I’m in such a great mood. I’m sure it will be wiped out when I have to go to work on Monday. I think the “honeymoon” phase when everything is bright and wonderful and carefree at work (don’t get me wrong, it hasn’t been carefree, I’m just talking about my outlook on my job) is over, and the drudgery sets in. I’m exagerrating, it’s not drudgery. I really do like my job. Still! It’s amazing, really. I do however, wish I didn’t have to dress up all the time. That IS drudgery.

But I digress. I didn’t want to talk about work, I wanted to talk about the weekend, and being happy and carefree! I was in such a great mood when I picked up my kids on Friday. I have been reading all these crafty home-makery blogs lately (loobylu and wee wonderfuls in particular, see my side list) and have been really WANTING to be crafty and MAKE something! MAYBE WITH TOOTHPICKS, or my SEWING MACHINE! I have a baby quilt I started before Jocelyn was born that I could finish, or a little blankey I was crocheting that I could also finish, but all this requires time, and I’m kind of short on that, so I was kind of tickled when I ran across these easy paper toys that take no time at all. Just cut them out and glue, and you’re good to go, on most of them. I made this sun box, and this bug box for Ethan, and next I’m going to make this little fuschia box for Jocelyn. Since they only take about 5 minutes, it won’t bother me *too* much when they get ruined, as I’m sure they will. I’m going to make myself a little box too to put paperclips in on my desk.

So anyway, on the way home, I was telling the kids all the fun things we were going to do this weekend. Make paper boxes! Go on bike rides! Make cookies! Maybe dig in the dirt! We got home and I — OH! I forgot to tell you. I got my BIKE! Yay! So, we got home and some neighbor kids were out playing, so while Ethan and Jocelyn joined in, I tried to hook up the bike trailer to my bike so I could take the kiddos for a spin, and I thought I had it all worked out. Loaded them in, but the wheels were flat, so not even making it out of our driveway, we came back with promises of “daddy will fix it” and we’d go out again tomorrow. So, today, James filled the tires, and I took them out around the block, but I obviously hadn’t hooked it up correctly, because it kept hitting the spokes of my back wheel (bad! bad! bad!) and it turned out when I got back, the gripper thingee had rubbed some of the paint off my bike frame (sad! sad! sad!) but oh well, and I have touch up paint and James figured out the correct way (i love that man. He can figure things out, AND reach things on the top shelf!) to hook up the trailer, so we have another outing in our future, this time, I’m going to make James pump up his tires too and come with! And it will be LENGTHY!

The short jaunt we took around the block was a big hit. I stopped to talk to my friend and after about 10 seconds, Ethan voiced his frustration with a sturdy holler of, “LET’S GET GOING!” and as I rounded the next corner, he urged me to go “FASTER FASTER!” This bike thing was a great idea.

So after bike adventures this morning, we hpoped in the car and drive over to a furniture city said friend had told me she’d gotten some furniture at, and damn, they had some nice things at good prices. We bought a coffee table. I’m so excited at the thought of having adult furniture again. We banished our coffee table out of the family room when Ethan was a baby and while it does make the room a lot bigger, it will be nice to have a coffee table to .. you know, put stuff on!

So bike, check. Craftiness, check. Furniture, check. that just leaves the spring which is sprunging all over the place, and bunko. i may not get to bunko today. I’ve been checking my little seeds and growing somewhat saddened each day as nothing is showing yet. Every day I think, “why did I think these seeds would be any good, anyway? SILLY AMY! SEEDS ARE FOR .. GARDENERS!”

And at first look today, I was still sad.

But then I looked CLOSER!!

I’m not completely useless as a garden type person! Yay!

I have more to write, but Ethan is talking my ear off about trains and diesel trains and diesel gas and my “Mmm hmmm”s and “yes dear”s are wearing thin and Jocelyn needs to be gotten up! So more later.

Take a look at this, in the meantime.

– amy listens to Ethan: “Some trains have snow plows. We need new batteries in our train. Mommy, this is a tape measure. Am I 4 yet? Mommy, I’m going to measure your computer.”

i think i had some freaky food poisoning or something. i have heard that there is no such thing as a “24 hour bug” and in actually, it is food poisoning. little scary.

