HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SISSY & BRO-N-LAW!!!

your gift is that my hubby comes home tonight so i won't be calling you fifty times a day anymore. have i mentioned how awesome my bedroom looks? now if only i could decide on a walk color and get it all painted. sheesh, that's going to be a job and a half. i really wish we had had the time to get that done before the furniture came.

bloodletting and power tools don't mix

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MIRANDA!!! well, i was wrong about sleep last night. qu'elle surprise. in other news, i learned a valuable lesson today. climbing a ladder and operating power tools after giving blood can be a less-than-good idea. fortunately for me, i'm an excellent bleeder (filled the bag in under six minutes, thankyouverymuch) and never suffer ill-effects of the blood-letting. however, each time i got up on that ladder, dizziness did ensue. i'm not sure why. luckily, it was not debilitating and no harm befell me or my home. it just took much longer to finish my tasks as i kept having to climb back down to lay down a minute between drillings. all in all, my curtains look great.

i get by with a little help from my friends

i just had a wonderfully cathartic conversation with my katie. it's good to have a friend like her who is capable of being a "shoulder" friend over the phone. those are rare. my hubby is gone most of this week. crummy for him because he's freezing his toes off and working around the clock - although the latter isn't really a change now, is it. crummy for me because i don't sleep well by myself but since i've been in a very down and lonely mood for the last week, we're probably better being apart a couple days. maybe when he gets home i'll be feeling better and stop snapping at him for no reason. i'm sure he'd appreciate that. on the bright side, a fabulous cold front has moved in and tonight and tomorrow night should be great open window nights. that should help me sleep.

next week please

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD and BRIAN!!! aside from calling and assaulting dad with my singing, i'm done with this week. just make it go away, okay?

tiring out the troops

please say a prayer for gma h. we got a call this morning that she somehow fell out of her wheelchair and broke her femur. they took her into surgery this afternoon to put pins in, which worried us quite a bit since she is ninety-seven years old. they ended up putting screws in her hip and knee and a steel rod along her entire femur. she made it through the surgery fine (what a blessing!) and is in recovery. we are waiting to hear when she is awake again. i'm sure it'll be a difficult recovery at her age so all the prayers she can get will surely help. all of that aside, we have been having fun here with our friends. we spent most of the day yesterday on the beach. it was a beautiful day. one of those rare days when you can actually sit in the sun and not sweat to death. there was frisbee-throwing and football-throwing and hole-digging and castle-building and beach-running and sun-napping. we then went and swam around the pool for a while and warmed up in the hot tub before coming back up for dinner. before i had dinner done, the kids and jeremy were asleep on the couch. one of the girls' head kept falling on the table all through dinner. they were more than happy to go to bed at an early hour. us adults managed to stay awake until 21:00 before happily dragging ourselves to bed. speaking of bed, i am so far very pleased with my latex mattress. friday night, we only ended up with three hours of sleep so that wasn't the best to judge by, but last night was very comfortable. after a night and a half of sleeping on it, i have not had any shoulder aches or body parts falling asleep. see, i'm a side sleeper so i have a terrible time with my shoulders and hips hurting and having to flip to the other side every twenty minutes until that one starts hurting too. that's where a lot of my tossing and turning comes from. as an extension of that, my arms and hands and legs will fall asleep on me. that's a big part of the reason i was adamently against getting an inner-spring matress. the latex, like the visco foam, is supposed to virtually eliminate pressure points. so far, it seems to be doing the trick. it comes with a thirty-day trial period so i've got that long to decide whether it's going to work out. my next priority purchase is going to be curtains. until i have curtains, there's really no way to know for sure whether i'm sleeping well in the morning. enough of that, a rainy afternoon at the beach means we're all headed to dinner and the movies. i don't know why they don't want to watch a movie on our 20" tv.

