Thinking Travel

Updates from our Labor Day Weekend Home Improvement-o-Rama…In three days we:

• Painted the trim and closet doors in the guest room and re-painted portions of the ceiling. The trim was easy enough to paint but the paneled doors turned out to be a royal pain. I initially had this grandiose notion that I’d repaint all 16 of our paneled doors (both sides). Now I’m think I’ll wash them down and be done with it.

• Pulled up the smells-like-cat/dog carpet and pad in preparation for painting the floor to seal it before the new carpet arrives (who knows when that will be). The old carpet is now on our deck and we’re really hoping we don’t have a late-summer storm because it’s hard enough as it is to carry the 12ft long carpet cigar.

• Unpacked a bunch more boxes in the den (Aaron’s office). We love the wall of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves!

• Made our weekly visit to Home Depot/Lowes/Target.
• Spent too much money.

OK, we worked for like three days straight but now it seems like we accomplished very little.

Well, what else did we do?

• Watched the German movie “The Lives of Others” about East Germany and the Stasi. Great movie. Loved hearing German, since I so rarely hear it anymore.

  (Random memory: When I taught in Magdeburg I supposedly lived across from a former Stasi office.)

• Ate a lot of take-out because we never seem to have time to go grocery shopping.

• Sucked down lattes at Open Eye Cafe Sunday morning (thanks for the coffee date, Momo!).

• Did 5 baskets of laundry at a local laundromat/bar (our dryer is still broken and it’s too humid to dry our laundry at home since our a/c is still broken).

  (Random memory: When I taught in Magdeburg there were no laundry facilities in our dorm so we scrubbed our clothes in our giant East German claw foot bathtub with scalding hot water and then hung jeans, shirts, socks, sweaters and the like from every chair, desk corner, and any other object that was sturdy enough to hold a dripping mass of wool. We cranked the heat so the clothes would dry faster but with three people’s soggy clothes covering every inch of the room, it got a tad muggy. So we opened the giant window to let in the -30 degree very non-muggy “chunky breeze” (i.e. wind/snow). *Sigh* Good times.)

• Cleaned, vacuumed, did dishes. (For like the umpteenth time. What’s up with this? I’ve been doing this cleaning thing for several years…and I’m still not finished. ; ) Ha. Lame joke, I know.

• Attended the final installment of a summer festival. Unfortunately, we were the only ones to attend because we were a week too late.

• Scribbled in my big fat red journal.

• Since Aaron gets up way before I do on weekend mornings, I know he accomplished some things while I was still comatose.

• Uploaded photos to Flickr (click on the banner in the right sidebar).
• Escorted a grasshopper from our bedroom ceiling to the backyard.
  Three times.

And what did October do all weekend?