Right now I'm sitting in the Hong Kong airport and taking advantage of free wifi while I wait on the last two hour flight and two hour van ride to Yangtze University. There are some nice duty free shops, but none of them are open this early. So far, so good. I'll check in again later.

One of the changes we have made to our house very slowly is the dining room. It's really more of a dining area since our house has an open floor plan and only one dining area. Here is it shortly after we bought the house.

This picture cracks me up every time I see it. Corndog had been begging to help us paint the house. We felt compelled to repaint every room and many ceilings before we moved in. SH chose this wall for him to paint since it was just a big wall with nothing to paint around other than one outlet. SH painted the circle around the outlet and told him to paint everything else. So of course, he painted his name in big letters and then got serious about painting the wall. Corndog was 6 at the time. Just a few weeks after we moved in he was talking to a lady at church and told her his family moved every 4 years and when we do we "make" him repaint the house. He claimed he had already painted 3 or 4 houses at the ripe old age of 6. (She thought it was funny, too. That's how I know about the conversation.)

Anyway, initally all we did was paint and put up some curtains and then lived with it for 4 years, like this:

It was not offensive, just pretty boring. When the table was centered under the light, we had a big space along the wall. We brought plants indoors over the winter and set them there, but mostly it was just space. But I had a plan, and just needed a carpenter and some new furniture to pull it all together..........

In April a friend, who is also a carpenter, helped SH build in the storage bench I wanted along the empty wall. Here are of of the "during" pictures.

As you can see, Corndog is doing some more painting in the dining room 4 years after we moved in, with his trusty sidekick close by. Oh wait, in this picture he is sinking nail heads in the trim, but he did do some more painting. Here:

Then my MIL spent a weekend with me while the boys were fishing and we made lots and lots of pillows. And of course, I ordered a couple of pieces of new furniture (furniture shopping is much more fun that car shopping ;-))) to get a dining room that looks like this.

So, I now have lots of room to store Christmas decorations under the bench--I won't have to go back into the attic in January. Yea! We can seat more people comfortably around the table. And by moving the new table closer to the wall it freed up room between the table and living area so that we can dance daily, or set up a card table when we have a really big crowd for dinner.

I haven't completely finished the Dining Room ToDo List. I still want to 1.) replace the light fixture with one that is more centered over the table and looks more like the funky pendants over the bar, and 2.) I need to make the cushion for the seat of the bench, and 3.) would love to have a display ledge the length of the wall and high enough over the bench that no one will bump their head on it. But at least now it looks like our dining room rather than a boring spot next to the kitchen where we have our table. Hopefully the rest of the changes won't take 4 years to get to.

NOT a one post wonder

Were you beginning to wonder if I was going to ever make another post, or not? The last few weeks were not spent the same way I had planned. My car, Old Faithful--who now appears to be a little more old and a little less faithful-- left me stranded on the interstate a couple of weeks ago. So, since our other car is also very well-traveled, we decided it was time to trade one of them in so we have a car we are confident will take us on our roadtrip and back later this month. I've spent more hours than I care to admit looking and thinking about cars and financing.

I am thankful that my summer schedule gives me some flexible time to car shop, and thankful that we were able to get financing approval easily, but I really, really, really do not like car shopping. It's one of the few types of shopping I dread. I hate feeling like I have to play games to get the best price. I hate knowing other people are probably getting a better deal than me on identical cars because I do not play the game well. I hate the way the salesmen act like the manager is pulling all they strings and they are just innocent and powerless middlemen. I hate the way they focus on the monthly payment rather than readily telling me what interest rate they are charging or what extras they are trying to squeeze into the deal. But I have to admit I do kind of enjoy the look on their face when I pull out my financial calculator, calculate my own payment, and tell them we already have financing arranged through our credit union with a better rate than they are offering.

During this ordeal we have discovered that I am emotionally attached to Old Faithful, our 2000 Honda CRV. We bought her when we were expecting Corndog, in the summer of 2000. I was thinking about what would be easy to get a carseat in to and out of and it has been a super car for us. We've put over 185K miles on it, but I'm still not ready to let her go. So, we are trading in the car SH drives for work and we'll be sharing the Honda and the new car. Hopefully all the wrinkles have been ironed out and the car shopping saga will be over by the end of the week.

Forget About It--Or Not

So, last night (early this morning when I could not sleep) I decided it was high time to start a blog. I have been thinking about it and composing imaginary blog posts in my head (yes, I am weird that way. I assumed you knew). So at the end of the blog start up process, I see a link to this blog and discover I started one over 2 years ago, that I had completely forgotten! How can I be THAT forgetful? I remember the professional blog page I had a student worker create that will probably languish for the foreseeable future, but this one?

I had forgotten about the Staples incident until I reread that initial post. That is not difficult to believe at all and one of the reasons I wanted to start a personal blog in the first place.

The next few weeks at the Trivitt house will hopefully be a little unforgettable for all the right reasons. My sweet husband has a milestone birthday on Saturday. Corndog and I have been debating how to commemorate the event for a few months and Corndog has decided that we need to take Dad to ride the world's highest and fastest roller coaster before he gets too old to want to ride it. So we are off to Sandusky, Ohio in July. While we are there I am also treating him to a fishing trip so he can fully recover from the coaster induced headache before we begin the long trek home. Details to follow, as soon as I figure them out.

We are also making some progress on making the house "ours". We've been in it almost four years and continually making small changes as time and money allow, but it seems like things are finally all coming together. The "To Do" list is still a mile long, but it now feels more like what I could envision when we bought the house and less like the previous owners house. I'll post photos soon.

Getting Started

As if I needed one more thing on my perpetual "To Do" list, I've decided to start a blog.  I'm just having so much fun watching a few friends' blogs that I can't resist joining any longer. 

Technology is not one of my strengths, so don't be surprised if it takes me several weeks to get photos posted and have a "pretty" blog, but I have to start somewhere and I'm not afraid of baby steps.  

Today I was more terrified than I have ever been, or at least in a very long time.  Corndog, my 8 yr-old son, (you'll be formally introduced later) disappeared in Staples.  I left him playing a game on a computer while I was looking at printers two aisles over.  I ran through the store twice without seeing him.  Then I had him paged, twice, and still no Corndog.  At this point I was beginning to panic and feel sick to my stomach.   I internally debated whether to call 911, or use the camera on my phone to start taking pictures of all the people in the store.  I finally decided to ask a male to check the men's room, and found a store employee who checked for me.  It turns out Corndog had an upset stomach and didn't have time to let me know where he was going before making a mad dash to the men's room.  He was only "missing" for about 3 - 5 minutes, but it felt like an eternity.  He's going to be fine once he gets over the creepy discussion about strangers we had in the car, but I'm afraid I may never be the same again.  

On the up side, the new printer we bought works exactly as it should and I can now print wirelessly from anywhere in the house or yard.   I'm sure this is just the technological intervention I needed to make me uber-productive when working from home.