Remodeling, Homework and Other Ramblings

Things have been sparse here at salguod.net for a few weeks. Let me tell you why.

I just got back from a week off of work to do a bunch of work around the house. We had a patio put in in the back yard. That's the one thing I'm not doing, but I did have to do some running around looking at pavers.

We've also painted. A lot. We started by painting our master bedroom which has a vaulted ceiling, a plant ledge and an integral bathroom (read: lots of corners to cut in.) The girls thought it was pretty funny to see Daddy laying up on top of the plant ledge with a paint brush. We also painted all 3 girls rooms and Maria's office. Maria came up with this cool idea, inspired by some scrapbook paper, to paint a border of circles in her office. 5 different size circles with 5 different colors all with a white border takes a long time to paint. It looks cool, though.

All this paint was in preparation for new carpet (no drop cloths to trip on). The carpet for the office, hall, stairs and master bedroom came on Wednesday. The rest will be in next week sometime. I've learned that getting new carpet is about 85% of the work of moving (move all the furniture out, move it all back in), but in the end instead of a brand new house you just have new carpet. Still nice though.

Of course, while we had our old wood frame full wave water bed taken down, it seemed prudent to replace the 13 year old mattress. Well, that turned into a shopping spree for a new soft-side water bed and then into all new bedroom furniture. That arrived on Saturday. The visits to furniture stores to look at beds led us to a can't-refuse deal on a dining room table. We were considering one anyway, so why not? That comes on the 11th.

So I've been busy. The cool thing is that through the miracle of home equity, all this stuff plus a bit of credit card debt will cost us the same amount per month as we were putting toward that credit card debt, and it'll get paid off sooner. Our goal is to prepare this home for the long haul. While we feel the pull toward bigger and better homes, we really like our home and neighborhood and have no desire to move again, ever. Once the kids get our of elementary school in 5 years, our needs may change, but we really like the idea of our 'modest' (by Columbus OH standards anyway) 4 bedroom home. The lower payment that goes with it will also allow us to do more charity giving as time goes by, something that I fell compelled to do, seeing how blessed we are to live here in the USA.

Now that the bulk of that is done, it's time to do my homework. We head to Chicago on October 7th - 9th for training to be Family Dynamics facilitators. There are three couple from our church going and it looks to be an intense weekend. We will be in class from 8-5 on Friday and Saturday and from 1-7 on Sunday. We are told to expect 3-4 hours of homework each night on top of the class work. Before we head to Chicago, we are expected to read the bulk of the book His Needs, Her Needs and complete a section of the work book. There are a few people in Chicago that it would be neat to see, but it doesn't sound like we'll have much time.

So the bottom line is not much will likely be happening around here for a while. In the mean time, go read some of the fine blogs in my blogroll at left. In particular, read Greg's post on a good kind of cynicism. This left me encouraged that perhaps I'm not the grouchy, curmudgeon, faultfinding naysayer that I fell like so often. Perhaps I'm just an idealist, longing for the church to live up to its promise and potential.

Also, Daniel talks about 7 years of marraige. Though I still plan to try to ignore him Pinakidion, ICOCinfo and ICOCnews continue to track the writings of Mr. McKean (if you care.) Also, you should check out the new and improved Blogs For God, a listing of Christian blogs. Or you could add a word to the Thinklings Blog Free Association.

That's a lot of words to say why there hasn't been and won't be a lot of words around here for a bit.