End of Major Painting Achieved

If you've been following the saga of my efforts at painting my son's new store, you'll be thrilled to know that I have finished painting almost all of the bricks onto the wall. Whew! I thought it would never end!


There are really only two walls in the front room that needed to be painted and this stitched-together panorama shows the majority of those two walls. There's a little bit more to the left side of the photo. If I knew how to make the middle part the same brightness or whatever, it would be a better looking photo, but anyhoo...

The big empty spots are where display panels, similar to the big one on the left, will be hanging. I even got the remaining three pegboards painted, which you can see in the center foreground. Their mounting frames are those rectangles on the right. There will also be a yellow home-run line running across the top of the wall. I still have to add vertical mortar lines at the bottom, right above the vinyl baseboard, and at the top, between the last course of bricks and the home-run line. DS also wants to have foul pole and screens in the corners, but if I can just get away with painting a couple of metal poles yellow and attaching them to the wall somehow, that will have to do.

Hopefully it will be more or less ready for the soft opening on Saturday.

Thanks for looking!

You Tube Gems

As a computer professional with utmost disdain for Microsoft, this You Tube clip I found on a local reporter's blog is undeniably funny and pretty close to true:




This other one was sent to me by a friend and I find it amazing. Louis Armstrong's "A Wonderful World" is one of my favorite songs. What this guy does with it is really cute:



Enjoy!

How Hot Can It Get?

I have to say that we have been very fortunate to have such cool weather, relatively speaking. Here in Texas we haven't hit 100 degrees, yet, but it's trying. What makes us doubly blessed is that our A/C went out at home during this mild summer. It could have been much worse. Our unit is 22 years old and every October we breathe a sigh of relief that A/C season is over and we made through another one without a failure. Last year, it would have been very bad since nearly every day was over 100 degrees.

Anyway, fixing it may be on hold because of DH's dufus boss and our dufus accountant. The accountant filed an extension with the IRS on our personal stuff and we found out last week that we owe a LOT of money. The boss is running the company out of business, so DH may be out of work real soon now. They always say bad things run in threes. NO MORE!!! We're at our QUOTA!!!

Today is the first day of school. The last first day of high school for our younger son, our baby. I should be weeping with longing for his childhood, but I can't seem to work up the tears. I'm proud of him and glad he's doing so well. I guess we have a whole school year of last-times now. I think it's going to be a blast!

Later!

It's A Miracle!

I was at the store last night, painting away, skipping choir practice, and DH showed up after choir practice to check on me. He had come by earlier after work to visit before going to church and then came back by and saw I was still there. I had finished taping the walls, except for a small section where I ran out of tape, and had started painting. I really wanted to get the horizontal lines painted and then I could come back and work on the vertical lines, since those are not quite as simple. Well, he asked how long I'd be since it was already 10 PM and he didn't want me to stay too long. I told him that when I ran out of paint in the small pan I was using, I'd be done. He figured it would take all night and then some and went to get a brush and started helping (GASP!).

Even the small part that he did was very helpful. I didn't run out of paint, but we did leave by 11:15 or so. I'll be back tonight to do some more. DS wanted it finished by this morning, but timeline was moved up from Sept. 1. Turns out he had a vendor coming in this morning to demonstrate some equipment and wanted to at least show progress. I hope he got the trash picked up!

I'll have more picture tonight, I'm sure.

Over Extended And Not Just Money

I got a pop-up reminder this morning that I had a doctor's appointment in 15 minutes. Not a problem if I'm on my way, but I was 45 minutes away and had forgotten to check my calendar this morning or yesterday for today. I dropped my car off at a garage near my office downtown to get the oil changed, so if I had remembered the appointment, my engine would have been rattling all the way there. The office was so kind to reschedule it, though.

Tonight I'm double booked again: choir practice or painting the store. I had a meeting at church last night that I had forgotten about until I got a reminder call on Monday night. I had planned on working on the store and helping DS get his Internet access working. I was at least able to go by and help with the Internet problem (we hadn't done the proper registration, yet). This was the fourth time AT&T had been contacted about the connection not working, but the first time anyone bothered to ask if we had registered the DSL box. All the others kept saying it was a firewall problem and couldn't really help. I had gone through every firewall on the computer and the router, but nothing fixed it.

While I was there, DS announced that he needed the store finished by Thursday morning. Ha! I'm not even through taping, much less painting. Then it would be okay if we got two display pegboards up. Well, only one of the four has been painted. So then it was, can we get the one on the wall so he can start displaying merchandise? Sure, that took all of 20 minutes. Here's what it looks like:


It's starting to look a little bit like a store now! (Oh yeah, that's my 6'5" 20-year-old entrepreneur standing there.)


Okay, so there needs to be a little more work on the display itself, but we were just putting stuff on the wall. I'll be heading back over tonight to finish what I can. I'm also going to need more tape! I've gone through eight rolls of 1-1/2" tape and 3 rolls of 3/4" tape and I still have to do the vertical grout lines. If I could figure out how to make a decent foam stamp that's 1/2" wide and 4" long, I could whip those lines out in no time.

Suggestions? Share them in a comment.

I'll get pictures of the rest of the walls and post them tomorrow.

The Inkblot Test

I saw this on Carol's blog and thought I'd give it a try. I've never taken an inkblot test, so I wasn't sure what to expect. If you do it, plan on taking a little time with it. It's not your typical blog-fun quiz. Here are my results:

Karen, your subconscious mind is driven most by Peace


You are driven by a higher purpose than most people. You have a deeply-rooted desire to facilitate peacefulness in the world. Whether through subtle interactions with love ones, or through getting involved in social causes, it is important to you to influence the world.

You are driven by a desire to encourage others to think about the positive side of things instead of focusing on the negative. The reason your unconscious is consumed by this might stem from an innate fear of war and turmoil. Thus, to avoid that uncomfortable place for you, your unconscious seeks out the peace in your environment.

Usually, the thing that underlies this unconscious drive is a deep respect for humankind. You care about the future of the world, even beyond your own involvement in it. As a result, your personal integrity acts as a surrogate for your deeper drive toward peace and guides you in daily life towards decisions that are respectful toward yourself and others.

Though your unconscious mind is driven most strongly by Peace, there is much more to who you are at your core.

One thing to note is that the "more" costs $9.95 to find out about.

I've Been Tagged!

This is the first time I've been named in a tag, so here goes! Thanks, Tammy!

Write 8 of your blog friends names in a unique way and post them. Then come back over and let me know. You must write the blogger's name that tagged you, then add 7 others. Be creative! This is a great place to do the names.