I had toast this morning and have been feeling all surreal and light headed all day, until *ding* I thought, hmm, maybe I should eat something. So I did.

Now I feel all surreal, woozy, and leaden-tummied.

Can’t wait for work to be over.

I stayed home and worked yesterday because I just felt kind of run down and needed a working in your jammies kind of day. I actually got quite a bit done and was feeling pretty good.

Then at 1am last night, I awoke with an urgent need. Oh yes, the urgent need to vomit. And so crawl to the bathroom I did (i have never been more happy that we have cleaning ladies as when I was sitting in that bathroom alternately clutching the porcelain and spewing out my stomach’s innards, and curled up in a fetal ball on the floor) and puked and shivered and puked some more.

the kind man who sleeps in the same room as me heard my feeble cries and came and brought me tylenol, ginger ale, and more blankies. The tylenol and the ginger ale didn’t last long in me (i drank them way way too quickly) and after a fruitless bath to try to stop the shivering, I climbed back into bed to shiver, now WET, underneath the mountain of blankets. The trash can came in handy, when the rest of the ginger ale was evicted.

So now, here I am at home, hoping the folks at home don’t think I am just playing hooky (I’m sick! I really am!) feeling miserable and scared to eat or drink anything for fear of it coming back up. I’m taking small sips of water and gingerale and seem to be tolerating it OK.

I wonder where this came from, honestly, because I was fine and dandy yesterday. James fetched us Subway for dinner, and I’d hate to think it was food poisoning somehow. I just hope it clear up soon.

So. that’s me. Sick. Wish me luck in my porceain adventures.

-amy pleads, “don’t let the kids get sick, don’t let the kids get sick, don’t let the kids get sick, don’t let the kids get sick!”

Ahhhh..

Spring is in the air. It has been so beautiful the last couple of days. It was really a kick in the pants to get my indoor plantings underway so they’ll be ready when it’s time to set them outside.

So, Saturday night, I got out the flat I had bought last fall along with my peat moss pellet disk thingees and set about some planting.

Just so you know, I really have no clue what I’m doing. Last year, after spending over a hundred bucks on plants for our yard, I decided that seeds were the way to go. I would buy seeds and start them indoors first! Not only is this cheaper, but damn, it sounded like a lot of fun. I have a wee bit of experience growing things indoors from seeds, I started my tomato plant that way last year, and also all my herbs. The tomato plant did fantastically, but I kept it in a pot where it quickly outgrew the pot and so stagnated it’s growth. This year, I’m going to plant them straight into the ground after they’re started.

The herbs did well, but same problem. I used fairly small, plastic pots that prevented them from getting very big. I also set themoutside, where they got knocked off the porch and then I would not miss them until a month went by, and then I’d wonder, “Where did my basil go?” and have to fish it out of the bushes. (Shhh. I think the basil is still there.) I did use the herbs quite a bit though, and having them fresh was very nice. Last fall I bought some heavy earthen (but still pretty) pots to move my herbs into after they’ve gotten a good start. I’m also going to try to remember to move them indoors before fall so I can keep them alive all winter.

So, back to seeds. Fun, right? Then I got the bright idea, why buy them? Why not just harvest them? So I started collecting seeds from my garden – it was a lot of fun, actually. I gathered a lot of impatiens seeds, which are fun, and yet tricky. After the flower falls off, a small green pod forms and it starts to swell bigger and bigger, and turns a lighter green color while the seeds inside ripen. Soon, the pod is so close to bursting, that if anything brushes up against it, it will go SPROING!!! and break open in such a way that the seeds inside are scattered everywhere. Nature. Cool, huh! Tricky for actually COLLECTING the seeds though. If you grab it before it’s ready you can actually GET the seeds, but then the seeds aren’t ready. If you wait until they’re ready, the process of grabbing the pod can make it bust open and thus, you lose all the seeds. I would go out with my scissors and cut the pod off directly into a little cup. Then if it busted when it hit the bottom of the cup, no biggie, I’ve collected the seeds in the process. Often, I would carry in a little cup of pods and Ethan and I would have lots of fun busting them open in the cup and watchign the seeds SPROING! everywhere.

