Vacation... house... buda

I've been on vacation this week (the first week of 2010-2011). Mostly I just worked at the house, and we also took a quick trip back to the old hometown.

The house is slowly coming along. We are painting the upstairs rooms and taking the carpet out of the living room and bedrooms. Last Saturday Jane got the first coat of paint on the living room, then Matt and Shelley came over Monday and put the second coat on. I stripped the wallpaper off the one wall in the kitchen while Jane started painting it. I was such an idiot... I used this spray concoction that Jane came up with - half water and half fabric softener in a spray bottle - you score the paper, then spray it on, then use a putty knife to take it off. It worked pretty good, but I could only find the 1" putty knife. Yesterday Jane found the bigger one we have. Oh well. Yesterday I tore up the carpet and pad in the living room. It wasn't too bad, but now I don't know what to do with the old carpet and pad. It's amazing how much dust is under there. I'm pretty sure we are going to put wood-looking laminate down in its place. The worst part of it was removing all the staples that had been holding the pad down. Jane finished painting the kitchen and started on the hallway and Anna's room.

We went back to Buda Wednesday night and came home Friday morning. We borrowed a van from some friends and that helped a TON. We had it completely packed with stuff we still had stored at my parents house and Jane's mom's old house. We finally got her trunk, a couple end tables, a rocking chair, an old baby bed, and several boxes of stuff. We also wanted to check on my mom following her cataract surgery. It went well and restored sight to her right eye. We went to Jane's brothers house Wednesday night (Mark). Thursday morning we went out to where Jane grew up and talked to her other brother and his son (Terry & Michael) who farm the farm, then we loaded up the van. In the afternoon we helped my mom and dad work around their house, then we took a drive around the countryside. You can really see a long way on the rolling hills. We also stopped and saw Ashely and Allison and Ashley's two girls. Thursday night we went over to nephew Tim's and visited with his family and Mark and Christine again. We got taco's from 6&34. They were huge. We got up Friday morning (April Fool's Day) and left around 10 our time. We would have left earlier, but I laid in bed for an hour because I thought my phone was showing eastern time, and it was instead showing central time. Oops. Oh well, it didn't matter. We still got home before 3:30. We unloaded the van at the new house and came back to the old house to see how mad the cat was at us for leaving her. She wasn't mad at all, but was quite lovey dovey.

Today we are going to go visit son Isaac's church. This will be our first time to see him play in their worship band. He is playing drums today. I think he plays guitar sometimes too. Josh Arthur is speaking in my place today.

I am a little sore today from bending over and pulling out staples. The worst thing is how sore my hands are though. I'm glad I don't have to play the guitar today, because it might be a chore. I don't know if we will work on the house today or not. We need to finish painting the bedrooms, then take the carpet out of the two and see what kind of shape the wood floors are in. We also need to decide on which laminate to get for the living room. I'm not too excited about trying to figure out how to install that. I don't think it will be hard to do necessarily, but there will be a lot of cutting involved, so it will require lots of thinking. Ugh.

Okay, I should probably get going. I was going to take a shower, and I just heard Jane start it.

Peace out; and in.