Of course, the minute you plan something like that, a hundred things pop up to distract you. On Thursday, my friend Colleen came to visit from New York and my friend Shannon came in from Des Moines. It was great to see them. I forgot how much I missed them, until I got to hang out with them again. After meeting them, John said they were just as fun and crazy as he would expect from my friends - and that was one of the best compliments he gives.
After we met my friends on Thursday, we came back home and started on the upstairs dormer room. It's where Stinky lived and now that she has moved out, we wanted to clean it up and make it another usable space. We're still not exactly sure what we'll do with it. We don't have the money right now to fix it up exactly how we want, but we can definitely make part of it a nice reading room and the other part can be where we put all of our bike/running stuff and we have two clothes racks and a shelf that we can finally organize things a little better. That would free up the extra downstairs bedroom to be an actual spare room, instead of the gigantic closet it has turned into. Anyway, Stinky came over and she and John and I got so much done in that dormer room. We pulled up the carpet to find nice, wide boards underneath. There is some writing on them and some cracks in between them, so this week, I hope to clean the hell out of that space, fill the cracks with twine and then prime and paint the floorboards a nice gray color. We'll see how that goes...
On Friday night, Shannon and Colleen came over for drinks on the back porch after work. Then I made baked parmesan tilapia, corn on the cob and brussel sprouts with honey/siracha sauce. Coadster came over with the grand puppy and ate dinner with us, while her puppy tried hard to play with Archie. Archie was having none of it. All cats are assholes, but mine is the biggest asshole around.
On Saturday, John got up and took all of our old paint cans and anything caustic and dropped it off at the special dump for environmental hazards, then picked up the truck and we started loading it up. We tried to go through everything - every shelf on the pantry, every closet, every drawer in every room. We honed, we purged and we threw out so much crap. Was it 20% of what we owned? Probably not, but it was great to get rid of the more likely 10% that we did...And we cleaned everything we touched. It was like when you move and you get rid of half your stuff and clean your place and think, "Man! Why didn't I do this when I lived here? I would have been so much happier in my home." One of the greatest things, is that we swapped out the old oven that came with the house that was all janky and half the stuff didn't work, for the oven my friend gave us when she moved into her place, so now I can actually broil stuff and roast veggies. Hurray!
We originally thought it would take about 3 trips to the dump, but the truck was so big, that we only needed one and when we got to the dump we realized that our friend worked there and we got an extra special discount. So, we were finished with everything by about 2 o'clock and got to go on a nice bike ride to the Brew Pub for good food and beer. Then we went home and watched Prefontaine. I hadn't seen the movie since it first came out and I forgot how cheesy it was. Also, the mustaches in it were so distracting, I forgot most of the lame plot.
On Sunday I woke with a bit of a migraine. I had to take my meds, which meant I couldn't do any playing outside for a few hours. I read and drank tea and then John and I drove the course for the State Road Race Championships next week. By the time we got home, ate tuna melts and I mowed the lawn and John got my Time Trial bike back to working without slipping gears every 5 seconds, I got to take that bike out on the road. I did pretty well, on my time and John went on his TT bike, and then we both got home at about the same time.
We then headed out to the mountain bike trails to play. I was pretty exhausted, so we weren't out there long, but for me, there isn't much more relaxing and fun and meditative after a week of doing crappy, dirty house projects, than taking my bike out on the trails and playing in the woods.
This week, I plan to try and clean and paint that upstairs room that we just cleared out. Wish me luck!
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