Petunia seeds are pretty neat also. The pod hardens and then opens up a bit when the seeds are ready, until it looks like it’s smiling. then you just pick the pod and try to dump the seeds out. Handy.
Impatiens seeds are very small, and kind of light brown in color. If I tried to collect from a pod that wasn’t ready, they would be super small, in very pale, and I would usually just discard them, as they probably weren’t viable. I took this photo Saturday when I planted, and it was night, so it’s not the best quality.

I did 4 sections (9 little “wells” in a section) of impatiens (yes, that’s a crapload of plants). I started out with just 2 seeds in each “well” (I have no idea what it’s called, the spot for each plant, i now dub thee, “WELL!”), and then started to doubt my seeds as I went along and started thinking about how bummed I am going to be if nothing comes up. So then I just started putting in however many stuck to the chopstick I was using, which was about 4-6 seeds in each well.

The first section I planted red salvia, and the next section, purple salvia. I had a beautiful little plant in my hanging basket that I bought without any labels, so I had no idea what it was. My neighbor across the street had the same thing, except hers were red. Some research later, I decided I it was “salvia.” I collected seeds both from my plant, and from my neighbors. I kept my basket throughout the season, but it was sickly and not doing great in the heat of the summer. It perked up and did much better in the late summer after it had cooled off. We’ll see if any of my collected seeds are viable.

The last 2 sections, I did day lilies. Some I collected from my yellow day lilies, and some from my neighbor Selena, but most of these seeds… Well, there’s no easy way of saying it. I stole them. I am a SEED THIEF!! Last fall, we visited my folks out in utah, and there were several trips to Liberty park in Salt Lake City. Well, they had beds and beds of daylilies that had gone to seed and were literally perfect for collecting from. Collecting seeds from daylilies is such fun, except that the seed itself is a little scary looking. The picture I have is crap, unfortunately, but they are on the large side, with a glossy, shiney black hard coat. They are a little wrinkly, and when you are looking at them in a dried side pod, ready to shake out, well.. they look like ugly little black bugs. They’re a little freaky, let me tell you! The freakiness continues even into planting. I beleive I stuck to 2 seeds per well for the day lilies.

So, one flat is all planted. I need to hop on the ball and get another flat planted, but honestly, I’m not sure waht I want, exactly. I also don’t know where I would put the flat where kids and kitties won’t meddle with it. I have purple petunia seeds that I collected from my petunias, but I’m not sure I really want petunias this year. They were beautiful, but they required a good bit of work in dead-heading and care. The impatiens were definitely a big hit last year, but I am not too keen on the color I had, which was pink. Definitely a big show of color though, mid season, and they lasted all season long, if a little droopy in the super hot periods.

Here is the mini flat I planted about 10 days ago. The three in back are tomato plants (which at least one of them has Tamara’s name on it!), the front left is rosemary, which hasn’t put in an appearance yet – the seeds I have for rosemary I am beginning to suspect aren’t viable. Then we have sage, and parsley (italian flat-leaf) which are looking happy and itty bitty and wee. So cute. After I initially planted them, I stuck the entire thing in a plastic grocery bag and tied teh top and stuck it on top of my refridgerator for a while. After a week I peeked in and lo, they were growing (excpet for the damn rosemary), so I put them on my sunny window, though a bit blocked by my forced bulbs.

As I stated before, these will be going into pots, some possibly sharing a pot – except for the tomaters – those will be going into the ground. I would also like to get a raspberry bush to plant outside – I would love to get my own berries and make jam! Oh yum! I am not sure exactly where it would go though.. They tend to spread, so it would have to be somewhere where I can get in and rototil around it, to prevent spreading. So before I plant more, I need to determine where exactly everything is going, and then plan accordingly. I need to do me some sketching.

I love gardening. I don’t know much, and I’m making it up as I go, but it is lots of fun.

And I need to hurry up, because spring has definitely sprung!!

– amy patiently ignores the fact that snow is a possibility in the forecast for next weekend.

I recently uploaded the pictures we took on our trip to utah last fall. We drove up to yellowstone and stayed in Jackson WY. I especially loved the Grand Tetons, which are featured in the new banner above. Also have pictures of Old Faithful and a myriad of geysers and waterfalls, as well as Jackson, and the kids playing in Liberty Park in SLC.
See the whole set.

