Whistle While You Work
Well, Mark took my advice about taking a couple days off to work on the basement. He announced this decision last Thursday, and emailed me to call the Carpet Guy to see if he could be here on Tuesday to install the carpet. Now, after this long, I know Mark and did NOT call the Carpet Guy. Mark is not lazy by any stretch of the imagination, but he does tend to be meticulous and a perfectionist, so he works s-l-o-w (and he HATES, LOATHES even, to hear this. It really hurts his feelings to have it even alluded to. However, I write the blog. He is perfectly capable of coming here and announcing all my faults, which there are plenty, to all of you.) I just knew the basement wouldn’t be ready. He worked Thursday and Friday nights, most of Saturday. Sunday we rested. Along comes Monday, and it was a lovely day. Tuesday was going to rain, so Mark just had to get outside and plant 50 trees, and landscape a better slope around the house, and pretty soon the day is gone, but Mark enjoyed the outdoors. Tuesday is rain, but that’s OK, we can just sit in the garage and stain and polyurethane the baseboards and trim, then install them. Indeed, everything is now stained (except the doors. Mark says we can do those after the carpet is in, but that is a bad habit of ours. Half finishing a project, and saying we’ll finish the rest “later”.) Everything is also polyurethaned. The doors all have their trim (except 3 doors at the top, which need custom fit pieces that we’ll do “later” (uh-oh!) And Mark starts in on the baseboards of one room. He finishes the room (yay!) but calls it quits because he wants to relax for the rest of the day. And then gets a little miffed when I said “I knew I shouldn’t call the Carpet Guy!” Now I write this with a smile on my face, but slightly gritting my teeth. 
Mark says “Well, at least the trees are planted!” to which I reply “You mean the trees that we had until Memorial Day to worry about?” And then I apologize, we kiss and make up and all that sappy stuff, yadda, yadda. So we are all a little tense around here, the end is in sight, but always seems out of our reach, the job left could be done in 1 day by someone who is trained, but we aren’t. OK, vent over, life is good, we’re all healthy, the basement will eventually be finished (I’m sure I can check out of the insane asylum to see it! Oops, there’s the negativity again! I’ll try harder!)
The above picture has a creepy story behind it. Last night we drove a friend of Alisa’s home, taking Reese, Dylan, and Alisa with us. We left the older three at home, thinking them mature enough to watch themselves (and hey, Zach is 13, I’ve babysat since I was 10!) This morning I got on the computer to upload photos and noticed 3 that I didn’t take. They were from the kids. The first two had them posing as if they were hurting each other (with a knife and with fists!) and the last posed as if they were friends again. They apparently thought this was not only funny, but wouldn’t anger Mark and me, but boy were they wrong and did they get chewed out. I told them I was going to post the offensive photos to the blog, but didn’t tell them it would be the last. The others are now deleted and hopefully they learned their lesson!
