Free Day

I got the day off today because the person I was supposed to be training called in sick. Bad for her, good for me. I have a ton of stuff I need to get done around the house. My mother-in-law is coming over this weekend to watch the kids so that DH and I can get away for a day or two to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary.[ Wow. 10 years--feels like 50! -just kidding DH! ;-) ]

Anyway, I need to do some serious cleaning so as not to be embarrassed by having someone else here. I am not a neat-freak, but the house is usually not a chaotic mess either...well, most of the time that is. When someone is going to actually be preparing meals in your house, using the shower, and maybe using the washing machine, it requires a much more serious approach than pulling the shower curtain closed to hide the mildew that's trying to take over. It also means wiping down the fridge and the microwave really well, so that I can pretend that the soda that spilled in there about a month ago and congealed into a crusty mess was never really there.

I also want to paint the master bathroom. Master bathroom, that's funny. It's actually more like a small closet with a toilet and some bathroom mats. Regardless, it looks really bad. Before we bought the house, it had been a rental property. When we saw it with our realtor it looked great; new carpet, vinyl floors and paint. It was empty and ready for us to move in. The problem, that we discovered later, was that in both bathrooms the drywall where the towel racks hung had obviously been broken and repaired numerous times. It looked OK on the surface, but we couldn't actually hang anything on the walls. They had been too abused and the repairs were made with patch kits, not new drywall.

We ran into the same problem around the windows. So many people had hung various window treatments over the years that there wasn't a solid place for us to hang ours. We had to hire someone to repair them so that we could cover our windows with something other than aluminum foil.

Aluminum. That reminds me . Last night when I asked DH what the gift theme was for the ten-year anniversary, he told me it was aluminum and tin.

Aluminum and tin. I guess he'll get a beer, soda, or maybe a disposable pie plate from the grocery store. And don't even get me started on tin. Are cans still even made from tin?

If anyone has any great gift ideas made from aluminum and tin...let me know.

DH suggested an I-Mac with a burnished aluminum finish.

Sure sweetie, keep believing the dream. One day you'll get your Mac.