Happy Fall!

Yeah, I know I'm about a week late. Tough!

I've been terrible about keeping this blog up. Once every week or two is just not cutting it for me. In an attempt to re-find my writing voice, (and to just add another item to my to-do list?) I'm pleased to announce a remarkable event, hosted by me.

Blog Every Day in October!

That's right, friends! I am challenging myself (and you, if you so choose to accept) to blog EVERY SINGLE DAY in this month of October.

Are you seeing this after October 1st has come and gone? No worries, start where you're at!
Hopefully this will also push me to give a little more attention to the appearance of my site. The possibilities are endless!

And, as a special treat for those of you who do not have a blog, I have enabled MY blog to accept comments from anyone. (This is for you, Aunt Faye. I know you tried to leave a comment before and it wouldn't let you.)

See you tomorrow!

Long weekend

My long weekend just keeps going on and on, since I have no job right now. I'm not complaining - not at this moment, anyway!

Kennedy and I had originally planned to be in NJ this weekend to visit Brantley and Caroline - but, as they often do, plans fell through and we ended up not being able to go. (No worries, we will be there for Christmas and are excited!)

Needless to say, Kennedy still had Thursday and Friday off, which made for a fun, extended weekend!

Thursday was Kennedy's 27th birthday. I took Elvis that morning so Kennedy could sleep in til 10:30. I'm probably going into more detail than is interesting, but get over it! So "on this particular day" (to quote the disgusting John Gosselin,) I had to go to Baylor Hospital to have a biopsy done on a couple of nodules on my thyroid gland. Without going into too many details, I basically had needles stuck in and pulled out of my neck for about 45 minutes. Not so pleasant. I won't have results from this biopsy until mid-next-week, but for now I'm not worried.

So after the procedure, I'm walking around thinking they had cleaned the iodine off my neck. WRONG. Kennedy snapped a photo for a keepsake.

From there, we came home and I made some desserts for Kennedy's birthday - a homemade apple pie and a couple of pineapple cheesecakes (or cheesepies, in this case.)
Then we went out to eat with my parents, and Emily came over a little later for dessert. Kennedy cleaned up in the gift department! Way to go, Kennedy.

The pies I made for Kennedy's birthday

The miter saw from my parents and Kennedy wearing his new Cowboys jersey from EmPat.

One of those gifts included a new basketball goal for the driveway. On Friday, we spent the day trying to figure out how to take down the old goal and put up the new one. What should have taken us no more than an hour, ended up taking about 6. BUT! We stuck with it and it's up and functional now.

After taking a break for a bit, we decided to stay up late and completely clean and rearrange the garage. It was already ok, but not up to snuff. So, we moved every shelf in there (about 8 total) and I swept out every corner. I'm a little ashamed to say that I even mopped parts of the garage. But you don't understand how dirty it was! The dirt and debris we swept up from under shelves probably filled an entire garbage bag. So, it looks much better now.

I have lots of things I need to put up on craigslist and then it will be completely finished. Can't wait!

So we ended up not getting to bed until about 2 am, and waking up at about 11. Luckily, Elvis slept in for that long with us, which is VERY uncommon.

Saturday was AMAZING. Yard work all day. I never thought yard work could be so satisfying. We trimmed up a bunch of bushes along the fence in the back yard. It looks soooooo much cleaner back there now. It's still far from being where I want it, but a huge step closer. It got so hot working on that, and I had to wear sweatpants tucked into tube socks to keep the mosquitoes off of me.

Here is what the bushes looked like before. This is when Kennedy trimmed them the FIRST time...

Here is what it looks like now! Much cleaner!

So when we were finished, we jumped in the pool. Now, it's been raining for the past two weeks here, plus it's the end of September, so the water was FREEZING. But it felt amazing. It was like the most refreshing glass of water after wandering in the Sahara for 40 days or something like that. When I jumped in, it literally took my breath away. So good. I hope it gets warm enough once more before we have to retire the pool for the year. Or I hope the pool heater guy finally calls to set up an appointment to fix the heater, DANG!

Saturday night was a nice date night with Kennedy - dinner then a movie. The Informant! was a weird, but entertaining film. Matt Damon is by far one of the most versatile actors. "Did you know he had to gain 30 pounds for this role?" That's all anyone cares about. The acting was good.

Lunch and football today over at my parents, or Lunch and nap for me! While there, Emily finally helped me trim Elvis' tail. I know I'm biased, but he has the cutest tail of any dog EVER!

Just to give you an idea, this is a crooked picture with Elvis's tail from Kennedy's birthday.

And here it is, trimmed! Kennedy deemed it a "Kate Gosselin tail cut." Looking at these pictures together, it kinda looks the same...

We spent the evening at a friend's b-day/going away party and now I sit here, overly recapping my weekend. Thinking about my grocery list for tomorrow. Thinking about web design - FUN! Thinking about the way my body wash smells - Pomegranate Mango. Weird that I'm thinking about that.....

Pray if you pray that I get a job soon - maybe tomorrow????

UGH

It should NOT be this difficult for me to find a job!!!!!

To-Do

There are lots of things I could be doing right now. Perhaps I need to purge my thoughts before I can organize my day.

Still no job but I applied for several today. What else is new? Was just about to walk out the door to take an application up to Starbucks, but called ahead and the manager is out of town. Now I think I'll wait. Some more.

In other news, I had to schedule a biopsy on my thyroid for next week. I'm not so excited about this. Beside the fact that they're going to be sticking a needle in my neck, the doctor said it was a 10-15% chance that it was something serious. Obviously, that freaks me out, so I think I'll stop thinking about it, starting....now.

Kennedy and I worked all weekend on the house. Since I don't have a job, Labor Day was the opposite for me. While everyone else rested, I worked. Kennedy worked too, but he never stops working. We replaced our front porch lighting fixtures, as well as put one in the kitchen that the dear previous owners decided to take with them (along with all our switch plates and outlet covers and shower heads - do I bring that up too much? I feel like I've said that a lot already...)

Kennedy also trimmed some more branches out front so the house is now visible from across the street.

Our old lighting fixture, available on Craigslist soon!

Our new fixtures (There is one on either side of the door)

Here is the light fixture we FINALLY, after about a month of talking about it, decided on.

This is what the trees out front looked like before...

And here it is after...There are still more limbs we want to trim back, but we do not have the necessary ladder height at this time.

Kennedy and our neighbor, Chuck, repaired the columns on the back patio that had been chewed apart by the dear previous owners' bull dogs. Then Kennedy and I painted over all the stains, dirt, and who knows what else. They now look nice, new, and white.

This is in the process of repair - I didn't get any before pictures of the columns, but you can see around the corners where the dogs had chewed holes in the columns. You can also see how dirty and stained the wood was.

Here they are, finished!

Here's another column with some of the monkey grass my mom and I transplanted from the front yard.

I painted our stair risers and have started to paint the baseboards and molding in the stair case. Of course, now I'm going to have to paint ALL THE MOLDING in the house so that it will all match. But it all needs new paint anyway, as there are lots of chips and scratches and stains.

Here it is before....

Here it is after....or in the process, I should say. You'll notice I got white paint all over the walls, but that's only because I'm going to paint over that awful grey/purple/what is that color anyway?

This house continually needs work, but it's such satisfying work. It's been so fun to see the house come together, little by little. I'd like to start painting our shutters and front door this week, if I can talk Kennedy into climbing a ladder and taking them down for me...We shall see.