1. Sneaking food into movie theatres. I LOVE to do it. Sometimes I’m disappointed when we go to dinner before a movie, because then there’s really no excuse to sneak in some snacks. And what fun is a movie if you can’t sneak in snacks?
2. Not cleaning up dog vomit.
3. Having cleaning ladies come to our house on a regular basis.
   Oh yes. This has occured, people. Our first visit was last Friday.
   Oh, I know I should feel guilty. How much of a yuppie could we be with our living in the suburbs and blatently wasting money on cleaning ladies when we could just scrub our toilets OURSELVES, but the truth is, it just doesn’t happen and when you have cleaning ladies you have to run around and pick up all the clutter and that’s just the kind of motivation I need to keep this place cleaned up. We have the, “people coming over” motivation, and the “relatives coming to visit”, and then there’s the “let’s pick up because we deserve to have a clean house and it will make us feel better” motivation, and guess which one always loses? (We promise to stop talking as if we are royalty.)
4. Eating bananas. Nope, nothing shameful about eating a banana! Totally guilt-free, there! Seeeeeee??? I don’t feel guilty about LOTS of things.
5. Yeah, I’m running out of items.

OK, so there’s many more things I feel guilty about then I do not guilty about. Oh! Writing on this webspace! No guilt there!

That’s all. Short post. THE END!

Hi there.

That word challenge thing? The deadline is today.

So … how many have I done?

mm…. 2? maybe 3?

Yeah. I’m going to be late. Oh well, I’ll be out of the running for the tin dog biscuit holders or whatever, but oh well.

I was all into making a post today, in fact, I didn’t clean up post party because I was all settling in to write stuff, but then got distracted with the camera and pictures, and downloading said pictures, and then naptime was OVER and well, maybe tomorrow I’ll post all the pictures and commentary.

It was a lovely day, with lovely warm weather, and oh i feel so lovely! And no, its not the lovely lemondrop martini from williams-sonoma talking, it was ever so loverly! i WANT to tell you all about it but I need to drop dead asleep first. I’ll tell you tomorrow. I’ll just say that a nice time was had by all, including Jocelyn the birthday girl. Funniest moment, Jocelyn seeing her daycare lady in our house. She stood staring, trying to figure out what was going on for a full half minute. I can only imagine it must have been like seeing your 5th grade teacher at the grocery store. Buying tampons or something. Just hard to actually imagine that they are ACTUAL REAL LIVE PEOPLE AND NOT CYBORGS THAT CEASE TO EXIST AFTER YOU LEAVE THEIR PRESENCE.

Sorry. that was a lot of capitals. err, capitols. i’m a wee bit drunk at the moment i highly recommend it. however, i don’t recommend talking to your colleagues via instant messanger while tipsy, because i suspect i am going to be somewhat frantic at looking up my message history after i realize what i’ve done tomorrow morning.

anyway. good niiiiiiiiight never never land!

ps – oh i cna’t wait to tell you all about this weekend, including the party and the gardening ie: the sowing of seeds and the SPRINGTIME that is waiting to be SPRUNG! tomorrow! if it kills me! tomorrow!

it’s late, and i’m tired, and you know what that means? a rambling, mopey depressed amy.

but talking (typing?) it out always helps. get the poison out of the system. yammer and yammer until i purge my brain of it and then i can move on to other things.

like sleep!

….

well, that didn’t work. the typing it out bit, i mean. trying to put words to the mopeyness just didn’t seem to happen. i think it means i’m just tired, and need to go to bed.

tomorrow is my baby’s birthday. She will be 2 years old. I still think putting them both in the freezer at night or maybe tupperware will work – can’t we just keep them babies for a little while longer? It is strange how when I look at baby pictures of Ethan, I can barely remember how it all was w/out overlaying the sweet little man he is now over the top of it.

And yet when I look at Jocelyn and think about how she is growing and soon even more of her personality will emerge, it’s hard to imagine how and what that will be like. And yet a year from now, I’ll look back at the cute things she does now, and see how it all started, how it all was just the little flower buds that I could just barely see the color of what was to come.

it’s late and i’m making weird analogies, you’ll have to forgive me. She has been doing a lot better lately with the tantrums and the screaming of, “MINE!” and “NO!” Often, she will holler once or twice, and then stop herself, and say “PEEEEASE!!” even though we’ll have no idea what exactly she is requesting.

She also has been saying a phrase that we can’t quite make out. She says it ALL the time, and it could be anything. Here are our guesses:

• “assignment!”
• “excitement!”
• “It’s Simon!”
• “eh’s find it!”
  or more likely,
• “Let’s find it!!”

Other things she says often, and with conviction:

• THERE it is!
• I found it!
• MINE!
• NO!
• Turn, pease! (as in, she wants a turn)
• 1, 2, THREE!!! (especially when you start)
• “PEEEEE!”, “GEE!!!” “ZEEE!!” (said at the appropriate pauses in teh alphabet song.
• VROOM VROOM!
• It’s flying!
• Hi! (Enter name of family member here)! Hi!

She also has a fit whenever one wishes to lay her on her back to change her diaper. I’ve found the best way to avoid the hammering kicking legs is to ask her where various body parts are. This also works for kisses. Lately, she doesnt’ want to part with any kisses, or be kissed. “Can I have a kiss?” is always met with running away while shouting, “NO!” So then I say, “Where is my nose?” and she runs over to poke me in the nose with her outstretched finger, and declares, “NOSE! MOMMY’S NOSE!” Then I ask if I can have a kiss on the nose, and she will lean in and her soft lips will squash my nose flat (I have a squishy nose with hardly any cartilidge) with a loud, “MMMMMWAH!!!!” and then she may bear to have me return the “mmmwah” in kind.

One thing we are going to have to remedy soon, even though I swore it would be YEARS before we did this, because Ethan’s was so disastrous, is get her a big girl bed. We moved Ethan out of the crib at about 19-20 months, and he did ok at nighttime, but he just stopped napping during the day pretty much completely. He would just get up and play in his room instead, and sometimes fall asleep in the closet. We transitioned him at that age because Jocelyn was going to be arriving and we didn’t want him to feel as if she was taking over “his” crib, so the idea was to get him a bed, hide the crib for the next 3 months, so that when it was needed, he wouldn’t feel like it was his anymore.

Jocelyn is already older than he was, but I still feel like we could hold off a while longer. She could probably climb out if she wanted to, but she hasn’t ever tried, except sometimes she puts her foot up when she wants to get IN. However, this girl is so enamored of beds. She climbs right in them, pulls up the covers, tilts her head to the side and shuts her eyes – not squishing them shut like you’d think a kid would do, but just closes them shut normally, and then says, “Sleeping mommy!” She loves Ethan’s bed so much, I know when she gets her own bed, she will be in HEAVEN. So, even though I swore we’d wait until she was 2.5 years old, we have been looking at beds with a little more than just the window shopping eye. I would like to get her a nice bed that she can use a long time. Toddler beds never really appealed to me because they are used for such a short time, though a full size bed can be quite overwhelming for a toddler. Ethan’s bed came from Ikea and was expandable, though we put a twin mattress in it right away. We have thought of getting HIM a new bed, and giving his old one to Jocelyn, but we’re not sure what we’re going to do yet. A quick check of craigslist showed a number of toddler beds for $30-40 bucks, so that might be worth it, even if it isn’t used for very long.

Speaking of Ikea, we went there tonight. It was such a fiasco. Our kids go to bed at 7:30 pretty much on the nose. We head upstairs around 7 for baths and stories and jammies, and they’re in bed by 7.30 or pretty close to it. Going to Ikea on a weeknight meant that we got home at about 8:30. Ethan was asleep in the car, and Jocelyn was tickled pink about it, “Ethan SLEEPING mommy! QUIET!!! SHHHHH!”

We picked up a kid sized table and 2 chairs, as well as some new shelves to go in James new office in the basement. Next time, I think just one of us will go, or we’ll wait for the weekend. Ikea has a little children’s area where you check your kid in, they label him with a sticker with his name on it, check his shoes, give us a beeper and tell us we have 40 minutes of freedom before they’ll beep us. Except that we don’t, because we have Jocelyn, who isn’t tall enough or potty trained and therefore doesn’t meet the criteria of Ikea SmaLand. We asked Ethan if he wanted to stay with us while we shopped, or go to the play area, and warned him taht there probably wouldn’t be any other kids in there. He made sure we were talking about teh same place, “It’s where the balls are?” “Yes, the play area with the balls you can jump in,” and to my surprise, said he wanted to play in teh balls.

