Something to Fill The Time

So much has happened since I was keeping up with this blog more regularly. First, Media Guy graduated from college and moved back into the house. Then the young friend for whom I made the Chocolate Dinner because she was Moving to Delaware (and thus getting out of Dodge), decided to move back to Dodge and needed a temporary place to stay -- as did her guy, her daughter, their cats, their dogs, and their ferret. So all of them moved into the house. Then Future Vet rescued a litter of feral kittens and couldn't keep them in the house he is renting while at school, so -- of course -- they moved into the house.Trust me, you do NOT want to know what the creature count was in our house over the summer.

Considering that the Wizard has been spending most of his time on the road and that my knees have been hurting quite a lot and that there is a lot more room in the master bedroom upstairs, we did a room shuffle which put the Wizard and me into the downstairs master bedroom and our house guests (family of 3 and assorted beasties) into the master bedroom upstairs. Now that our guests have found employment and moved into a house of their own, we had to make a decision about moving back upstairs.

As usual, I was happy with the idea of another round of Musical Bedrooms and staying downstairs. We would have gained the small bedroom that connects to the downstairs master, but ended up with considerably less space overall. So I agreed to move back upstairs.

After three months of occupancy by 3 people, 2 cats, 2 dogs, and a ferret, the upstairs master needed some major cleaning. And once we moved everything out of the room so that we could clean the carpet, we took a good look at the walls and decided that maybe we should paint them. And while we were doing that, we could finally paint the upstairs bathroom that we had redone in oh, 2009.

Today we got started on the painting. Four views, before and after:

Well, no, we aren't done yet. But we got a fair amount of painting done today and since Sports Nuts is out of school this semester, we have lots of time this week to finish up. We're painting the walls green because green is the Wizard's favorite color. But he's not here to make a decision on the bathroom colors, so I can go wild there.

We stopped and cleaned up because tonight is Halloween and Sports Nut and I decided that we would turn off the outside lights and hide in the back of the house tonight.

Twenty Months

The Wizard is still commuting to the Sunshine State every week -- and while we're at it, how does Florida rate the moniker "Sunshine State" when the National Solar Observatory (supposedly the sunniest place on earth) is in the same state as Dodge? But I digress....Although the Wizard is commuting, he was home for four whole consecutive days this weekend and we had a chance to talk about -- you guessed it! -- getting out of Dodge.

We think we have come up with a solution that involves spending approximately 20 more months here in Dodge. That will give Sports Nut time to finish his degree at Yet Another University (don't ask) and will also coincide with the time that Future Vet should finish his undergraduate studies. In other words, May 2013 or thereabouts.

It's good to have an end point. Now all I need to do is figure out how to fill those 20 months.