Li'l Momma's Rant-O-Rama

seriously. i am so just so gloriously happy this time of year. this morning at 6am, angus started his usual "feed me, feed me" wake-up routine... but instead of it being pitch-black outside, the sun was starting to peek through the windows. and the birds -- the tweeting from hundreds of birds singing in the neighborhood was almost deafening. it's like they're having a kegger every sunrise to celebrate being back together. it's one of my favorite sounds in the world.

yesterday was an exhausting but awesome day. who knew it was going to take 2 people 7 hours to paint a bathroom, and not even finish? jack got to tackle to door, which was coated with 3 different colors' worth of thickly slapped-on paint... he spent the day wearing down the high spots with an electric sander outside (there was no way that door would ever close again if we just painted on top of the existing stuff). i was in charge of the rest of the bathroom -- sanding down the doorjamb, then 3 coats of paint on the trim and one coat on the walls and ceiling. 1 more coat on the walls/ceiling this morning and we should be done. but yesterday, by the time 5pm hit, i was falling over exhausted and soooore. we showered and dragged ourselves out for indian food, and 1/2 hour after we came home i was passed out on the couch.

another awesome home/spring thing -- jack found me a lawn service yesterday. my neighbor has been doing my lawn since i moved in, but she hasn't mown at all this year. well, she's done her lawn, but not mine. hrm. at the same time, for the past 3 weeks the house has been dark and empty most of the time, and when she's home there's a slew of people with her cleaning out the garage and putting stuff into a u-haul... i'm thinking she's prepping the house to sell. (if anyone wants to be my neighbor, here's your chance. :) ) so i'm guessing she's been too busy to mow my lawn, or even tell me. it's been getting so bad i've been mortified... no lie, it was a good 6-8 inches high in places, and packed full of weeds. so yesterday while i was finishing painting, jack spied a landscaper guy mowing another neighbor's place, and went over and asked him about prices and all and hired him for me. his rates are reasonable, and jack said he seems like a nice guy. all i know is within 10 minutes he was over mowing my lawn, and 20 minutes later it looked fantastic. what a great way to end the day -- an almost-finished bathroom, a freshly-mown lawn, the physical effects of a hard day's work, and topping it off with indian food. i was really happy last night. :)

i had no meetings scheduled for today, so decided to take the day off and wander around new hope in the rain. i haven't been there since last summer, and it's so much fun to walk around and look in all the cool shops. i have to figure out some other stuff to keep me occupied though, because the contractors are going to be here for most of the day and i don't want to be in their way.

the bathroom is coming along well. i'm hoping it will all be done by the end of the day tomorrow, so i can spend the weekend painting and decorating. yay! i'm so impatient, for some reason i actually thought it'd all be finished yesterday and was disappointed when i saw there was still a bunch to be done. i know angus will be happy when it's all over -- he's been locked in my bedroom for 2 days now, because there's too much laying around down there (staples, dust, etc) for me to let him out at night. he's actually been very patient and well-behaved, but i think that's going to come to an end soon.

and oh, i heard back from my landscaper that they're finally scheduling me for the end of next week. so not much time left before the outside has had a makeover as well. woo-hoo!

* in 2 hours, the contractors will be here to start rebuilding my bathroom. eeeEEEEeeeee!

* looking forward to a vacation day on wednesday -- painting and finishing that bathroom, and doing some 80's prom wear shopping in new hope.

* i have 2 hoop orders to make for friends. friend hoop orders are the best. :)

* the sun is up now when i wake up in the morning! i can feel my S.A.D. going away, which is so awesome. it's so nice to have energy in the morning, and to not have to nap as soon as i get home from work.

