Fireplace, Basement Lights, and Trash Action

As Karen prepares ham balls for dinner, I'm back at the keyboard after two more full days of vacation activity. Well, disregarding the wonderfully slow start each morning...we've put in full days. And if you count all the evening hours we're putting into the second puzzle...we're actually working overtime!

On Friday we attacked the closet upstairs in our "library." Actually, it's not a library, it's the one of our two tiny "guest" bedrooms upstairs that just happens to have most of our books in it (as well as far too much stuff in the closet). Once we fought our way into the closet, we sorted through clothes, sorted through stuff that'd been stored and stacked in there for years, boxed, organized, trashed, and made another drop-off run to Goodwill. After home-made pizza for dinner, we watched a movie, and then returned to the second jig saw puzzle of our vacation. Remember the airplane one? That one only took us two evenings to finish. This new one? It's another shaped puzzle of 750 pieces but we've already been on it three nights and we'll probably still be working on it next week!

Here's Karen and the puzzle after we'd spent three nights (approximately fifteen hours) on it. We plan to hit it again tonight after dinner.

This morning I repaired our fire place--every so often I need to repair the mortar between the fire bricks. Then we ran some errands and returned home to hang the two flourescent light fixtures we just bought in the basement: one over Karen's work space and one over my work bench. That reminds me, I need to post a photo of the bench now that it's completed.

Tucker supervises my fireplace repairs.

The completed basement workbench in my "man cave."

After the lights were hung from the floor joists with care, Karen and I headed out to pick up three full cans of trash that had collected in the alley behind our house. It was a mess left over from the flocks of crows that rip up everyone's trash, the big windstorm of a couple weeks ago, and the fact that some folks have a lower sensitivity to where they toss their garbage than others. I'm a firm believer that trash attracts trash, so having a nice afternoon of weather to get out there for an hour or so and pick it all up was a blessing.

Have a great day tomorrow and we'll be back on the blog Monday! See you then.