up in the next couple days and all the snow will be gone again, but at least we had it for a little while.

Snow will not deter those hungry for fish

Hubs was really hungry for fish tonight and I was not in the mood to cook, so we decided to head out to a Friday night fish fry. The problem was that it was snowing to beat the band. I wasn't going to drive in it, but if hubs was willing to brave the weather, I would gladly ride shotgun. Now I'm stuffed full of broiled haddock, we're back safe and home and life is good.

Tomorrow is the area school's solo ensemble. It's being held at our school this year, so hubs and I are volunteering to work. We were assigned cafeteria duty, which was fine. Angel #4 has 3 different performances, a solo, a duet and a snare drum solo, and our volunteer assignment only overlapped during one of them, so we could watch her performances in the first two. But now, because of the weather, they've already arranged for a 2 hour delay, but our work hours are the same, and now they overlap all 3 of her scheduled performances. Hopefully it won't be too busy and we can sneak out of work to watch her.

In other exciting news, I'm going to be a chicken mom. We got an incubator and 21 fertilized eggs from the coop yesterday and they're now percolating in the downstairs bathtub. I chose the bathtub as their incubation spot because it was the one room in the house that it would be easy to keep the animals out of, yet was in a place where I'd see them easily and not forget to turn the eggs twice a day. We should have babies on March 21 or 22. With any luck, it'll be an early spring and they'll be able to go out in the barn by the middle or end of April. We've had baby chicks in the house before and they are really noisy, so the sooner they get outside, the better.

NOOOO!! Not Davy!!!!

Davy Jones can't die, he's a Monkee! I watched The Monkees waaay back when I was just a little thing before I can even remember. My mom used to tell me how it was my favorite show when I was only about 3 years old. Now Davy's dead. RIP Daydream Believer

it's raining and crappy outside, I'm in no condition to think of a title

Well, Adeline is still holding the PoC dvd hostage. I did a complete clean of the living room yesterday, the last place the dvd was seen, and I didn't come across it, though I vacuumed up enough dog hair to make another dog or two. Short of taking every book out of the book case, I think the living room can be declared PoC clean. Our house isn't that big and it barely has any closets or storage space in general, so it's pretty hard to believe it got stuck in a random drawer or something, not to mention I checked all the drawers, random and otherwise. I've got one more library renewal left after Monday, so I've still got a week and a half for it to turn up....though my Mouli is still MIA, so I'm not real hopeful.

Tanya & Jeanie, you need to check out Retro Renovation, the link is on my sidebar. It's all about restoring (or keeping) mid-century homes in all their glory. They encourage pink tile bathrooms and boom-a-rang print laminate counter-tops. That site is my internet crack, I love it. I don't know about Adeline not liking the house's new color scheme, if the previous paint jobs are any indication, she was a color lover as well. Our laundry room, unheated entryway porch thingy and our stairwell were painted pepto bismol pink. I'm not a real fan. The laundry room is now a sage green color. I've got the stairwell painted a cool looking lime green as far as I could get it without scaffolding, so it's only about 1/4 of the way painted. The porch is still pink, but I'm hoping that maybe this summer we can insulate and drywall it, making it a heated porch so we can put snow boots, coats etc, out there next winter. When I was prepping my kitchen walls for painting (they were a poopy brown color) I pulled off some old wallpaper behind a shelving unit and discovered that at one time, the kitchen walls were a dark turquoise color about 4 layers of wallpaper ago. So, it's just going back to the beginning. I've got the cabinets about 2/3 painted with the melon, the rest are still the bright yellow they were when we bought the place. So, if it wasn't Adeline, someone in my houses past was as big a color freak as I am. Now, if we can only get the fake blue marble wallboard off the bathroom walls, all will be right in my world.

Enough already, knock it off, Adeline

Adeline the ghost has struck again. Saturday morning, Angel #4 & I went to the library. As I was collecting library material to take back, I saw the Pirates of the Carribean pt 2 dvd sitting on a bookshelf. #4 had checked it out a few days earlier and I debated whether or not to bring it back to the library and decided against it since she hadn't watched it yet. While at the library, she picked up the other 3 PoC movies and when we got home Saturday afternoon, we were going to have a PoC film festival. BUT, movie #2 was NOT on the bookshelf where I last saw it. Hubs & WE were home all day, but neither of them saw it, we've searched the house from top to bottom (there were a LOT of dog toys stuck under the couch) and we can't find it. I even double checked at the library to see if I returned it by accident, nope. So, once again, I'm blaming our stuff-stealing ghost, who also hasn't produced my missing Mouli yet either. I hope the movie reappears before we have to pay for the stupid thing. It's bad enough if I have to pay for lost library materials, but it's insult to injury that it's the worst of the Pirate movies, so if it does show up, we're the proud owners of the Captain Crap Sparrow of PoC movies.

In addition to mysteriously missing DVD's, I also had something else weird happen today. I did my time on the treadmill, went upstairs and took my shower and whatever else I did. When I went to put the treadmill away, I noticed that a big chunk of paint was scraped off the window trim. I spent 45 minutes on the treadmill looking out that window and the trim was not like that when I was treading (?) and I saw no evidence that something had fallen against the wall or anything else that would have made 3 layers of paint come off a window. Once again, I'm blaming Adeline.

Many people have "To Do" lists they leave lying around the house. I was looking for something on hubs desk this morning and found a piece of paper titled "To Don't List". There was nothing on the list, which brings me to believe that there's nothing my husband won't do.