While the weather we had this past weekend was nothing like the tremendous tornado in Kansas, we did get some high winds gusting as high as 60 mph. Our 50+-year-old tree in the front road took a beating:

Ever since we moved into the house five years ago, we’ve always known the tree in the front yard would have to be significantly trimmed back—or eventually come down all together. Not only is there the risk of the entire thing falling on our roof and leaving a gaping hole in the house, it already yearly causes our main sewer line to back up. But taking care of the tree is not a cost we’re looking forward to. When I asked Roger what the deductible for our home insurance was, I stated that it might be cheaper for us to let nature take its course than pay for preventative medicine!

Quite some time ago I saw the following display in a Pottery Barn catalog:

I loved it so much — but decorating straight from Pottery Barn ain’t cheap. So, I waited for the metal stars to go on sale and picked up some frames from IKEA.

First things first — laying them out on the floor. (This was last July, mind you.)

Then, summer was over. Fall came and went. And finally, in the new year, it was time to do something about it. So, Roger brought home a fancy laser level and we started to map out the display on the wall. We traced the stars and the frames on wrapping paper and positioned them on the wall. Much yelling commenced.

Finally, once we got the cut-outs just right, we replaced them with the real thing:

At this point I still hadn’t figured out what photos I’d be putting in the frames. (I figured hanging them on the wall would be the kick in the butt I needed.). So, I ordered some prints online from WalMart (cheapest prints, and in-store delivery meant saving nearly $10 on shipping). They arrived Friday, and yesterday, we filled the frames:

Pretty cool! Clockwise, from upper left: Paula and Ryan’s self portrait from our vacation in the Dominican Republic; Kozmo; the lakeshore steps at our family cabin; Newman; some wildlife at the Dominican Republic; and Roger and me at Ryan and Paula’s wedding.

We’re done! (Well, almost.) With the exception of nailing in the moulding and putting back a few pieces of furniture, our work on the family room is complete. You can see the pictures here.

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!

Imagine our horror on Monday night when we finally decided to rip the carpet out of the “baby’s room” and discovered that the “finished” hardwood floors were not exactly “finished.” We’re just making guesses here, but we’re assuming that the previous owners always knew they’d be laying carpet in that room, so when the painted the walls a bright blue it wasn’t a big deal for them to leave paint all over the hardwood. Ouch. The project of turning the “baby’s room” into the “guest room” might take longer than expected!

Despite the many surprises, Roger and I are still having a good time being homeowners. We’ve completely re-decorated two rooms (the living room and the bathroom) and are now on the third. Last weekened we planted our first garden … a 12 by 12 plot from which we’ll harvest tomatoes, eggplant, cilantro, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers and cantaloupe! And, last Sunday, we also invested in new patio furniture, to be delivered in early June. (We then scoured KMart for cheap tiki-torches to light up the backyard during our first annual Bocce Ball tournament, at a time and date TBD.)

Despite that we love being at home, we’re traveling too: this Saturday we’re off to Washington, D.C. for a week. Just today Congressman Jim Ramstad’s office called with the date and time of our Capitol Building tour. (Hint: call your congressperson if you’re traveling to the nation’s capital — they’ll hook you up with all sorts of cool things to see and do). We’re going over Memorial Day weekend so expect the city to be full of events for us to attend, including concerts on the Mall and a ceremony at Arlington. We’ll post many photos when we return!

What cruel games nature plays on us. As I look out on the deck I see 6 inches of snow covering the deck and all our patio furniture. So much for doing yard work yesterday while Lynsey is in Chicago.

On the bright side though, it gave me a chance to make that long awaited purchase of one of these. And of course I couldn’t be with out one of these either.

I never thought I was much into the aesthetics of functional equipment. I mean who cares what color the wheels are. Well, it did yesterday. For all practical purposes last years models and this years models do the same job. But this year they decided to change to the color of the wheels to this really ugly yellow. A yellow so bad that I didn’t even want it in my garage. Something tells me they were trying to mimic another famous green and yellow combination. Take it from me, Sears should leave it to the experts at John Deere. They have this soothing green and yellow combination that is timeless and should be unchallenged. So needless to say, I have the much nicer looking green with gray wheels model decorating the corner of the garage.

I think that Spring is finally here and our current Web site title isn’t just wishful thinking. Besides having to work on Friday night and all day Saturday, we managed to enjoy part of the weekend together. Or should I say that we were introduced to the joys of doing yard work at our new house. Of course that meant a trip to Home Depot for some of the essential yard tools: garden hoses, rakes and shovels. The only good thing is that we don’t have to buy them every year. I think our next trip will be to Sears for a lawn mower and weed trimmer. We got quite a bit of our lawn cleaned up and took out a section of old fence that the previous owner hadn’t replaced when he did the rest of the back yard.

While reading the paper yesterday, I found an article that was quite disturbing. I wasn’t so much disturbed by the subject matter of the article. Only that they’ve come up with a name for it and now there is a book about it. Doesn’t this just perpetuate the problem and only make it the “in” thing to do.

It’s been busy weekends around our new house in Bloomington lately. This last weekend my parents visited on Saturday and Eric and Uncle Ron stopped over on Sunday. The weekend before that, Lynsey’s parents and Lucas were in town for four days. But the grand daddy of all weekends was two weeks ago when we painted our living room red. Yes, you saw it…RED! I was a little bit leery at first since I wouldn’t have thought to paint such a bold color before I met Lynsey. But a coat of tinted primer and four coats of paint later it looks great. Lynsey found a couple paintings that match perfectly and the new furniture looks great.

This weekend I have to work on Saturday and we’ll be preparing for our first ever Oscars Party. It’s sure to be a hit!

A few more photos of the new house, these provided by the current owners (and much clearer than the harried snapshots I took when we first looked at it).