The Renovations And The Dog

The new kitchen counter top. I should have took before and after pictures but you will just have to trust me that this is a major improvement.

The glass tiles for the tub surround.

Tub and tiles

Little Frankie

She is almost all grown

Crying

Today my brother-in-law came and pulled the old bathtub out. Next week I will have the new Whirlpool jet tub that John ordered installed. I decided to go ahead with this. I know that he would want me too.

In November all his brothers came and put the siding on his garage. He would have loved seeing that project completed. All his tools sit where he laid them.

The thing is, where he is, he is not missing this stuff. I just miss him. All these things bring the reality home.

Sometimes the dog and I watch the garage door, hoping that reality would change and he would come through that door humming a tune like he always did. If I close my eyes tight enough I can almost see him.

I tell God that this is just too hard.

Six More sleeps

Let me tell you, I am getting ever so excited. It is better than Christmas exciting! New baby exciting! I can hardly wait to meet my newest grand daughter, Hannah. Somebody needs to come and tie me down. I think that if I get at some of the projects that I have lined up, it would help the time go faster. It needs to go faster! It has slowed to a crawl. That is what happens when you are looking forward to something. Have you ever noticed that? If it is something that you are dreading time speeds up. If it is something that you want to happen NOW it slows to a crawl.

John did the taxes today. I am so happy. I was so afraid that I was going to have to pay a lot of money. We get money back. Enough to put siding on the garage. I guess that means that we will be getting just a plain tub. John says the garage has priority. I guess it is the responsible thing to do. It just is not fun. It is like buying tires. That is no fun either. I told him that a spa tub would add value to the home. He said that siding on the garage would add just as much value to the home. Arghh! There is just no arguing with the man. He is right, of coarse! Maybe if I promise to go out and work a bunch? Thing is, he will want the money up front. He will say "Show me the money honey!"

The Sham Wow was not what made the dog stink. I guess I missed part of him on his previous bath. Just thought you would want to know. Now that I washed the Sham Wow, I think it will be more absorbent.

Maybe I Hava Spa!

Tomorrow is the big day. Think of me at 1:00 P.M. That is the time I will be meeting with the citizenship judge. I am nervous so I am not trying to think of it. I did some practice exams on-line and consistently was scoring 95% and even go a couple of 100% yet I still am nervous.

Today John and I went around looking at tub surrounds, tile and bathtubs. It is funny how one boo boo on the wall is turning into a complete bathroom reno.



I was going to try to paint the tub but John is against this. Seeing as how I hate the old tiles and want to replace them, it is a good time to change up the tub. These are the original tiles circa 1979. I picked out some white rectangular tiles and am going to accent it with some ice white glass tiles. John picked out a tub surround. He asked me what I thought of it. It is alright. I could live with it. But the tiles are EEEEEEEEE! I so love them. They are very affordable, just more work but I think that we can do it.


We did find a nice tub for 319.00 dollars. If we add another 1,500 dollars we can get it turned into an air tub. It is not really just a luxury. It would benefit John I am sure. Hot tubing does seem to ease his aches and brings him some relief. I don't have a problem spending this for that reason. I just have to convince him. Ooooh, que in the dreamy music!

November 19

November 19 is the day that we are to be in Seattle. That gives us a little more time to prepare. We have travel insurance to buy, car to get tuned up, winter tires to put on car, funding applications to fill out, accommodations to book, health directives and wills to update and who knows what else! We hope to get an appointment next week to talk to our social worker and put them to work! I am sure that they can get us going on the right track and bring anything to our attention that we may have overlooked. I will try to keep you filled in as we get more information. I will be posting this information over on The John Braun Page from now on.

I have been beefing up my bank account the last three weeks. I have the opportunity to work some more next week in Stores. I will try to get a little more time in there if I can. They are still working short. Things have been going a bit better there. Today my young co-worker and I did the job all by ourselves. We kicked it! Yee-Haw! Makes me feel great and we managed to do it without sour faces. Wish two other people could see that you can do a good job and have fun all at the same time. What a concept! I am going to be dreaming SKU numbers and computer programs. It still can make my head spin a little. I had to walk away a couple of times and let my brain rest a bit. Hahaha! I am mentally and physically tired. It is a very mental and physical job. I am amazed at how strong I still am. Today my young co-worker told me I was like the Hulk. What a machine. It is getting easier and easier to move those fifty pound boxes of paper.

Tomorrow John and I are going over to Jonathan's and Melissa's new house to help with the renovations and painting. I am glad that we will be here to see them moved into their new place and to see some of the finished work. That does not fix it for us not being here to great our new grand child. I do know what the color of the babies room will be. I will let them do all the telling. We had guessed correctly. I think that is what broke them down and they told us. I can't get the smile off my face.

Noah helped John mud the walls this evening. He killed a lot of bugs in the house as well. We think that the house had sat empty for awhile. It was overtaken by Maple Bugs. There are a lot less of them now. Good job Noah! I hate bugssess. I wish I had brought my camera. I will try to remember tomorrow and get some pictures up. I remember how excited I was when we moved into our first home which is by the way the same house we still are in 30 years later!

