Thursday, November 27, 2008

Happy Thanksgiving & Construction messes

The picture on top is what the living room/hall/foyer looked like on Tuesday. The bottom picture is what it looked like yesterday when I got home at 6ish. We have no electricity in part of the living room, dining room, or kitchen. Luckily all three of those rooms do have some power in the plugs. Also the appliances are on different breakers. Our electrician was an idiot, I believe. He had to come back twice after we moved in and it would have been more times, if Jeff hadn't just figured it out on his own. But we are talking electricity—the one that kills if not used properly.

Today, Jeff has been dealing with attic insulation. The drywall on part of the ceiling had to be taken down, as well as, some 2 x 4's. This means a ton of insulation has fallen to the floor. So far, he is at 10 bags of insulation to be put in the dumpster. At some point either today or tomorrow we are hanging new drywall on the ceiling. Luckily it is only a few pieces that need to go up. Although, I think I prefer hanging the ceiling rather than walls. I don't remember, I have deleted the Thanksgiving of 1995 and summer of 1996 from my brain. When we decided to try for a baby, we also decided to finish the basement. So, the summer before Deirdre was born, we drywalled. Hard to believe that was 12 years ago.

This is the first remodel that we have done that doesn't have us thinking "resale" value. We might have really changed how much our house is worth by deleting an upstairs bedroom, but at the same time we are making the remaining two rooms larger. But we aren't selling until D leaves for college, if then. Who knows what the market will be like. No matter what we sell the house for, it will most likely be more than we built it for even with the additional costs of the remodeled kitchen, both upstairs bathrooms, the finished basement, and now this one.

I have a pumpkin pie baking in the oven as I type this. I love pumpkin pie! I like pecan pie even more, but D doesn't so it's pumpkin for us. We are having Cornish Hens, stuffing, mashed yams (mashed potatoes using a yam), peas, maybe spinach souffle (I had to buy it when I saw Albertson's had it), rolls, gravy, and pie with real whipped cream. Jeff doesn't really like turkey and D hates it, so Cornish Hens it is. Cornish Hens are easier to cook than a turkey anyway. I am also about to make the honey butter for the scones for tomorrow's bake sale in Manti. I have the dough thawing for the scones. I also have Rice-Crispy treats, brownies, and maybe sugar cookies to make. This is one of our fundraisers for Girl Scouts. Besides a small profit from cookie sales, as a Service Unit, we do two big fundraisers: the Manti bake sale, and during pageant time we clean the tables at the "food court" and hand out the Sanpete Messenger's pageant insert to the people entering the temple grounds. The majority of girls in our Service Unit live in Manti. As a matter of fact, our Junior troop there lost more than half its girls to aging out (They should have come to mine, but didn't reregister.), the troop was down to about 7 girls. She is back up to 17!! I can barely get 5 to come to our meetings.

Well have a Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I'm off to clean and cook.

Friday, November 21, 2008

Volunteer thoughts

As the SUD-Bud for our Service Unit, I am in charge of finding ways to honor our volunteers. For our October meeting, I copied an idea that I received from Jostens many years ago. It involved M&M's as "pills". Each color represented a "cure" for a different problem. I made cute little "diaper pouches," filled them with M&M's. I wanted everyone to have at least two of each color and then a few more. They took forever to make 40 of. The top one shows the different components and the bottom one shows the finished product.

supplies used: all SU DP Ghostly Greetings, CS Basic Black, Whisper White, and Pumpkin Pie, Batty for You, Pumpkin Pie classic ink, scallop and 1 3/8 punches, misc. ribbon (from WalMart :( ), I printed the list on my laser printer on white cardstock.
For November's meeting I enlisted Deirdre's help. She doesn't like to CASE (Copy and Share Everything) ideas. I keep telling her it's how teachers function. Beg, borrow and steal ideas! She was very unhappy that I don't have a lot of patterned papers in fall colors. I tend to go for soft subtle backgrounds. I had just purchased some "holly" paper from ZIM's (25 sheets for $2), but it looks fall, not Christmas and I had another patterned "fall" color paper that she liked (also from ZIM's going out of business sale). I was going to make all 36 like the more complicated one below, but decided it was going to take waaay tooo long!!!


supplies used: SU scallop square, scallop circle, horizontal slot, and tag corner punches, orange cardstock unknown source, four different fall ribbons from Michael's, patterned paper from ZIM's, laser printer for tag.
We had a great assembly line going. Deirdre punched the orange tags and put the scallop papers on the mints and stuffed the bags with mints. I punched the scallops (those punches are a devil to use) and tied the bags closed and tied the tags on. They didn't take nearly as long as the previous month's. Then I left them at home! So everyone will get two in December.

I already have my idea planned. I am going to use my new BigShot and new Top Note Bigz die. I am doing red/white peppermints in bags with the TopNote used as the closer. I just don't have the "inspirational" saying or the stamp set decided yet. I already have the paper for the closers and the peppermints too. I need to get working on these soon too since the house is going to need my help soon too.

An update

Yes, that really is a squid on Deirdre's head. All the girls did it during the dissection lab at CIMI.

Life has been really crazy the last few weeks. When we drove up to get Deirdre from the airport we were re-ended by another driver on I-15. Some idiot stopped in the car-pool lane causing all of us behind him/her to slam on our brakes. The woman behind just couldn't get her Suburban to stop fast enough. Our van was in the shop for three weeks and it cost her insurance $4500.

Below are the before and current pictures of Deirdre's old room. We decided to remodel. So far there is no drywall in two of the upstairs bedrooms or flooring. We are down to waverboard in bedrooms and the hall. I'll try to update as we go. Or I really should say as Jeff goes, since he is the one who is doing all the work so far.


There seemed to be so much more to update, so I was putting it off. But now, I can't seem to remember any of it. Clearly a reason for updating more often.