I am so far behind today that I can't start on today until I finish yesterday, lol. bobbi-- what time is the BBQ? Count me in! What should I bring? Something chocolate?! Btw, okay for Christie to become pres, but he is NOT going to CA! Trust me, that man is Joisy through and through! Overland--Welcome! Don't ever lose the accent, it is what makes you, You! Haven't lived in NY for 16 years, but you should hear me tawk! Fuhgheddaboudit! ASV-- We used to have the one day a year thing of big junk collection. (My favorite trash day of the year!) But now they say they can't afford it because people had too much junk last time. (Well yeah, when you wait too many years for them to offer a day, it builds up. Mostly it is out in everyone's backyard or on their front porch...) You could hear the cars coming and going up and down the block in the dark. Guess everyone thought we must have good junk around here like Astraea! It was like backwards Christmas the next morning. Instead of seeing what you got, you went to see what was still left in front of your house. One year, someone even stopped to take the neighbor's "golden toilet" as my sarcastic teen daughter referred to it. My best find by the side of the road--An old oak filing cabinet. 3 file size drawers on the bottom that fit on a base, topped by za bunch of couple inch deep drawers to handle papers and files lying down. Another piece topped the whole thing off. OUT AT THE CURB! like it was junk. Don't know if I squealed the brakes on my car when I stopped and threw it in my little Ford Escort with the hatchback! Astraea--You must just have good junk if it's almost all gone! trasgorshek--Thanks for the welcome! Okay, now over to today's post to see if anyone has gotten into trouble yet. Fingers crossed! Just kidding.

No, we are still working. I had to walk away for it for a bit, which is a good thing. The holidays kept me busy, and I just started looking at it again with the hopes of a different perspective. I have been paying close attention to the kitchens in the houses I vivisection over the holidays, and I started attending open houses in the area to get some ideas. I am fairly sure I M changing the two window layout on the front 16' wall to an oversized window. I was thinking of extending the cabinets onto the 5 1/2 foot wall and continuing the cabinets on the 13' wall as well. The 8 foot wall the runs along the bathroom I was considering leaving that bare, which would allow for a 2-3 person island and a place for the dog bowls. Of course that can change. Since we are doing this in two stages, I really have time to play with it. I just want to figure out where my windows are going. It would be nice to have the layout completely done so that I could do the kitchen electric at the same time the electrician is here installing for the upstairs.

back....exhausted. We saw the California daughter and her family off at the airport, and went home to bed. I think we slept at 2.30 am. I pulled down all the blinds, so we both slept till about 8 am. Spent the morning watching the Republic Day parade on TV, having coffee, dozing off... then GD arrived, toting a huge bag. Homework, she said. My daughter had gone to office. So we had lunch, hubby went for a nap, and I supervised GD's printing out of biology homework. 73 pages! I gave her an old file cover and the punch. Then I found some separators. Then I produced a pen. Now we are in business to get the bio homework done! She is a reluctant homeworker, alas. Now I shall make noises like a grandmother and insist that she sits down to finish her work. More tomorrow, but I need to have a nap myself.

I want to add - anyone who’d come to my home and say something like ‘your home is lovely but that stuffed elephant toy really doesn’t go’ or ‘well that tuna can cat bed is an interesting design choice, you couldn’t find something that coordinated with the sofa?’ is welcome to take themselves right back out again. Yes, we try not to have a huge mess and I did consider the color scheme of the room when buying Vinny Max a new bed recently, but our pets live with us, they get to have their own space and stuff just like anyone else in the house. (Actually right now we have a bit of a design nightmare as we got Vinny Max a crate to use when he was new and we didn’t know how he’d be left home alone - I previously had a dog who tried to go through a window, so I don’t like to take chances - and it turns out he LOVES it and likes to just hang out in there with his daily chew or for a midday nap. So we’re trying to figure out how to have a crate for a 90lb dog in the living room without it being quite so much of a focal point. Because crates are really not attractive. We might give up the bottom half of the coat closet and build his crate into there - so the bottom would be the door to his crate and then the top half would be doors into a shorter hanging space for everyday jackets and so on. Long coats would have to go elsewhere.)