Having Fun

We are having fun visiting the kids and grandkids. The boys were excited to see us except Sammy was sad that we did not bring Roscoe. Becky almost almost but not quite broke down and phoned and told us to bring him. The power of motherly love never fails to amaze me!

We went along with Becky on her annual fall photo shoot. She was very frustrated with her camera so Glen gave her the green light to get a new one. This is lovely except now I want a new one too. I did manage to get a couple of nice pictures. Her new camera is going to blow my pictures out of the water. You have to have a fast camera to catch a nice picture of Sammy. He does not sit still and it is hard to get his face nailed down. I did get a lot of pictures of the back of his head. Her new camera has 10 times zoom capabilities! Sigh... I am sure she will have us out hiking around today to try out the new camera. So far it is a beautiful sunny fall day. Perfect!

John has the old shower removed so I imagine today he will get the new one installed. I am excited about this as I am a shower person and I have not been able to shower here for awhile. I hate rolling around in the bathtub. I feel like a beached whale. I hate it when have to play contortionist to rinse my hair under the faucet. I have issues with rinsing my hair in the tub water. I think that it leaves a residue of soap behind. I have to rinse with clear water. I have to! I must! Tub baths are ridiculous and waste time that I could be doing other stuff. Go John go!

The kids are amusing me. You should have seen the look on the grandpas' face when Sammy stopped for a second in front of him, holding his Teddy Bear up by the little stub of a tail that he has and declared: "Look Grandpa! This is the bears' penis!" Ben tells us he loves us all day long. Who wouldn't love that. I think we should move in. Hahaha!

Well, I hear life stirring upstairs. I wonder what today will bring? I am sure it will be sunshine and laughter.

Rainy Sunday

What A Dufus!

The weather today is overcast and was great for sleeping in. That is what I did. I haven't done that for a long time. I feel like a teenager. I woke up, turned and looked at what the clock had to say and wondered where my mom was with the vacuum cleaner. That is how she would wake me up on the weekends. Come to think of it...I wish she was waking me up with the vacuum because that would mean that I would not have to do it today. I still have not been able to teach the dog to do a great job at that. He is great for quick clean ups though. We should have named him Hover. If something is spilled we just yell: "Roscoe... come clean up" He is on the job. He just does not seem to care about non food stuffs. Don't you think that insert fake Scottish accent here "Hover...come clean up" would sound better?

John is feeling somewhat better today. I really hope that these
Shingles are on their way out. He has really been suffering with them and pain medications don't work against his poor screaming and raw nerve endings. He is much more cheerful today. He is taking on the phone to Jonathan right now. First the conversation goes to home renovations. Jonathan has a new interest in home renovations. After discussing the renovations they moved on to sports. I am missing my grand kids. We should be able to have them over now because the Shingles rash has dried out and there should be no more risk of the kids getting Chicken Pox.

Well that is aboot all I have to say today. Not a typo...I am just speaking Canadian. Oh...one more thing...I did conk out on the Open Door challenge. I did run out of doors. Apparently, Angela has some fantastic doors from when she was in Spain. She was telling me about one door that was in a castle that she was visiting along with Diane and Joanne. It had one of those little slits that you can open and peek through. When Diane came to come through the door Angela held the door shut, opened the little slit and told Diane that she could not come in that door and that she had to go way over to another tower and climb up there and come over from there. Of coarse there was no connection from tower to tower. Diane believed her. She got a great shot of Diane over in the other tower yelling. Hahaha! She gets this kind of behavior from her father.

Que The Dreamy Music

The ceiling is not finished but John says he can work around things and that the rest of the job won't be messy. I think that the bathroom turned out nice. I wasn't convinced at first because the color is dark. The white accents look nice. The girls got the paint cheap because they bought mismixed colors.


The taupe walls look cozy. It will look even better when Angela gets her pictures up and the rest of the room put together. I am amazed at how much of her stuff fit into this room. It is much larger than her room in her old suite. The white statue is a lamp...Gene Kelly...Singing In The Rain. I love that lamp. I hope that the cats can't get up there and break it. That would be a tragedy.


Looks a little bare but the pictures will fix that. I love the green accents that she has going here. They go well with the taupe. Again...I was concerned about how dark the paint was. I think that the girls were nervous too but it worked out well.



Libby is helping by checking to make sure that there was nothing left in the boxes. I think she would love it if we left a few behind for her use. An empty box might come in handy when she gets sick of Roscoe.


She got stuck. She was nattering at me to get her out. She decided to hang there until I decided to help her. I had better go and check her during the day as we are keeping the cats in the basement. She may get stuck again. Really...I think she has just got lazy as she aged. She is very good at duping me. She knows how to work it! She can act quite pitiful when she wants too.

Angela has a way to go yet. She did not get much accomplished downstairs yesterday. We went and cleaned her old suite. We had to clean the oven...defrost the fridge...vacuum... wash walls and scrub the bathroom. All that is left is to mop the floors. She will do that on Tuesday before she goes to do the final walk through. Moving is such hard work. Roscoe is surveying the damage. He always get worried when we are disassembling things. I think if he could talk he would be saying "Bad dogs...you guys are very bad dogs! You are going to get us all in trouble."

