February 22, 2005

My day off...
Richard got up early Saturday and started on the kitchen cabinets. He painted the second set and they look great now. One final set to be primed, left to dry for a few days and then painted their final color. The kitchen looks bright and pleasing. I need to make some pot holders and maybe a runner or something to add a little more color. We then went to the Home Show here in town. Mostly a big disappointment. It was virtually the same as last year's show, even the "house" they built looked the same - the layout was different, but that was all. Now, inside that house they had one of those home theater things - the big screen TV, the recliner chairs with cup holders, the surround sound, the track lighting on the floors and steps that led to the higher seats. 2 rows of seats, too! Richard is now thinking of making such a room in our future home. And I have to admit Star Wars on the big screen WAS pretty awesome. I particularly wanted to see the relatively inexpensive poured concrete counters that are almost as good as super-expensive granite counters. The counters themselves were smooth and I could see they'd be easy to work on. The colors at the one display we stopped at were atrocious. Completely unnatural looking - hideous green, a bilious blue, mustard yellow and some rusty maroons. The only pretty one was a soft gray called platinum. Richard is positive he and Pa can make them prettier than what we saw. We shall see. The rest of the Home Show was the usual - flooring options, AC/heating, outdoor furniture, pure water displays, several jewelry cleaning folk (I bought one), sewing machines, hot tubs and manufactured outdoor buildings.We then went to the local pet shelter to check out a small half-Schipperke dog for a friend of mine online. He was adorable and if she decides to get him, she will drive down from her hometown to pick him up this Saturday. Sunday Richard wanted to drop by Best Buy. I needed an ink cartridge and he wanted to buy speaker cord to run the television set to my Bose 901 speakers (the poor man's home theater experience). He had great fun watching shoot-em-up macho flicks after that. It sounded like we were being attacked by a full complement of Army infantry. The explosions were particularly disconcerting. We then forced ourselves to go to the commissary and stock up on food. I've hit the pantry supplies pretty hard, had to refill the small kitchen containers of rice, sugar, flour, oatmeal and noodles. Richard made 15 bean soup for dinner. On Monday, I got a surprise day off - since the banks were closed only our backup drivers and the pharmacy drivers worked. So I hopped into the SUV and took it in for an oil change, state inspection and brake job. Its needed the brake job since before Christmas and I've been putting it off. Richard's car needs some work, too. Probably next Saturday for him. While the mechanics were working on my car, I was shuttled home to wait it out. I worked most of the day on editing the short story with the thought of getting it out this week. I also did some editing on HOME FOR CHRISTMAS, but not nearly as much as I wanted. My critique partners did an excellent job - I received 3 really good basic crits and worked for several hours to clarify, fix punctuation (I have this comma fetish) and ADD descriptive narrative. Generally, I add more descriptive narrative than they like, so they were a little surprised that I didn't have as much as I should! And today, I went to work. It was a busy day. Between several small crises that I had to call boss to help handle I did pretty good. That pretty much took up the morning! I didn't get started on my regular paperwork until well after lunch, and of course, I had 6 days piled up. The Valley manager was out of the office on Thursday and Friday and sent his paperwork today. I finally got it all wrapped up around 3:30. I then rushed out to deposit checks and mailed a critique partner a hard copy of her manuscript which I'd red-lined and marked all up on Friday and Saturday. She's in a rush to meet a deadline and we thought this would make it easier for her to do corrections than switching between screens (where I post it in a private file and she uses that as her base to fix it on the computer).So except for not working as diligently on my manuscript as I had intended, I accomplished quite a bit for me three day weekend. It works for me.