Roger lied when he said it took only five hours to get all the wallpaper off — it really took seven (we started at 2 p.m. and didn’t get done til 9!) Once the wallpaper came off, we were in for a surprise: the walls were in not-so-good condition. The mint green walls had been painted, then paneled (we found the paneling glue) and then wallpapered, so the sheetrock underneath was quite damaged. Roger then decided to tackle the celing and scrape and sand all the texture off. Once he did that, he found large cracks where a trap door used to be. He cracked them open a bit more, then was off to Home Depot. Four gallons of joint compound later, the walls and the celings are looking pretty good. We’re just in the process of finishing the sanding now … and I snuck away to get a few pictures online.

Next steps: clean up the mess, start dusting, leave for Belgrade for a few days, come back Friday, paint the ceilings and walls, and we’re done!

Lynsey decided to take this week off and use up the rest of her vacation for the year or she’d lose it. I on the other hand am currently unemployed. Well, not really…I just have a week off before I start my new job next week with The Blackburn Company. And yes, the “The” is part of the name. This, of course, means that my career as a Professional Boy Scout has come to an end after only 14 months. While I’m excited to be starting a new career in something I’ve always wanted to do, it’s a little sad leaving all of the wonderful volunteers that I’ve gotten to know over the past year. When I announced that I was leaving at recent meeting of about 70 volunteers, the room became so quiet that you could hear a pin drop. I guess it’s nice to know that I made a differance and that I’ll be missed. The other part I’ll miss of course is the truly dedicated staff at the Boy Scout office. And thanks to my Field Director, Bob, I had a nice going away party. But, all good things must come to an end and now I’ll be a manufacture’s rep for about 25 companies, mostly in the hardware products area.

But, back to our vacation. So far we’ve goofed off a little bit and we’ve started a new home improvement project and we’re finishing another. The new project is to make our family room look like one large room, rather than two seperate rooms (one area had wallpaper and the other was painted). Today we labored for about five hours taking off the old wallpaper. Needless to say, this project is only beginning. The next step is to scrap the texture ceiling and patch the walls. The old project is to finish the guest bedroom that we started about six months ago. After striping all the old varnish and paint that was spilled on the floor, I just finished putting on the first coat of polyurethane. We’re hoping that the color matches the other floors in our house.

The rest of our vacation will be spent on getting our cars serviced, getting a haircut for Kozmo, going to Belgrade for Thanksgiving, and of course hoping that we finish our project before the end of next weekend!

My Field Director and I made an interesting observation while at the Vikings Training Facility today, while picking up some autographed footballs for our volunteers. First of all you, need to understand that we drive company cars here at the Boy Scouts and for some reason our accountant has two favorite cars. The first is the Chevy Cavalier, of which we have about five in our lot.

The second is the mighty Ford Focus. Normally I wouldn’t have a bias against a car, but when I look out the window I feel like I’m at car dealership. We don’t have just five of them, nor 10, but a whopping 15 which includes the two brand new ones that were delivered today.

The comment I made to Bob today was, “Do you think the Vikings have the same lease plan as we do because the players have as many Cadillac Escalades as we do Focuses!”

In the past few weekends, Roger and I have:

• Gone Geocaching. My mom and dad got Roger a very cool GPS-thinige for his birthday and we took it out in the woods a few weekends ago to see how it works. Geocaching is bascially scavenger hunting for GPS nerds. Photos are coming soon.
• Seen the Chippendales. Well, actually, I was the one that went to see the strippers … uh … I mean, “exotic dancers.” Roger stayed home with the dog. Sketchy details are available through the planner of the event.
• Discovered Nickel Creek, the most kickass bluegrass band I’ve ever heard.
• Seen Sweet Baby James (Taylor) in concert.
• Started stripping the guest room hardwood floors.

More later!