beddy-bie time

woohooo, i have a matress! tonight, i will sleep on a real bed again; i am psyched! they delivered it and set it up and then we dressed it. our room looks so purty and sophistimicated. tonight our first guests will be coming in for the weekend. we are looking forward to a fun beach-filled weekend with them.

furnishing

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, SANDRA & TONY!!! today was a happy day. our bedroom furniture came in and looks fabulous. we also got a dining room hutch that looks perfect with our dining room table. this place is really starting to look nice. as far as furnishing, it is far nicer than our old house. well, that and the location and the view. i'm just happy to have this place start feeling livable. and not a moment too soon with our first company coming in tomorrow night.

so much for new

wth would you go into someone's home and slap pieces of wood down on their brand-frikkin-new dining room table?!! and then go sliding them all over the place?!! j@ck@$$!!!

can it be?

OMG! it must be snowing in hell this morning - our stove just arrived! anyone know how to do convection cooking?

gettin' high

i don't know about you, but it has been farookin gorgeous here the last few days. playing football on the beach has been not-too-hot. swimming in the pool has been not-too-cold. lovely, it is. and, our home is coming together nicely. stuff is actually jumping out of boxes and into cozy little put-up spaces. we haven't made any more progress on those other six chairs but, when we do, the dining area will be beeyooteefuwl! on a side note, it amuses me to look down on the coast guard and military helicopters and planes that fly by. most of the time, it doesn't seem like we're that high up.

coming together

we have furniture!!! yesterday was an expensive day. we purchased our mattress set and our bedroom furniture, which will both be delivered by next thursday. i am looking forward to having a bedroom that looks like a bedroom. and a new, comfy, non-springy bed to hopefully stop my tossing and turning for a while. we almost got a bunk bed but we were shot down at the credit card handover with the pronouncement "out of stock". dagnabit! it could never be that easy, eh? the only thing that we actually came home with was our dining room table. it's very purty. we got the table and two chairs put together (after we finally took down the christmas tree and put it away). those chairs were a beast; it might take us the rest of the week to get the other six assembled! we also attempted to buy the elbow for the dishwasher installation. unfortunately, the one little piece we need is the one piece they don't seem to sell so we had to buy the whole hose. of course, even that was too easy because we got home to realize we had dramatically underestimated the length. funny how we might actually get our stove (mythic purchase that it apparently is) and install it before the dishwasher that has been here all week. such is life. luckily, my husband is all the dishwasher i need. what i am looking forward to, aside from my matress, is my stove. tomorrow is supposed to be the day. i'm not holding my breath but i sure will be excited if it happens to show up. slowly - excruciatingly slowly - this place is starting to look and feel like home.

normal? what's that?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SANDRA!!! the good news is that good things are happening finally. today, we were the happy recipients of a microwave and dishwasher - only thirty-eight days after we bought them! we got the microwave installed and it looks very pretty. we started on the dishwasher but we seem to be in need of an elbow so it will have to wait a few days for us to go out again. we are told that our stove and stacking kit for our w/d will arrive friday. keep your fingers crossed for us. it sure will be nice to have a complete kitchen again and not have to decide on dinner based on what will cook in a toaster oven (or now microwave). saturday we went on a furniture shopping expedition and i believe we found the mattress set and bed that we want. hubby will be calling to haggle prices make purchases tomorrow. (i am so not a negotiator) we also found a bed for the bunk room that we love but we're unsure that it will be a good fit in such a small room. it's so cool looking though. unfortunately, the dining room table that we hearted so much that my boy almost bought it without any prodding from me last year is gone. there is a similar one at a slightly higher price but we're not sure we like the two-tonedness of it. the only other one we've found that we like though is $500 higher for the same setup so we'll likely get over the two-tone dislike. we have also taken the time the last two days to remind ourselves why we moved here and that all of this is worthwhile. we've been playing frisbee and football on the beach and we've been utilizing the pool and hot tub. it's been wonderful. we also started back into the gym this weekend. life is starting to take on a semblance of normalcy. i'm ready for normal.