Saturday, August 25

Wow, I can't remember when I last had a day to do *nothing* in--and actually did it. I didn't do any exercise worth mentioning. My headache still lingers from this past busy week. My back decided to do some spasming for some odd reason. (I made a massage appointment for a week from now.) The weather was fairly cool for August; I even wore jeans and a t-shirt with sleeves today. Altogether circumstances just made me happy to hang out, even though there wasn't anything on tv worth watching. There's only so much Property Ladder I can handle (five minutes, maybe).

Breakfast: back to soaked oats, strawberries, and vanilla yogurt. I felt sorry for myself (roll eye) and allowed myself two mochas. The second one was decaf. As though that redeems me. For lunch I reheated the leftover beef tomato soup from yesterday and had two pieces of wholegrain toast (margarine) and the last two banana muffins. At supper I had a large tossed salad, two mini-meatloaves and some French fries (more rolling eyes). I currently have my breakfast oats soaking for tomorrow and am debating what, if anything, to have for evening snack. (Had three Wasa crackers with cinnamon/splenda fat-free cream cheese...mmm)

I made one trip to town to get drinking water (for my water cooler), look for storage units at second hand stores for the kids (didn't find anything I could fit in the car tomorrow that was worth buying), and scout out peaches for canning. I wish they didn't cost twice as much at the local fruit stands as they do in the grocery store. That is seriously irritating. I haven't decided what to do about it yet. But I want to can peaches again this year. I'll do them mostly in pints so Jim can take them up to the apartment. Quart jars of fruit tend to rot in the back of the fridge these days. I also want to test a small batch with Splenda instead of sugar, as the added calories have kept me from enjoying canned fruit the last couple years. And I must say that home-canned fruit has WAY less sugar added than store bought anyway. But still.

We've started to talk again about working on the house and what we hope to get accomplished before next spring. Obviously finishing the kitchen is at the top of the list. Heck, it may be the WHOLE list, the amount we get done some months. My boss has offered me a stack of rough-cut cherry planks that Jim thinks would be enough to make the countertop for the peninsula. We've gone back and forth on this for six months. It's my fault. I want it to be ALL tiled and at the same time I want it to be ALL butcher block. Um yeah. Even I can see the problem with that. I believe the butcher block is winning as even with the temporary countertop in place (two lengths of melamine shelving), I'm turning to that spot for most of my prepping and sandwich fixing. So the remaining countertop needs doing, the electrical needs doing, and the upper cabinets need to be installed. Some of those will be a royal pain, also. Can I hope we will be done the kitchen before Christmas?

Every single night I get up once, twice, or even three times to use the bathroom. Getting a bathroom installed on the second floor seems to me to be quite a high priority. Unfortunately we need to build a dormer in our roof before that happens. Fall is the driest time of year for ripping apart the roof, but will we still be in the middle of working on the kitchen? Is it advisable to rip apart the roof even if the kitchen isn't done, just to catch the best weather--and have more of the house in limbo for longer? We're such procrastinators I hate to do that. But I sure don't want the roof off in January!

I spent a couple of hours sketching house and yard plans this morning. You'd think I'd have that all done, being as we've actually started the renovating. Yes and no. We keep thinking of cool new ways to do things, and today's sketches include some of the stuff we talked about in our many hours on the road this past week. Jim will be home Sunday evening and I can show him then, see if he thinks it will work as well as we thought. If money were no object we could do some amazing things. Ha.

I've also spent time digging through the back corners of the FlyLady site, trying to get re-motivated. Yesterday's marathon cleaning was the old Val. And it worked! I seem to be the kind of person who gets really gung-ho when needed, but honestly all the little FlyLady steps in the past couple months made the marathon much easier than ever before. So I'm trying to get my brain back in the groove. I was complaining a bit ago that it's harder for me to do the FlyLady stuff when Jim's schedule puts him at home. Yeah well, what an issue that is, eh? Most gals have folks in their life to work around. As FlyLady says, you can get a lot done in fifteen minutes. More if you stop sitting around and whining about it, I imagine.