After 4 years I finally painted the kids rotten bathroom!

So its been 4 years now in this house. When we first moved in, every square inch of this house needed to be painted. I happily jumped into painting. In fact I love painting so much (yeah right) that I even painted several of the rooms more than once. After all of that painting, I just couldn't bare to even paint another room. Especially the kids bathroom/dark dirty dungeon. I hate that room so much. It has no window and my kids don't keep it very clean. YUCK!

So after 5 sample cans of blue and 4 samples of beige, we ended up with.... drumroll please... beige. Yep, thats right plain ol' beige. It took me several days to choose. Everytime I would walk by I would flip the light on, stick my head in and scrutinize all of the colors. Every color was close but not exactly what I wanted. It took days of this and finally I settled on what looked like a nice neutral beige. So off I go to Home Depot. Crap! It looks pink.

• Honey, does this look pink?
• Sister, does this look pink?
• Kids, does this look pink?

Ugghhh. It is pinkey beige. Gross. So then I was mad. I got out my 40 billion quarts of "sample" paint and started adding anything and everything to my pink beige paint. Finally, I achieved it. The ever elusive holy grail of neutral beige paint.

All Stars Swim Championship 2009

I am so proud of the kids. Our summer swim league is broken up into several divisions. Each division has their own championship, then the top 8 swimmers compete at All Stars. All three of the kids qualified for All Stars. They all did awesome today, but Kyle definitely stole the show. He took 1st place in all 4 of his events.

• 6 and under Freestyle Relay
• 6 and under Freestyle
• 7 year old Butterfly ( he is only 6, so he swam up)
• 8 and under Boys Freestyle Relay ( all of them 8 except for him)

The video is of his Freestyle event. Sorry about all of my yelling and shaking of the camera. I was super excited.

I'm still here!

No I have not fallen off the face of the earth. We put a new antivirus software on our computer and now it won't let me upload pictures from my camera. I am at my wits end trying to figure out how to fix it. Hopefully I can get this fixed soon, so I can show you what we have been up to.

Elton John and Billy Joel 2009!

Les and I went to see the Elton John & Billy Joel concert on Saturday night. It has been a dream of mine to see Elton in concert for quite some time. It was so awesome. They played for almost 4 hours. When they began to play "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me", I actually got a little teary eyed.

2009 is shaping up to be the year of dreams coming true for me. First the fence and now Elton... So dreamy.

Fence Update

Why is it that home improvement projects are never simple? After much debate , a couple of trips to Home Depot and one return of stain for another color, we decided to start staining the fence. My first thought was "oh know, what have I done to my beloved fence?". It looked like we painted it red. Les was spraying it and I followed behind with a roller to blend. That wasn't working , so we switched jobs. I proceeded to spray over the fence and nail the sides of our neighbors house. Total panic. We had to jump the fence because the neighbor's gate was locked. We scrubbed and scrubbed to no avail. I even tried using some 100% acetone nail polish remover. Ughhh. Eventually we got most of it off. Back to painting the fence.. I mean staining. The further we went the more I hated it. I was totally freaking out and threatening Les that he would have to tear it all off and fix it. We then decided to try a different approach. We hand rubbed in the stain onto every square inch of that fence. TOTAL NIGHTMARE! ... but I think it looks really nice.

New Fence... Finally a dream come true!

We have lived in our home for 4 years. For 4 whole years I have been begging my hubby to replace our hideous fence. It is truly the ugliest fence I have ever seen. For those of you that have seen it in person, you know I am telling the truth. Well finally dreams really do come true. It was too cold and wet out to finish the slate on the front porch, so we decided to work on the fence instead. By "we" I mean actually Les. I would go out occasionally to comment give opinion and offer up a nice drink of water. Just doing my wifely duties. I think he did a fantastic job.


BEFORE

AFTER

(Please excuse the pile of doggie doo doo in the foreground)

Barking Mad!

Have you ever been kept awake all night by a barking dog? Well I have. This weekend was cold in the low 40's at night. For South Texas, that is downright frigid. One of our blessed neighbors left there dog out for two straight nights. The dog barked and howled every 15 minutes. Then it would stop. Just as I was beginning to nod off that dang dog would start up again for another 15 minute session. I just lay there in bed thinking" am I the only one hearing this?". By 5:30 AM of night 2 of this I was seriouslly thinking of marching over there and opening the gate so the dog would run away. It is amazing how deranged our thinking can be when we are tired and sleep deprived. I think the neighbor was out of town and left their normally "inside" dog outside. They also did this over Thanksgiving. Luckily that was only one night, but now I think I need to address the problem.

So, my question is... What is the proper etiquette in addressing a irresponsible barking dog owning neighbor? I would love to hear your thoughts.