* while i'm not a big fan of temps in the 90s, i love looking forward to driving home from work with the top down. it makes every day at 5pm feel like i'm going on a mini vacation.

today i gave the contractor the go-ahead to rebuild my little powder room. to think that after 2 years of it being gutted, i'll finally have that bathroom back, is so exciting. and it may be done as soon as next week! even better! i'll have to post before and after pix, because the "before" was so horrific. eeeeeeee!

now if only the landscaper would tell me when he can start. 3 weeks ago when i signed the agreement with him, he said everything would be done by mid april. well, it's creeping towards the end of april, and we haven't even scheduled the date yet. grrrrrrrrrr.

70 degrees today... thank you, THANK YOU mother nature for hooking me up. this has been such a stressful week, and driving home from work with the top down this afternoon will be the perfect way to end it. WOO freakin' HOO! and 70 again tomorrow... this is heaven.

you know what else is heaven? my weeping cherry tree is in massive full bloom right now. i'm starting to see a few tiny petals on my deck, so it should be raining pink in the next few days. for now, this is the beautiful sight i get to see out my kitchen windw every day:



and another beautiful sight: hoops ready for me to ship today. every time i make a hoop for someone, i get so giddy because they're all so pretty! (inkuwait - yours are the first two, they'll be on your doorstep next week!)



and last but not least: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JILL-O!!!!!!!!!

just got back from 3 hours of drilling at the dentist. the novocaine is just starting to wear off... this is the part i haaaaaaate. the left half of my lip, tongue and jaw are tingling and itching beyond belief, and there's nothing i can do to make it stop. this sucks.

jack and i are going to be hoop-making machines tonight, which will hopefully help take my mind off of the mouth. have i mentioned lately that he's completely awesome? all the lowes stores stopped using the connectors we prefer to make our hoops... the new ones they're stocking are longer in the middle, which creates a long flat part where the 2 connected parts meet. i don't want that, i think it looks bad. so he spent half the day researching where we could get the connectors i like, and found a distributor a few states over... in the meantime, he discovered that the lowe's in quakertown had 3 boxes left before they were switching their stock to the new ones (they sell them individually), and he bought every single one. 150 connectors. w00t! he rocks.

because of all the knots in my back, i dug into the back of my closet and found a little hand-held massager thing from bath & body works i'd bought a million years ago. last night jack was goofing off with it, and decided to see if the buzzing would freak angus out. just the opposite -- he went crazy in love over it. i had to shoot some video of his kitty massage because it was cracking me up so much...

so, a costume shop owner in RI was charged with cyberstalking one of her cometitors. basically, she went online and signed them up for all sorts of stuff, which caused them to get a whole slew of unwanted phone calls. so the local RI NBC affiliate went to her shop to get her side of the story.

this is so uncomfortable to watch.



is anyone else as impressed as i am over how the reporter is actually able to stay so professional throughout this whole thing?

one sign of the "eh" economy: junk mail. has anyone else noticed an increase in their junk e-mails over the last couple of months? companies that had never sent me e-mails before (like sears, who i have a credit card with) are now starting to flood my inbox with offers and deals. bleh. same with local businesses -- one thing that stinks about being a homeowner is how many flyers i get on my door or mailbox or driveway from local businesses all year. every day when i come home from work, i have to chase paper that blew off my mailbox or door. now that warmer weather is creeping in, all the lawn services and home improvement companies are papering the neighborhood trying to drum up business. and i get it, business is probably slow and everyone needs to keep going... but those flyers are more likely to steer me away from them.

facebook continues to amuse me. i just added a bunch of friends from all different periods of my life, including a girl i was good friends with until i moved to kuwait after 5th grade. she was this little nerdy, brilliant girl with thick glasses and amazing artistic skills... now she's a stunningly beautiful woman, about to have a baby, and she lives in the same town as me. too funny.

i really need to start pulling together a hooping routine i've had in my mind for a while. this is the wrong week to start, because i'm so exhausted from work and the shoulder is healing (but starting to feel better, thanks swingdoc). but of course that means i'm beating myself up for unwinding at night instead of working on it. *chuckle*

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