“The balls are going to be COAL! And then I’ll JUMP IN!”
I don’t think James heard it clearly, but I know what he was talking about right away.
“You’re going to pretend it’s the Polar Express, and you’re jumping into the coal car?”
“YEAH!”

Turns out that shortly after we checked him in, another kid got checked in. When I picked him up, the attendant said that they latched on to each other and were having a grand old time playing together.

At times like these, I think, what fun it must be to be a kid. Then I remember when I was kid. I remember how disappointing some things can be – things that are no big deal to adults, that we shrug off as unimportant, but can be devastating to kids. I’m always conscious of how many times I have to deny something to Ethan.

“Can I come in with you to get Jocelyn?”
“Can we go over the bridge?”
“Can we go by the train station?”
“But we were going to fold laundry with my loader and dumptruck!”
“Are we taking a bath tonight?”
“But I don’t want to try the meatballs..”
“Can we stay home today mommy?”

Sometimes it’s asked or stated cavalierly and I know he knows that the answer is likely to be no. Sometimes he answers my denial with a simple, “Ok.” Sometimes it’s an exhalation of frustration/disappointment, “AWWWWW.” And sometimes the request or statement is nearly on the brink of tears because the amount of control he has over his own life and actions are so limited that I know it must be frustrating as hell.

As mimi said not so long ago, “I swear, we should give every kid under four a medal for keeping their shit together even 60% of the time, because they were BABIES just moments ago and now they have to do all this BIG STUFF.”

It’s so true. Just because they can walk around and talk in complete sentences and have a fairly good grasp of the day to day events, there is so much they’re still trying to gather information on and assimilate into some semblence of understandability (it’s late. shoot me.) and then having their choices controlled and monitored so completely.. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I am not about to just let Ethan do or have whatever he wants, and I’m not talking about that sort of “control”. When I told him he had to have one taste of the meatballs the other night, tears actually welled up in his eyes, and not because he was going to have a tantrum, but because he just really had a hard day and was hungry and just plain didn’t want to have any meatballs.. and so sometimes I bend the “you must try it once” rules, and let him have 2 bites of noodles instead of 1 of noodle and 1 of meatball in order to get the bowl of yoghurt.

Oh my god have I rambled. I think you’ll all probably be happy when I go back to not updating for a bajillion years.

And with that, I think I’d better go to bed already. Don’t you?

-amy will try not to lay awake and be mopey.

Yesterday when I arrived at the door of Subway to grab a (only 7 pts!) 6″ turkey on wheat piled with veggies, I was aghast to see a “CLOSED – WATCH FOR OUR NEW LOOK!” sign in the window. Further inspection found that the inside had been completely gutted. Looks like Subway for lunch is out for a while.

James used to work in this area, and when I first had my interview here, the first thing he said was how he had a little place he used to stop and get breakfast (a egg, ham & cheese sandwich), and “it was soooooo goood.” Well, I thought, why not, I’ll find out from James where it is, and go check it out.

I called him up, and due to the lack of speakerphone and the lack of an automatic in my truck, had some trouble just talking to him while trying to steer and shift all at the same time (this girls needs some bluetooth headphone LOVE) as he tried to recall street names. He was also sitting down to lunch with a couple of other friends who also worked at the same place that James worked. So I heard them start to pipe in, “Yeah, that one road in between Lee highway and 66..” I heard Kurt say.

“Treetop.” I said into the phone, and turned that direction, heading back towards my office.

“Yeah, there’s an office building kind of on that corner, but a little further down, and the place is in the loggy of th–”

“He’s talking about Cafe Speedy?” I asked James in disbelief.

James: “Yeah, Cafe Speedy, that was the place. Man I loved that place.”

Me, Staring AT MY OWN OFFICE BUILDING: “James, Cafe Speedy is in the lobby of THE BUILDING WHERE I WORK.”

…

Dorks drove me around back to my own office building. I nearly dislocated my shouder talking and turning and shifting all at once. James has even been to my office before, and never clued in that the cafe he used to eat at was at the same place.

So this weekend, was the weekend of marriage, sleeping, driving, sleeping, playing, sleeping, playing, sleeping, banging laminate floorboards into place, and sleeping again.

