…my hydrangea is pink!

The window* in my living room is on the south side of the house.  While it is pretty shaded, some of the sun still sneaks through the leaves and causes a terrible glare problem on my tv.  And even though Annabel enjoys the warm spots on the couch, I do not.

This brings me to today’s project.  I had some brown curtains left over from my last apartment, where we had a window about the same size as the window* in my house.  I’m going to see how many different shades of brown I can use in my living room.

After I bought the curtain rod at Target, I got it home and started freaking out that it might be the wrong size.  I knew how big my window is**, but for some reason I was second guessing myself and tearing the house apart because of course, when I need it, I can’t find my tape measure.  Luckily, just as I was tear up the living room closet, James showed up and was kind enough to lie on the couch and use himself as a measuring tool.  He assured me that the curtain rod was the correct length.

So I got out my drill to make holes for the plastic anchors that came with the curtain rod.  First I had to guess what size drill bit to use, since there were no clues about it on the package.  Then I had to let the drill battery charge since I haven’t used it for awhile.  Then I had to try a couple other drill bits.  I finally found that the one I needed was the 1/4″ one.  If you buy a REstyle curtain rod from Target, that is the size you should use, even though they want it to be a mystery.

So finally, after watching Wheel of Fortune, playing Angry Birds, dodging hail to put my car in the garage, hanging out in the basement during the tornado and installing the curtain rod, here is the end result:

I think it’s time for a drink.

*James insists that this is not a real window, since it is just a pane of glass set into the wall.  He says a real window opens, and this one should just be called a glass wall since it is stationary.

**I hate this window and the fact that it doesn’t open.  I spent a week or so pricing new windows last spring, but in the end decided to just hope that a branch flies through it or something so the insurance will replace it.

It’s that time of year again!

The chain saw has been fired up.  I hope it’s in it for the long haul. It has a lot of work to do this year.  I need to stock up on wood for the fire pit.

A little bit ago (October or so) I decided to paint my living room.  I haven’t done any major projects inside since I moved in, and thought it was about time to pretend that I’ve lived here for over a year.  I had decided on a color scheme, and I would go to Home Depot and get about 40 paint sample paper things and then leave them in a pile on the kitchen counter to look at later when I wasn’t busy watching Millionaire Matchmaker.  I was always so busy watching the millionaires that I never quite got around to deciding exactly which hues I wanted to slather on my walls.

Sometime in early October, I decided that I needed to just go to Home Depot and pick out some paint colors.  So I did.  And of course, I decided based partially on actual paint color and partially on the name of the color.

This is where I tell the story about how I got Mimi to call the MMO wall paint color Golden Shower for 6 months before she found out what a Golden Shower actually is.  And if you don’t know what it is, I’m not going to be the one to tell you.  The paint color is actually called Golden Mushroom, but she has an aversion to mushrooms.

Back to my living room.  The wall facing the window would be Embellished Blue.  Not very clever, but I’ll let it slide.  The other three walls would be <drum roll> Peanut Butter!  Unfortunately, they did not offer the scented paint in this color.  That would have been awesome, but might have clashed with some of my Scentsy scents.

Here are some pictures of the process, which, of course, lasted about a month and a half.

Before:

If you look closely in the lower left-hand corner, you can see my little bucket of nail hole filler.  I did such a professional job that I used a cut up cereal box as a spackle knife to make sure my walls looked smooth.  Go ahead.  Be impressed.

During:

You’ll have to wait for an after.  I’m very busy watching 30 Rock on Netflix right now.  I’ll get up and take a picture tomorrow maybe.  I think you can all use your imaginations right now and envision about how it turned out.  It’s like a peanut butter and light blueberry jelly sandwich.

Today, this happened:

And now I’m going to Target.

Last year, I discovered that I had a leaf vacuum, which I though was pretty cool.  I was outside, sucking up all my leaves, filling up about 17 leaf bags while my neighbor smugly mowed her yard and went inside.  I stayed outside for about 13 more hours, filling about 14 more bags, when finally Clarimae came out and filled me in on her little secret.  If you have a mulching mower, which I do (!!!), you can just mow your leaves every so often and it will magically look like you picked them all up!

For this reason, mulching mowers are probably one of the best creations on earth, followed closely by DVRs.

In only about 20 minutes, I transformed this…

…to this

Now I can use the extra 27 hours I would have spent picking up leaves doing something useful!  Like catching up on my DVRed episodes of Private Chefs of Beverly Hills.

I’ve been admiring the downspouts at one of the houses I babysit at.  Is it weird to covet a downspout?

Anyway, here’s what I had:

You can see one of my tomatoes on the ground.  The squirrels steal them.  The squirrels also dig holes in all my potted plants.

I replaced it with a flexible plastic “Flex-A-Spout”:

It can just hang out over by the fence and not trip people anymore!  Now I just have to fix the holes in my yard and it will be mostly hazard free.

The other problematic spout was in the front.

That front “garden” is such a mess, my camera doesn’t even know where to focus.

Here is the new and improved spout:

It’s green so it blends in with all the foliage.

