What I did over Christmas Break.
Well, after ten days of having my honey around, he's back at work. *sigh* I miss him already. It's the first time he's had more than a weekend off in a year--and I'm not even sure we should say it was that recently, since last year we were moving at Christmas, making the 8-hour drive between Sylvan Lake and Peace River 3 times in a week, and packing and unpacking plenty of boxes and furniture on either end.
After that very long introductory sentence, I just don't know where I can take this post from here.
Just kidding. While Jason was home, we managed to get lots of "around-the-house" stuff done, as well as plenty of visiting, too. By the way, if anyone was wondering, Amanda had a baby boy on December 22nd, named Oakley Leo. He was a whopping 10 lbs. 3 oz! Good thing he was 2 weeks early! Yikes! Both he and Mommy (and the rest of the family, too) are doing well.
We got to enjoy a brief visit with my father and brother, as they came up in Dad's cool new pick-me-up truck on Christmas Eve, and left around noon on Boxing Day. (For the un-Canadianized, that would be the 26th.) There were a lot of X-Box, turkey, movies, and various and sundry card games enjoyed during their whirlwind trip, along with some good visitin', too. We wished it could have been longer, but! I am totally excited that my brother is going to be moving back to ye olde Alberta in February sometime. After six years in Seattle area, this will be a total blessing to know that we can see him even more often, and that the gag gifts will be cheaper to send in the mail.
After they left, Jason got busy cleaning out/organizing our storage room, so we can actually call it "useful space" now. All of the items we didn't know what to do with as we unpacked, or as Jabin outgrew his baby items, were just kind of thrown haphazardly in there with any tools from various renovation projects. Yay! for organized space.
The guest room is almost finished being repainted—I have to get down there after this and finish up the last bit of the walls. When Jason gets home in half an hour I'm going to run down to the hardware store and buy new trim. I'm thinking that the room hasn't been painted in at least a decade, and the walls sure showed it. Not only that, the last person to paint it also decided the ceiling tiles should be the same colour as the walls, but instead of removing the tiles, they just painted them as-is—right over the metal frame, and everything. It looks terrible. Now we are trying to decide if we should replace them all, or just keep on with what the last person did and re-paint them into a fresher, brighter colour.
The room already looks WAY better than it did when we started. Best part--I didn't even have to go buy paint, as I am just using up paint I over-purchased when we painted the office a year ago.
So. That is one more renovation project we will soon be able to check off our "to-do" list.
I didn't get nearly as much done on the holiday break as I thought I would, but I always have a tendency to over-estimate my capabilities. I think I still work on the "if I didn't have kids" time-table, forgetting how much of my day is required just to look after them. They don't really "get it" if you decide to skip making lunch because you just want to do one more coat. What's with that, anyway? (You'd think that by now, it wouldn't be so easy to forget that. I guess I'm a slow learner. Or an eternal optimist.)
Oh, and if any of you thought we were ignoring your calls, we just weren't answering because the phone line went whacko on Thursday morning, and the Telus guy couldn't get here to fix it until today. So, if you call now, we promise to answer.
Anyhoo, I better go see if I can get anything done downstairs before I have to head downtown. Sorry for the boring post--I'm just getting back in the swing. Hope you all had a very wonderful New Year!
What did you do on your break?
