We've been making lots of blanket tents and finding new ways to be as lazy as possible!
Tommy has learned how to escape the bounds of the living room and explore the rest of the house. Here he is "helping" to do the dishes about a day before the dishwasher died forever. It went all defunct right before I was to host Christmas Eve for my family. With our past dryer troubles, oven troubles, and refrigerator troubles, and now dishwasher troubles...I've had it with this junk! All I need to poop out now is the microwave. Oh, the sump pump clamp loosened and sprayed water all over the utility room last week too. The last time that happened, it sprayed water on the water heater and shorted it out. THAT was a 350 buck repair. It didn't happen this time but it was a nice, wet mess for a few days and freaked me out because Butch was out of town. I re-adjusted the clamp and tightened it. I'm getting to be a regular handyperson around here with that hubs of mine gone all the time (he'll be home for a while now, thank goodness) Anybody want to hire me? I work for 100 bucks an hour. Tommy will work for suckers, macaroni and cheese, pieces of lint, pennies, polly pocket pieces, pen caps, or anything else you could find in corners of your living room or in between your couch cushions.
Here is a shot of my dining room wall (whoops, it's sideways) after I took off the wallpaper border but before I really got into painting it:
Here is our Christmas tree, in the corner of the soon to be painted dining room. I couldn't stand looking at all the little pieces of tape holding the rippy border up on EVERY wall. I didn't have any money for paint but I had supplies and leftover yellow from the living room, also I had red from the hallway and bottom of the dining room...hey! Yellow and red make orange, right? Right?
Before:
After:
This is the other corner and I think the paint looks pinkish here but it's really a terracotta kind of color. I was going to go for a darkish, rusty orangish color but I like how this turned out. You should have seen the mess I made mixing paint but I am so happy with the result. I'm also proud of the fact that I didn't bother with taping the trim and did it all free hand (It's perfect, by the way, if I do say so myself.). I started the whole mess earlier in the day when we first put up the decorations on the tree and I ripped all the wallpaper off. I knew that, come hell or highwater, I wouldn't go to sleep until the whole room was painted and put back together. I wanted at least ONE THING DONE before Christmas! I finished around 3 am. (I will paint your room for 50 bucks or grocery store gift certificates.).
Here is the space above the main entry door that I like to decorate with seasonal stuff. I usually just grab a bunch of extra decorations, household thingies, lights, and other misc. statues and baubles. I asked my cousin Deedee if she had any extra things and she gave me that tree in the middle. It was just the thing I needed. The lights didn't work on it but I had extras from last year and it looks so cute from outside. I think I'll take down the colored lights and add white ones, and I'll take down the super Christmas-y things so by the time spring and summer come, it isn't so obvious that I never get around to changing that thing. When I crawled up there to change it, I was fighting dust and spider webs from LAST SPRING when I last changed the motif. 
Here it is with the lights on (that's the entry chandelier in the top right of the picture). That old cabinet to the right is an old machine parts box on it's side and I like to put a bunch of things in there to play an"i spy"-type of game. "I spy...a dust bunny, a spider web, an errant ball, an old sock that Matty thought would be funny to throw down over the ledge, an earring back, a pill bug, and parts of my Easter display from 2003..."
Okay, gotta go try to keep from pulling my hair out on this cold, blizzardy day. At least the kids have the Wii Outdoor Challenge game to stomp around on and work out the willies.
I'm outta here, people!:
