Summer Reading

Do you like to read during the summer? I don't generally limit myself to reading in the summer, but that's traditional time for keeping the kids current. Too bad my kids don't like to read. A friend came to visit recently and on his drive up (about 5 hours) he was listening to a book on tape called The Smoke Jumper by Nicholas Evans. Evans also wrote The Horse Whisperer. I hadn't read either one, but he said that Jumper was a really good story. I think he found driving difficult while listening to it. Anyway, after supper that evening, we went to Half Price Books because he had some books to sell and I love browsing there anyway. While he was waiting for his offer, I looked for either Evans book, but couldn't find them, so I wandered around looking at other stuff. I almost bought a book on making handmade journal books, but decided to save my pennies because I have enough projects going on at home already. Including de-cluttering.

When I caught back up with my friend, he had both books in his hand. I snapped them up and started reading that week. I first read The Horse Whisperer. I haven't seen the movie, yet, so I had no idea what the book was about other than it was about a woman and a cowboy. It was much more than that and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was very surprised at the ending, but I can understand it. I'll probably start reading The Smoke Jumper later this week or next week.



In other news, my younger child is graduated from high school now. We are so proud of him. He'll be attending the University of Texas at San Antonio this fall. I'm still waiting for him to get a job, but I suppose it will happen eventually. With the stuff that's planned for summer, he's concerned about getting a job that will let him take off the time he needs for vacation Bible school and incoming freshman orientation at the university. I'll cut him a little slack for now, but only until after orientation.

Since we've decided that we're going to be in this house for a while, we figured we ought to do some of the maintenance items we've been putting off. We'd have to do them to sell it anyway, but who's counting? We got two free toilets from our local water board to replace the old large-flow ones that came with the house (nearly $1000 worth of toilets and installation stuff) and I decided that before I would put one of those lovely new fixtures in the dingy, nasty guest bath, I was going tile the floor. That was over Memorial Day weekend. What a chore! That vinyl flooring glue was almost melded into the concrete after 22 years! It took Friday night and all day Saturday to get the floor prepared for tiling. But I must say that getting about 25 square feet of tiling done in a 3-day weekend wasn't terribly hard and it turned out lovely.

We had to rent a tile saw because the tile cutters we had weren't hefty enough for that tile, but let me tell you, for less than $150, we've got a nice new floor in there. Now I just need to think about tearing out the old wallpaper and painting and re-grouting the shower enclosure, caulk. Can you tell I'm not done, yet?