The Bathroom is Finished!

It is complete! Grout sealed? Check! Silicone seal around tub? Check! Curtains made? Check! Wrinkly new shower curtain steamed? Check! Toilet reinstalled and sealed? Check! Threshold installed? Check! New rug and wastebasket in place? Check! Removal of giant basket full of toilet paper rolls? Check! (Apparently Daniel has never liked that. Who knew?)

Grout!

I decided to do tile on the walls along the floor (in lieu of baseboards). These pictures show them as well as the grout which is now complete. It's coming together!

Bathroom Upate

Got the tile down yesterday! Here it is:


The next step is to do the grout and baseboards.... but we'll see if my shoulders allow me to work on that today.

Piano Lessons....

Playing piano is something I've always wanted to learn to do, but never had the opportunity growing up. I tried to teach myself several times, but without much luck. Although I never learned to play an instrument growing up, I had always been in choir, and had a good foundation of music on which to build.

So last week I called a local piano teacher and had my first lesson. I'm really excited, and dare I say, proud, of myself for tackling a new challenge. I think learning to play will be a good way to exercise a new area of my brain, but I'm especially looking forward to the day when I can produce beautiful music and get lost in the notes.

I didn't make a New Year's resolution, but this could probably be called one. I encourage all of you to tackle a new challenge this year. Do something new, step out of your comfort zone, and see how you grow as an individual because of it!

Excited for the Inauguration!

I got to say.... I'm so psyched for tomorrow! What an exciting time we live in, huh? It's so cool that we get to see history in the making as the first African American President is sworn into office. I think that we can all agree, no matter what your political affiliation, that tomorrow will truly be a great and wonderful day for our nation.

Bathroom Remodel Update

Once again, I am working on retiling the bathroom floor.... this time it's the upstairs guest bathroom. Everything is going more easily and quickly than the downstairs since I know what I'm doing this time around. However, the next task is to cut the tile and there's a heck of a lot to cut! I was so lucky with the first bathroom because the dimensions of the room were exactly 3 tiles wide by 8 tiles long. I only had to cut for the vent and the toilet! How nice, huh? Not so with this bathroom. Every edge tile will have to be cut, in addition to the toilet and vent pieces. Yah. (Can you hear the sarcasm?)

I was going to post a pic, but it looks pretty boring. It's a floor. What can I say?

Also, Daniel and I were super bummed today that the Eagles lost. He is a native Philadelphian, and I'm an adopted fan, and it was heart breaking to see them so close to being NFC Champs. :-(

Just like new....

So I honestly have had a good reason for not updating my blog in so long.... my computer has been very sick.

This last week it refused to allow me internet and network access, which meant I couldn't print anything either. Not only that, but the processes that did work were extremely slow. I would open a jpg file for editing and wait several minutes for it to load. It was such a headache. So Daniel ordered me a faster hard drive more memory. Yesterday it arrived and he swapped all the old parts for new ones.

Voila! It's like a brand new computer! I'm in the process of reinstalling all my software but I can already tell that all the processes run much faster than even before my computer was sick.

Yah! Thank you Daniel!

Too much puzzle!

This last week Daniel and I completed a 3000 piece puzzle on our kitchen table. After turning over all the pieces and finding all the edges, we began to realize that the puzzle was bigger than the table, like 4 inches bigger! We had to rig up special cardboard ledges on both sides of the table to accommodate the whole thing! And if trying not to bump the precarious cardboard ledges wasn't difficult enough, we had to convince our 3 cats that the ledges could not be jumped upon and that the puzzle pieces were not toys. We never accomplished either.

However, after 4 days we did finally complete the puzzle. Here is an aerial photo of it. The hand holding the camera is pressed against the ceiling in this shot. If you look closely, you can see the cardboard ledges peeking out the sides of the puzzle.

Snowshoeing is Fun!

Recently Daniel and I went snowshoeing for the first time ever. We had a blast and look forward to our next outing!

This Christmas....

This blog is so overdue,... I know! Here is how we spent our Christmas Vacation:

Drove up to Breckenridge to find some snow! Here we are sledding:





After shopping in town we had an evening sleigh ride pulled by Doc and Dick, seen here:


We also drank hot chocolate on the ride to stay warm:


Back at home we made Christmas cookies. They looked good, but they were unfortunately inedible. I swear I didn't overcook them but they were hard as rocks!

Hope you all had as much fun as we did!