Paint my bedroom

Alright my legion of readers.  I need your fashion design input!  You may not have heard, but we're buying a house!  It's practically perfect in every way, but one of the features that I don't particularly like is the color of the master bedroom.  It's purple.  If I had more X chromosomes, I'd probably have a better description of what sort of purple, and just calling it "purple" probably makes it sound worse than it really is.  But that's not the point.  The point is: I don't like it, and I want my room to be a different color, but I don't know what color I want.  This is where you come in.  I'm now accepting suggestions for wall colors.  There are four walls to work with, and they don't all have to be the same color, so get as wild as you want - but not too wild, or I won't pick your idea.

The room has a wood floor (technically laminate, but it looks like wood) and our furniture is of the "eclectic/not-matchy" style, so I think you can more or less do whatever you want.  I await with eagerness your suggestions, because while white is fine, it's also kinda boring.

Life

I don't blog much because life is "boring".  What does the boring-ness consist of?  I'm glad you asked!

First off, work!  I work a pretty normal amount.  Roughly 40 hours per week, on average, which I pack into 5 days one week and then 4 the next, leaving me with every other Friday off.  This is an optional perk, which I enjoy.  What this does, in essence, is to steal an hour of time from the other days of the week, and lump them all together in a whole day off.  So rather than getting a little bit done each night around the house or something, I have a whole day off, which we use for having fun instead of being productive.

But still, evenings are free for blogging, right?  Ha! Good one.  I get home around six each night (partly because I am incapable of getting up early unless I really, really have to), and we eat dinner.  You know Shanny, the model housewife with the hot dinner waiting on the table as I come in the door.  At dinner we totally feel like the family from "A Christmas Story," where the mom never gets to eat a hot meal because everyone needs something.  I do help with the girls (Ella is particularly needy), but Shannon definitely gets the short end of that stick.  Last night we went to a park in the evening.  Tonight, right after dinner, I went to scouts (I'm a Webelos leader, along with teaching the primary class on Sundays (and still playing for the choir)), while Shannon took the girls to a preschool meeting.  She's the secretary or something for the executive committee, I think. After scouts, I picked the girls up from the school and got the girls ready for bed.  Shannon made it back just for lights out and that brings us to this point in the day.

This is the general theme it seems for every day.  Sometimes I try and work in running, but that's getting hard with the days getting shorter.  Book clubs and preschool meetings.  Basketball and RS activities.  FHE.  Looking for houses, meeting with realtors.  Home inspections.  Either I'm doing something or Shannon is, and the other one is staying with the girls.  (Too cheap for babysitters!)

So, that's the background noise of our lives right now.  Now that we've cleared that up, I can make some blog posts about unusual stuff in life.

Rain rain go away

It rained overnight in St. George. Normally, I love rain. It makes things cooler and cleaner. It sounds nice. It can be fun to watch. But this morning, I was laying in bed at about 5am listening to the rain and wishing it would stop. Why? Because it's watering the weeds!

We've spent a lot of time in the last 2 weeks trying to get rid of weeds. They're everywhere. They grow so fast. We've been ripping them out, whacking them, mowing them, spraying them and just about anything else we can think of. And now they just got another batch of water over night. They'll be 4 feet tall again by tomorrow. Grrrr.

Visitors

Kim and Patrick came through town this week on their way further south. They stopped to say hi to Julia and Shannon and brought food with them for lunch, too. I guess they didn't end up eating all of it (they came and went while I was at work) and left some behind. Shannon showed me the zucchini they left us:

"That's great!" I said. "I'll put it next to the one from our garden."

Yard Work

I've got a friend who apparently likes yard work.  I guess I need to invite him over more often.

Last night we cranked up the sprinkers for the first time.  We probably could have done that a week ago, but oh well.  Luckily the sprinklers all seem to be working in reasonably good order.  One is somewhat broken, but still puts 90+% of the water out on the lawn where it should go, so it certainly isn't a crisis.

I also repaired the spigot in the backyard.  Look how handy I am!  It was leaking out of the knob when turned on, so I took it apart, applied Teflon tape and cranked it back together good and tight.  No more leaks!  Now I can return the new one that I bought under the assumption that I wouldn't be able to fix the old one.

Also, we've been weeding fiends lately.  Apparently the difference between a plant and a weed is that a plant is what you want to grow, and a weed is what will grow.  I think we should just declare that we are trying to grow the weeds.  Then, we will either succeed, or the weeds will decide to shrivel up and die, which wouldn't be a bad thing either.

Now the top priority is to get the garden planted, and the water all hooked up for it.