I Have a Lot of Plaster Dust in My Nose

I think I have officially gone off the deep end. The last time we did a "project" I silently vowed that it would be my last. All I wanted was to get some new living room furniture and to paint the living room a color that didn't look like last week's moldy supper that I forgot to throw away. Simple right? Not if you live in my house. John took this as an opportunity to remove the wall between the dining room and the living room because it wasn't done "right." Turns out he was correct, but it turned a relatively simple project into a not-so-simple one that took several weeks to finish.

But I digress. Anyone who knows me knows that my dining room has been reluctantly transformed into my "craft room." If it wasn't supposed to be a dining room, this would not be a problem. I am into paper-crafting and I have a lot of supplies. Turns out, the dining room is big enough to hold all my supplies and it is conveniently situated next to the kitchen which has a tv so that I can watch it while I Create, and has ample counter space to spread my supplies on.

However, as I mentioned, this is actually a dining room. It's not supposed to hold crafting supplies. It's supposed to be used for dining. I caught a break last year from temporarily cleaning it out for thanksgiving because my mother decided to host that instead of me, but this year I feared the worst. Where the heck was I going to put all that stuff so that people would have a place to eat on thanksgiving? The answer: the spare bedroom.

This is one view of the room before its amazing transformation into my new, cool stamping studio. Why is there a big whole in the plaster, you may be thinking? This particular bedroom has walls that are in very poor condition. (I found this out the last time I painted it. Yes, that was me that decided on the bizarre random stripe, and no, I don't know what I was thinking). So I decided that it was time to rip out those old, crappy plaster walls and re-do them with nice, new plaster walls. And while I was at it, I thought it would be nice to replace the old, crappy windows with new, fancy, energy efficient ones. Sounds like a good idea, right?

Construction, or should I say destruction, began this morning. It will not end soon. I live in an old house which means lots of lathes (as you can see in the pic) and lots of horse-hair plaster (hence the plaster dust in my nose). Unfortunately, we only have one level B suit and I didn't get to wear it. I mostly stayed out of here while the destruction was going on, but I did enter on occasion to bundle up and bring out all those lathes. What I was doing in the meantime was stripping the paint off of the trim: windows, doors, baseboards. Yahoo.

I know it will eventually be done, but man, I gotta tell you hauling all that ridiculously heavy plaster debris downstairs and out to the bagster is hard work. One thing that I realized is that I'm not "young" anymore and doing all this hard labor is way harder now than it was ten years ago. My back is killing me and I'm tired of trying to get all that plaster dust out of my nose.

By the way, several years ago we hired a local company to blow insulation into the outside walls because we knew there was nothing there and it would help somewhat with the obscenely high heating bills we were paying. Although I can honestly say we did see some benefit from it, as you can see from this picture, trying to blow insulation into an old house is a crap-shoot. This is blown fiberglass insulation, which is not supposed to settle as much as the blown newspaper type of insulation, but settle it has. Something to think about.

The Mysterious Rash

Let me first begin by saying that I am not a marketing expert in any sense of the word. I am, however, a consumer and like most consumers (and most people, really) I know what I like and what I don’t like. I was searching on eBay recently for anklets and happened on a listing where the thumbnail was intriguing enough that I clicked on it to get a better look.

I really wish I hadn’t. I think feet and ankles are not the most attractive feature on anyone, but this is just wrong. If I made jewelry for a living, I would pick someone with really nice ankles to model my creations. Not someone who is covered in bruises and who has recently gotten over a mysterious rash. I’m just saying.

Nate's Birthday

The birthday boy. Some of those boxes are way too big.

Ah. So that's what was in the BIG box.

Born On Dates

The experiment: Can John really tell the difference between new and old beer? He claims that he will not drink beer that has a "born on date" more than two months ago on account of it tasting foul. (This is Bud Light we're talking about). So Scott challenged him to a blind taste test. The beer on the right was born within the last two months, the beer on the left is from earlier this year (I can't remember the exact date, but it was way more than two months ago).

Here, he's drinking the newer beer.

This is the "old" beer. He thought Scott was playing a trick on him and that both beers were from the same bottle. However, in an uncanny ability to sniff out the newer beer, he did claim that one tasted really good.

The conclusion? Who knows. He still won't drink a beer more than two months old.