Friday, May 01, 2020

Gimme a Break! The Game is Survival! Gimme a Break, And Plan My Arrival!


Soooo, I'm going to talk about how lovely last weekend was. Not just the weather, but all the things we did. I'll start off with projects. I know not everyone else is as weird as I am (Okay, almost no one else is), but I love to do projects, especially ones that make a huge difference, and are pretty when they're done.

Right when they were starting to close everything down for Covid-19, I ran to the paint store in case it wouldn't be open for a while and I got paint for our front screen door. Our house came with this cool, old, screen door and any house nerd who sees it tells us how amazing it is. The big problem with it, was that it was a 1970's brown color with weird, tan trim and on a 1950's white house, it just looked unattractive and odd.

If you know me at all, you know how much I love color. Bright colors. So, a few years ago, I started looking for pictures of houses with colorful doors. I found one that I loved that was bright blue, not teal, or aqua, but a lighter, bright blue. When I went to the the paint store, I checked out different paint samples and asked the woman what the best kind of paint was to use on a metal door. She was very helpful, and I found exactly the color I was looking for:


On Saturday morning, John got out the Borax and cleaned the hell out of that door (and boy-howdee! did it need it). Then in the afternoon, I started painting. I got the first coat on by the evening and got up early the next morning to apply the second coat. I think it looks great. It's exactly what I wanted, and man, is it bright. It's amazing how much different our house looks just from painting the door. We've had tons of compliments on it, and on Sunday, my friend Bridget, who owns her own house painting company was across the street at the community gardens and yelled over to me how much she liked it. I figure, if a professional house painter is enthusiastic about it, I did okay. I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't like my bright blue door, but those people don't have to have one on their house either.


While I was working on the door, John went to work on our side yard. It's not very big, but it was one hell of a mess. It had tons of volunteer trees, and a few of them were right up against the house. So, John finished the project I started, digging those up. If you want to talk about a shitty project where you're basically hacking at the earth to get to some roots, there it is. By Sunday morning he had finished that thankless job. Now, this weekend we're going to dig up all of the fern starts there, then use some of our tax return money to buy some more brick pavers, weed cloth and lava rock. I wanted to finish that project by last weekend, but now I'm shooting for this coming weekend. Wish us luck!


We also headed up to the small town where Coadster lives with her boyfriend to drop off her bike and some seedlings for what my daughter is calling their Victory Garden (she is and always will be a World War II nerd). When we were there, she told John that the Aloe plant that he gave her for Christmas a few years ago, had grown out of its latest pot, so he took it back with us and repotted it in this HUGE ceramic container. Hopefully, it will be a few more years before he has to repot it again.


After all of our chores were as done as they were going to be for one weekend, we did our favorite thing - Bike ride! Bike ride! Bike ride!


We are very lucky to live in Iowa during this pandemic. We can ride a couple of miles and be out in the middle of nowhere. We love it that there are more animals than vehicles in Amish country.


And the majority of vehicles we see have a very different kind of horse power than in town.


We rode almost 50 miles and it felt so good to play outside where there wasn't any danger of catching Covid-19. It was almost like it didn't exist for a few hours. Exactly what I needed - a break from it.


When we got home from our mental health break, I made veggie lasagna and my favorite salad for dinner. It has fresh spinach, raspberries, feta cheese, red onion slices and pine nuts. It is pretty damn delicious.

Anyway, I'm glad we had such a lovely weekend, because work this week has been hell. May first is decision day, and we are inundated with calls and emails from students wanting to either cancel their admission, postpone their admission, or a firm promise that we are going to have classes on campus this Fall. If only we knew what the future held for all of us...

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