Moving Day

Stupid snow! What would be a moving day without snow? This should be such fun for all involved. The reno in the basement is not finished and it is a mess. John is going to go take care of Noah this afternoon because we figured that I would be needed more here. List of things to do this morning:

1. Shovel snow so it is not tracked in and repeat the process if it starts snowing more which it may as it says in the forecast. Have you ever noticed that the weatherman can always be relied on to be telling the truth when he forecasts bad weather but when he forecasts good weather it never seems to come to pass somehow?

2. Clean up construction materials and painting junk and vacuum basement. All this stuff is sitting out in the middle of the way. Finding a place to stash it temporarily so that it is handy for my handyman to resume the reno will be tricky.

3. Clean the bathroom. Due to the construction dust is clinging to everything. It seems kind of an exercise in futility but John promises the messy stuff is done.

4. Do the supper dishes. Yes my supper dishes are still hanging around. I worked yesterday so I didn't have a lot of extra energy. Excuses! Excuses! LOL

5. Go to the store and find something to feed all the movers and make lunch for everybody. I wish I had had the foresight to make a large pot of chile in advance. I think that they will have to do with soup and sandwiches and cookies.

6. Have a cup of coffee and think about the list. I am sure that I am missing some vital chore. Coffee helps me procrastinate. Did I write that? I meant to say think!

7. See the coffee helped. FEED THE CATS!

Mood, Garden And Reno

It never fails to amaze me on how sunshine effects moods. Last week I felt so terribly depressed. It seemed that there was nothing to look forward to. I know that the next year holds a lot of challenges but usually I manage to stay somewhat positive and know that things do have a way of working out. Last week I felt that nothing would work out and that life in general was futile. With a day of sunshine, my whole outlook has improved and I know that we will manage.

Yesterday I applied for a job doing light assembly in a first aide kit production place. I am hoping to get something for May and June in order to sock some money away for our possible trip to Seattle. I have hours booked at the hospital for July and will be probably getting some more for the summer. I do hope to keep a little time free to vacation. My goal is to save $3,000. I already have $3,000 so that puts us at $6,000. That is very close to the $7,000 that I think it will take. See! Not impossible at all. If I don't get the production line thing I will apply at the teleservice center and be a bill collector. They will hire people on the spot. Apparently they tend to treat their staff like kindergarten babies and it is likely that my boss may be only 19 years old but I think that I could do it for a little while. Seriously, most people don't last more than three months.

Today I got the house cleaned. After feeling so despondent and unmotivated last week, it needed that. John, Angela and I went out for lunch. (If you could call McDonalds lunch!) Ha! it was my idea. I had a strange craving for cheeseburgers and fries all week. That is probably a residue of my depressed state. After that we went to Canadian Tire where John bought a drill press on sale. I got some Dahlias and Anemones and Freesia for the front rock garden. Don't they look colorful?

Then we went to the Co-op to get a new suspended ceiling for the basement bathroom. Now we can get all the reno finished before Angela moves back home next week. John is down in the basement now getting the ceiling ready. He has to remove the lower beams that held the old ceiling on. He says: " that because he installed the old ceiling so well that he could have hung a truck up on it" and "basically removing all of that is a bitch". Hehehe! I love it when he talks like that and he has a hammer in his hand. It all sounds so normal because it is so normal.

Becky and Angela painted the spare room. They taped the ceiling tiles. When they removed the tape they were left with this mess. Now we have to try to paint it away. We are going to put some quarter round up there but that won't cover all of the flaws. The ceiling did need to be freshened up anyway. We are hoping to get it finished by the weekend so Angie can just move her stuff in.

VPX Cordless Power Drill

John is installing the new thermostat for the furnace. He is using his new VPX cordless drill. He is around the corner giving me an ongoing rave about the drill complete with demonstrations as to why this drill is so incredible. "Like you know when you have a drill with a keyless chuk and the armature spins? Well, this one doesn't!!" He drills the air. I nod my head and say "how nice" and "Wow" I have no idea what he is talking about. I am sure he bought the thermostat so he would have a reason to use the new drill.

He keeps having me to come over and see if I can read the little digital writing that is on the thermostat. My eyesight is worse than his. I remarked that maybe if there was better lighting I could read it. This started the search for his new Canadian Tire wind up flashlight. His eyes were sparkling because not only would he be able to use the drill but joy of joys, has a reason to use the wind up flashlight!

The thermostat says that it is 23 degrees C. I think it is wrong. I don't think the furnace has come on since he started this procedure. I don't have the heart to tell him. I am going to go and put a warm sweater on now.

Moans and sighs are being emitted from over there where the work is happening. Not good. Ohh-Ooo! Now we are seeing what happens. He says he would hate to have to put the old thermostat back in although it would give him another chance to get the drill back out.

READY FOR SUMMER

THANK YOU JONATHAN AND MIKE