Only a Week and a Half Left!

You think I'm going to say "until Christmas", right?

Nope, not me. Only a week and a half left of...autumn. Yes, even though we've had snow that still hasn't melted, it is still technically autumn. This is important to procrastinators like me because tulips and daylilies still need to get in the ground before winter.

Now, what's funny is that I finally went out and bought new white tennis shoes. The old ones had given up the ghost and even I, being the fashion-less person that I am, could not stand wearing them with my toes hanging out anymore. The very day that I buy these new shoes, I decide I need to get those bulbs in the ground.

This is how I break in my shoes, apparently. Now they are suitably mud-covered. More importantly, next spring I should have hundreds of red tulips, and next summer, six or seven lovely purple daylilies.

Even though I'm not writing about blooms anymore (since they've all gone and died on me with the first snowfall), I am still working on getting more of those blooms next year. Because I just love flowers!

You know what else I love? Being done with gardening for a few weeks. Weeks, you ask? Oh yes. Doug will insist we start seedlings in January, so I get to enjoy these few precious weeks of not gardening or watering. Ahhhhhh.

Making Moravian Stars

I saw this post last year about making Moravian stars out of paper, and promised myself that this year I was going to try it.

And I did! The tutorial on 33 Shades of Green was very easy to follow...so I cut out some strips using wrapping paper. I chose a silver pattern on white, so that the front and back wouldn't look too crazy when I folded it. Here is the front of the star:

And here is the back:

The idea was to make lots of them and then string them from the ceiling, add them to the tree...but after five, I gave up. Mostly because by that point I only had two (Jack had destroyed three of them), and one of the remaining ones was smashed:

Argh. And again, this is why my house is sparsely decorated for Christmas. I really enjoyed making these, though, so maybe it will still happen? You never know!

Dash to the Deadline

We are refinancing (again - how many times have we done that in the past two years?!?) to take advantage of the low interest rates before they shoot back up. Did you know they're expected to get back up to 12% starting in January? Whoa. This refinance will break even in two months. A serious no-brainer.

What this means to me is that we have to be ready for an appraisal. And I just am not ready for that. Really. However, appraisals do not wait for homeowners who just want to sit around wrapped in a blanket reading a new book. I got a call from our appraiser on Friday, asking to see the house today. Yikes!!!

So Doug and I went to work. Trying to look at the big picture, we decided that we needed a finished wall in the front room, and it would be really nice to have the painting done in the kitchen. Saturday was also Malena's piano recital and a church Christmas party (at which I was singing and accompanying a quartet - that hadn't practiced). So it was a busy, busy day.

It worked kind of like this:

1. Prep the kitchen while Doug pulls electrical to the other side of the wall.
2. Prime the kitchen.
3. Take girls shopping for a birthday party (oh yes, that happened too).
4. Eat lunch. Doug is still playing with the electrical.
5. Go to recital. Drop Malena off at her birthday party.
6. Paint the kitchen (coat #1). Doug was now finishing the wall by installing a new corner bead and mudding the new drywall.
7. Rehearse with the quartet.
8. Paint the kitchen (coat #2). Doug had finished what he was going to do, so I was all alone...and loving the solitude.
9. Go to the Christmas party. Eat dinner (mostly), then rehearse again.
10. Perform. Repeat.
11. Fight with Sophia, who was soooo tired at this point (no nap).
12. Go home and crash.

It was kinda crazy. But here are the results!

A painted kitchen. Sadly, this is one of those things that you don't notice - and that is a good thing. I should be grateful that no one is noticing it because it's bad, right?

Before

After!

A finished wall. The electrical isn't quite done, but I can now sand, prime and paint the wall to match everything else, too. Yay!

The back of the wall

And the front of the wall.

Sunday I put all the electrical plates back on in the kitchen and basically rested, and rested, and rested. Monday I tried to put the house to rights (weekends are hard on the house with everyone home) and finished vacuuming moments before it was time for the appraisal. I made it! Hopefully the rest of the week won't be so chaotic and demanding. Of course, that's just wishing for pie in the sky, but a girl can dream, right?