That’s right, I finished laying the laminate floor. Last Monday on President’s day, Chris, Ann and Kurt came over to our smoke filled house (more on that later) and helped lay down some tracks floorboards. The smokiness was because the blade which Lowes-Man told James to buy for a nice smooth edge on our floor, was way too thin and flimsy and wussy to do a proper job. So James would lower the blade, and it wouldn’t really cut, but instead the heat from the friction on the wood/ laminate would cause it to smoke and in addition to taking FOREVER to cut a board, slowly but surely, our entire house because like a scene from some midnight swamp-forest, all murky and smokey with a nasty acrid smell that made one feel sure an icy hand was going to REACH OUT FROM UNDER THE REFRIDGERATOR AND GET YOU! Ahem. Maybe not that bad, but it was smokey and hazy and stinky. So, Kurt and James set off hither and yon to Lowes to Get Thee A Bigger, Badder Miter Saw Blade. They came back and James strapped in that new blade, and it was much much better.

So we sawed and we laid and we CLICKED! and we hammered and we sawed and sawed some more, and then we got to tricky bits where weird shapes and notches had to be cut out of the middle of some boards to go around the closet door frame and Ann and I watched Galaxy Quest (I’m a big believer in entertainment during long drawn out home improvement projects) while Kurt and James sketched odd drawings on pieces of paper and then James would trot back and forth from the saw to the closet, with both of them looking and nodding to each other and saying “Just a bit more off here,” over and over.

Chris abandoned us first and then went James, which is pretty sad seeing how it was HIS ROOM we were flooring! But I guess school is a fairly good excuse. FOR NOW. So Ann and Kurt and I carried on, sawing and laying and beating and sawing some more. Oh, and let’s not forget measuring. It was kind of fun, especially with friends to make it go faster faster. But when the time came to go get kids and we called it a day, we were still just a bit shy of half-way finished. And when James returned, he commented: “Did you guys get any further?” Which about got him a fat lip.

So, Sunday morning I hopped downstairs and started working on it again, and was dismayed to find that the increasing smokiness of the new blade was… increasing. The sawing was taking longer and longer because if I pushed the blade down too far, it was just getting smokier. I decided, what the hell, I’m going to take this blade off and get the HUGE blade on, dug up the manual under all the sawdust, and carefully managed to get the old one off and the new one on. I wish we’d just used that one from the VERY BEGINNING, because that huge mother fucker sliced those boards like a HOT KNIFE THROUGH BUTTER!

I really enjoy sawing. Is that the proper term for operating a miter saw? That’s what it does, it saws, so I think I got that right. It is pretty fun, and I have to admit, when we started, and James was doing all the sawing, I was getting all itchy and fidgety, because I WANTED TO OPERATE THE SAW OF DEATH THANKYOUVERYMUCH and when I finally got to saw, I was like.. Yeah. This rocks. And I was also very determined not to lose any fingers, thanks to Ann, who helpfully said, “Your thumb!” right as I would turn the saw on. It’s a good thing. No one wants finger stubs floating around a basement, lest of all me, and ESPECIALLY lest of all, my hand. However, I am not as paranoid about the blade coming loose, flying off the saw and whacking me in the eyes, because I often forgot my safety glasses. Not even from in the other room, I’d forget them on top of my head. I guess if the blade DID come loose, I would need to be worried about more than my eyes, more like my whole head.

Anyway, sawing is fun, (“I AM AMY! I OPERATE THE SAW OF DEATH! FEAR ME! MUAHAHAHAHHA!”) and after I got the Large Blade of Dhoom installed, the sawing was much faster. I got just about done that afternoon. During nap time James came down and we finished up the floor part, and felt all anti-climatic because we still had a little corner in the closet that wasn’t finished, so we couldn’t rise and do our “we’re done, we’re done, we’re done!” song and dance. But I finished that up that evening and now…. the flooring is done 🙂 Now, we just have to install our quarter-round (think trim) and find some matching caulk to fill in some gaps around the door frames, and we’ll be DONE done!

I’m thinking Wednesday is the day for the final “we’re done, we’re done, we’re done!” song and dance 🙂

– amy feels all bad-ass today, thus the use of “mother fucker” in this post.

– amy also loves the sound when the boards “CLICK!” together perfectly.