Busy Jim

Since Jim isn't much of a blogger, I guess I'll have to tell you what he has been up to besides work. 

Jim has spent a lot of time on the craftroom shelves.  We decided to save money by buying the wood and cutting out the shelves ourselves.  We've borrowed our dads' miter saw and router, so Jim has had fun playing with those.  I think the shelves are coming out nicely.  Here is a profile pic of one of the shelves.  The other pic is Jim carrying it on his head.

These shelves seem to be taking forever, but they are finally going up on the walls.  Jim snuck a pic of me painting the shelf supports in the garage.

Yea for shelves on walls!

Besides the shelves, Jim has been hard at work on the firepit.  I think it came out nice.  There had already been an existing small firepit, so we just expanded it a little.  We didn't realize until after Jim was done, that some tree branches from my miko tree hang over the pit.  We'll try to trim them back before our first fire.

Along with the firepit, Jim has been practicing grilling on our new cheap charcoal grill.

After finishing the firepit, Jim was supposed to mow the lawn; however, he did something that he wasn't supposed to do which resulted in breaking my wheelbarrow.  We have a cement pad behind our garage that seems to be the remnants of an old shed with foundation.  Last month, my MIL and I had cleaned up all the glass that was in one corner of the pad.  I was under the impression that Jim and I had agreed that the only other thing we would do before our housewarming concerning the cement pad was to bend down the metal pipes sticking out of the ground at the corners.  Well, Jim got over-zealous and decided to start removing the cement blocks around the pad.  The blocks were heavy, so he just lobbed them into the wheelbarrow.  Unfortunately, the wheelbarrow didn't appreciate this method, and the tub cracked in several places.

Jim was mad at himself.

I could have gotten mad at him too for not listening to me, and then breaking the wheelbarrow, but instead I struck a deal with him...I wouldn't get mad at him for this if he doesn't get mad at me the next time I break something.   I told him that he just made more work for himself.

Here is a before and after pic of Jim's wayward efforts.

This pic was taken from the same corner.  : (

Unfortunately, he never did finish this job.  He also didn't get to mow the lawn that day because it rained.

  See, husbands should listen to their wives!

Jim has decided to take part in deforestation and has started to clean our gutters.  We've only managed to do the garage so far. We haven't gotten to our house gutters just yet.

  Jim must have found something smelly by the look on his face in the second pic.

Jim has also removed a dead limb which had a tree swing hanging on it.  We wanted to remove the swing and limb before the party so that no one was tempted to play on it.  We didn't want a big tree branch falling on any of our guests.  We will hopefully be able to put a new swing on a different tree in the future.

Is that a monkey in that tree?  Nope, just Jim.

So, that is what Jim has been up to in the past couple of weeks.  Maybe one of these days he'll write his own post.  ^_^*

From Hiccups to Snowball Fights

I mentioned in a previous post that Jim has poison ivy and is currently on medication for it.  The prednisone is working but proved to have an annoying side effect...frequent and persistant hiccups.  It seems whenever Jim would eat, drink, or cough, the hiccups would start and be difficult to stop.  Fortunately, this only lasted for the first 3 days or so.  This did allow us to try different hiccup remedies.  Among the various remedies that we tried, we can attest that the following work:

1. Taking small sips of a full glass of water without breathing.

2. Sucking a lemon.

3. Placing a knife (handle up) in a glass of water.  While drinking the water, prop the knife handle on your forehead.

3. Drinking a shot of apple cider vinegar.

I think Jim's least favorite was the vinegar.  Unfortunately for Jim, we didn't realize that he filled a double shot glass to the top until after he drank it.  O.o  Oops!  On the bright-side, that was the last of his hiccups.  lol.

A couple days ago, Jim showed me a web-comic about nature.  One of the baby birds was named Bertrand. Jim thought the bird was female, but I said the name sounded more male.  We made a bet, and I won!  Bertrand is a boy's name.  Woot!  Since Jim lost, he was in charge of making dinner that night.  Jim's culinary skills are quite lacking, so we went out to dinner at a new restaurant.  We didn't realize until after we ordered that they only took cash or check.  Seems kind of odd that they don't take credit, but whatever.  Anyways, Jim neither had cash nor his checkbook.  This meant I had to pay for a dinner (so much for winning the bet).  Jim felt bad, so the next day he took me out again for dinner.  We went to this secluded, romantic restaurant called Arby's where we ordered Beef 'n Cheddar sandwiches.  I guess I shouldn't expect any romantic home-cooked meals in my future, unless I'm the one to make them.  : /

The other day, I was feeling silly so I decided to try to instigate a snowball fight.  Jim wasn't really into it though; I think he just played along to amuse me.  You are probably wondering, "Amanda, how the heck could you have a snowball fight in May?!"  Well, I'll tell you.  Over the weekend, we had a big storm blow through, and it broke off 2 large branches from my snowball bush.  I felt bad for the big puffy blossoms on the broken branches.  I decided to put them to use in a "snowball" fight.  One last hurrah for the snowball blossoms.  Come on, I'm sure I'm not the first one to think of that.  ^_^  I don't think of myself as crazy, just free-spirited. : P

Jim and I have finally physically started my craft room shelving.  First, we had to buy the lumber at Lowe's.  It is too expensive to just buy ready-made shelves, so Jim and I are going to make them ourselves using our dads' miter saw and router.  It was cheaper to buy 2 large planks of wood and have them cut them to size at the store.  After the cutting, we still had a decent sized plank of wood leftover, but we thought it would still fit into my Saturn.  We were wrong.  lol.  I laughed, but Jim was annoyed and embarrassed because he had to go back into the store and ask them to cut the plank smaller.  When he came back out, the plank fit, but just barely.  We played around with the router until we found a bit that I liked.  Jim has it all set up now.  We just need to do it.  Hopefully I'll have shelving on my walls by the end of the month.  

Jim practice-routing

Oven Update:  The repairman came this morning.  Apparently, our heating element is broken.  He didn't have one in stock, so it is on order.  He is supposed to come back out next Tues morning to install it.  The repairman was friendly and talkative.  It turns out that he was my age and lived in Litchfield too when he was younger.  This just proves to me that this is a small world afterall.  Not only might I have met the repairman when I was younger, but also our neighbors behind us.  The husband is a cop in the town I graduated high school from, and he used to chaperon the school dances and police the football games when I went there.  The wife was also a teacher at the middle school.  Funny how things turn out.  I don't remember any of them, but it just goes to show that you'll never know who will come back into your life.

And of course, here is a new blooming flower.  It seems like I find a new one everytime I go outside.

Our appointment with the real estate attorney is this afternoon.  We are on good terms with our neighbors regarding the easement, but we just want clarification of what rights we have, and what their rights are as well.  I'll try to blog about it tonight.

Toodles!