What Struck Me

I’m thinking of getting new furniture for the dining room now instead of waiting until after construction. I’ve been pricing different sets I like and I’ve pretty much settled on Pottery Barn. I can get a table, 6 chairs, a buffet, and even a new desk & file cab with hutch for less than $6k. Compared with some of the others I was looking at it’s an awesome deal. I still blanch at spendiing that much in one shot though.

But I’m just so sick of the nasty stuff we have in there now. Nothing matches except the table and china cab, and they’re both really beat up. We have old chipped rickety chairs in there now (the ones that matched the table all fell apart)- when people come by I make sure the table is covered and we pull in the nice sturdy PB kitchen chairs so no one falls!

We really need a desk for Pat- he spreads out over the DR table when he works. Usually he leaves his piles there, lately he’s been putting them away, but that has to be a PITA. It would be nice if he had a fulltime homebase like I have, since he does work at home pretty often (and maybe he would more if he had the room.) The desk from PB is huge, and the new file cab and hutch would be plenty big for all his crap important papers.

Part of the reason we downsized the addition was so we could afford to buy this stuff, and new LR furniture, too (the sofas are 12 years old, even slipcovers don’t help. And the dog has trashed the seat cushions of the set we bought for the den :sad: but we’re not replacing those quite yet, just flipping the cushions when company comes!) A new bed for the new bedroom (goin’ kingsize.) It’s a lot of stuff, I know. We have no problem spending money on stupid stuff, but big ticket things, not so easy! So it’s backed up and hitting all at once. But I’m trying to look at it as a long term purchase- none of these things will need to be replaced for at least 10-15 years, in the case of the DR stuff it should last forever (so far I’ve very happy with the Pottery Barn furniture I have.) By that time we should be ready to move on, anyway, since the kids will be all growed up.

Hmm, I almost have myself convinced! Maybe I just need some peer pressure like last time :thumbsup: .

I’ve recently set up Google as my homepage (www.google.com/ig). There are all kinds of widgets you can add to it, and I have to say my favorite is the “flickr recently added” one. I have it set to change theh photo every 5 seconds, and it’s pretty cool seeing the random photos pop up, I just saw a wedding, a baby, some guy in his kitchen, another guy hugging a giant pillow, and a gorgeous shot of a boat in the sunset. I love the variety of it.

Heard via the elementary school grapevine that Tim got in trouble yet again yesterday, but I had to laugh at his responses when I asked him about it. Apparently he and 3 other boys were talking about “disgusting” things and the substitute teacher (who happened to be a classmate’s mom) turned them in. Exactly how disgusting? “Something about chests.” “Tim, were you and your friends using the word ‘boobies’?” His eyes popped wide open, then he looked down and mumbled “yes.”

He then rated the respective “badness” of each of the boys involved. He placed himself as third, going from most to least bad :rofl: . I had to just send him back to his legos at that point before I busted out laughing in front of him- so I don’t know exactly what other “badness” was involved, besides the use of the word “boobies”. Which, in all honesty, doesn’t even hit my radar as an offense.

We’ve dropped the front porch, put the sunroom into the someday/maybe file. The bedroom & bathroom are a bit bigger. The new door off the dining room is still there but now leads to a huge deck. Hopefully we’ll start soon!

click to biggie size

I woke up this morning from a dream about high school- starring one of my best friends and a former friend I really treated like crap years ago- and I again treated like crap in the dream- but you know, she was soooo annoying, and I tried so hard but we all have our limits… Anyway, woke up and had a headache and my first thought was lovely another day feeling like :sad:.

But I got up, slugged some water & advil. Climbed back into bed to let it all get to work and was joined for some snugglin’ :heartbeat:.

Fixed myself a damn near perfect omelet for breakfast.

After I got the kids off to school I put on my nike sweats (last time I had them on- I slammed my head on the ice…) and actually got on the treadmill for the first time in way too long. Told myself I’d do 15 minutes but ended up doing 25 because I was actually having fun:faint: .

Had a nice chat with a friend, ran some errands, found $1000 that was playing hide n seek in the project grad budget (phew!), got some paperwork done- almost seemed like a totally normal day. I even have normal plans for the rest of the day- drive Nick to and fro and cook an easy meal since Pat has a meeting tonight.

:aniflower:

ps- yes I reinstalled smilies into my wordpress. why do you ask:playnice:?

WordPress updated, new skin loaded. Back to :surf:.

Except for the giant balloon that is my stuffed up head, life is slowly returning to normal. I haven’t blogged all that’s happened over the past week or so, but some of you know. It’s not been fun. But today wasn’t so bad, even when I got lost driving (as I do- often) I didn’t really care. It’s become a lovely joke in my family- anytime mom drives somewhere new, she at best misses a turn and has to turn around, and at worst heads completely in the wrong direction, going miles out of the way. Today I did both- the sad thing is that the miles in the wrong direction was on a road I travel fairly often. I guess this head cold clouded up my sense of direction even worse than normal.

At least Andy smartly refrained from teasing- he takes his first driving lesson on Monday. He’d better be nice to me if he wants to convince me to give him the car keys and climb in the passenger seat!