While I was wandering in my front yard, I noticed something mysterious.  I won’t post a picture because it’s really gross, but it seems that my sewer is backing up out of the access hole thing in my yard.  Schoonover is coming tomorrow to check it out.  It should be quite a show.

The little tree in my front yard is turning red!  And Pat is confused about trees.

First, Dad took the old one out…

…then we moved the “new” one in!  It’s actually a hand-me-down refrigerator, but my old one always froze my lemonade, so when I wanted a vodka lemonade I had to make a whole new pitcher of lemonade.  That was quite an inconvenience for me.

And now, on to the Hamlet!

Dad went home to paint his house or something and left Pat and I to build the Hamlet.  We tried to tell him how much fun it is to build a Hamlet, but he really enjoys painting his house.

First, Annabel inspected all pieces of the Hamlet.

Once she gave us approval, we started assembling.

I don’t know if it’s because it was the second Hamlet we had assembled or because it was not as hot and we were in the shade or because there was beer involved, but this assembly process seemed to go much faster than that of the MMO Hamlet.

Yes, there’s a tree stump in my shed.

TA DA!!!

After we stood and admired our handiwork for awhile, it was time to empty out the old shed.  Pat and I got to work getting out the lawnmower, chairs, patio table…  Then suddenly Pat ran out of the shed yelling obscenities.  I’m glad the kids next door had gone inside at this point.

I asked him “what is it?”

And he said “what do you think it is?”

And I said “oh, a possum.”

Pat has had a few run-ins with our stupid little fleshy-tailed friends, and he has not enjoyed any of them.  At least now he’s growing up and not running around screaming like a girl.  He only drew enough attention this time for my neighbor to come out of her house to make sure everything was ok.

Here is a picture of his new acquaintance peeking out around the leaf bag:

What a cutie!

I borrowed Dad’s cat trap, I mean, live animal trap and put it in the shed.  The next day, I caught the possum.  I called Animal Control to see if they’d come pick it up, but they said the state protects possums or some crap like that but they could give me the number of a person who would come pick it up.  I said no thanks, my dad will do it for free if I let him borrow my coveted extension ladder.

There he is in the back of the truck, with the ladder and some flooring.  Dad took him out and dropped him off somewhere in the country where he can learn to live like Bear Grylls and survive in the wild while trying to find his way back to civilization.  Good luck, possum friend.

When I bought the house, I knew the shed needed help.  The tarp worked for the first year, but it’s had that puddle of water in it all summer and I’m sure that doesn’t help the bug problem in my yard.

This summer, I spent pretty much every waking moment of my life getting MMO, NFP ready for business.  You may think preschool is all fun and games, but there is actually quite a bit of behind the scene legal stuff that goes on.  Anyway, I recruited all-purpose Pat to come help out with some of the random stuff there and one of our projects was to build a Hamlet.  Yes, a Hamlet, in the parking lot of MMO.  Our Hamlet isn’t nearly as exciting as the ones on that website (what?  no pool?  are you kidding me?) but it was so much fun to build that I had to go buy one for my house, too.  Pat was thrilled when I told him about it.

I went to Menard’s and told the man I wanted a Hamlet and then I went and paid for my piece of paper.  Then I pulled around to the pick-up gate thing and the girl looked at my paper and got confused and told me to just pull around over by the garden center.  So helpful.  I pulled over there and flagged down some guy on a forklift, who had to go find an electric forklift so he could drive it in the store and then he finally brought my Hamlet to my car.  I folded down my seats and they stuffed it in the back of my car, but it was just barely too long so I had to move my seat forward.  Which means I had to drive home with my knees hitting my steering wheel, and not intentionally, like when I eat a Spicy Southwest Sonic burger.  Dad was coming over anyway to pick up some branches or something so he helped get it out of the Jeep and into the garage.

Then I forgot about it for a month or so.

When things finally settled down and I was only working 65 hours a week, I decided it was time to tackle the Hamlet.

First, we had to clear a spot in the jungle for the Hamlet.

It only took Pat about 20 minutes while I stood around debating whether I should go buy another shovel so I could help.  By the time I decided I would, he was finished.  How convenient!

Then we had to go to Mom and Dad’s house to get the dolly to roll the Hamlet from the garage to the backyard.  I wasn’t about to tear up my grass again by dragging it through the yard.  It had just finally grown back from when I dragged the keg for my birthday party back there.

There was a small ordeal with a dead squirrel in the driveway.  I didn’t know what people in town did with dead animals they find in their yard.  I’ve always just thrown them over the back fence, but I didn’t think my neighbors would appreciate this, especially as it was Labor Day weekend and they were having a cookout.  We put it in a gift bag and took it to Dad, then I threw it over their back fence.

We got the box back there and got to work doing the pre-assembly.

Hard to imagine a whole Hamlet fits in that little box!

We got the base frame put together…

Then we got to work assembling all the pieces that needed to be assembled before we started the actual building process.

Good thing we had already built one Hamlet and knew exactly what to do.

This is the point in the instructions where it tells you that you need two people and “many hours” to finish the Hamlet.  We did not have “many hours” so we put off the rest of the construction for a week or two.

And now I will put off writing the rest of this post for a day or two (or maybe a week, who knows?) and leave you with a picture of my new pet.