Forward Thinking

Sometimes, you just have to do something that’s just for you. I find that if I don’t set aside some “me time”, I start feeling flustered and irritated with everyone. Part of my personal time is spent working on painted glass. It makes me happy to create these original pieces. Part of my personal time is spent watching movies. I need that release.

Still, as a woman, I find I really don’t concentrate nearly enough on things like long, hot baths and just relaxing in a luxurious tub of bubbles. I need that to feel really feminine. This is why I’m having a spa party in a few weeks. My younger daughter sells all the products for a great home spa treatment. Some of what she has are exfoliants and lotions. She’s fully licensed to demonstrate all the products and the equipment you can get for applying them. I think the only thing she doesn’t offer is acne treatment, but I could be wrong.

Most of what she sells are things to help you look and feel beautiful and pampered, and right now I could use it all!

Technorati Tags: painted glass, feminine, spa treatment

About a week ago, my son’s car got a flat tire. Now, normally this would be a no-brainer, easy fix. Just change the tire, right? Wrong. See, his car has BMW wheels with all locking lug nuts. He has to use a key, that looks like a hex wrench, to take the wheels off the car. Bear in mind, these wheels are made in such a way that the lug nuts sit flush with the wheel, so you can’t use any other tool to get them off, and each wheel has four locking lug nuts.

So, he starts to change the tire and breaks the “key” on the first lug nut. Yes, it’s broken and there’s nothing else we have with us that will work. The car has to sit where it’s at for several days before we can get back to it. In the meantime, I’m driving even more to get him and myself to work.

We finally have some time when we both are scheduled for the night so early in the morning we start making the rounds of parts places to see if we can find a replacement key. You’d think we were asking the auto parts guys for Parmigiani watches, the way they looked at us. No one had a key that would fit. We were advised to go to a BMW dealership.

OK. There are none within a hundred miles of here. There are no tools that will come close to fitting the stupid locking lug nuts. It’s 97 degrees and my car has no AC. We both look like bright red, drowned rats from driving all over the place and sweating like race horses. We are both getting more and more frustrated, and my thought is that dynamite will get those wheels off!

I call my oldest son and relate to him the problem. He says, “Come to where I work and we’ll get it figured out.” So, we drive there, show him the tiny, useless end of the wheel key, and he says to hold on a minute, he’ll be right back. Fifteen minutes later, he emerges from his work place with an iron “T” shaped tool, the end of which is a perfect match to the wheel lock key. He had gone inside and built this tool!

Now, why didn’t we call him when the key first broke? We are still asking ourselves that question!

Technorati Tags: flat tire, BMW wheels, locking lug nuts, BMW dealership

I’ll sure be happy when my car is paid off. I’ve traveled extra miles this week due to a variety of reasons. One of the reasons was going by the corporate office to deliver some paperwork. I was nearly at my job when I got the call to bring the papers by there, which meant turning around and heading in the opposite direction.

I felt like I had wasted the gas because this call could have been made sooner and I could have dropped the papers off on my way to work. I just needed to know that they needed them that day.

Once my car is paid off (in just about one month), that frees up a lot of money each month that I can put toward gas, minor repairs and such things. The minor repairs should make the car much more fuel efficient, but right now there just isn’t money left in the budget to have them done. Until them, I’m going to remind the “powers that be” that when they need me to do something for the corporate office, please call me early enough in the day so that I don’t make any extra trips.

Technorati Tags: corporate office, job

It’s only June, and where I live the temperatures are already going into the 90s many days. It’s blazin’ hot every afternoon when I drive to work. And, my car air conditioner doesn’t operate which means it’s like driving a sweat lodge. I leave early so that I can arrive at work early to cool down and dry off before I have to clock in. Yeah, it’s that hot.

I have been thinking about trading cars so I can have one with AC, but this car is so close to being paid for that I really would like to fully own it and drive it without the payments for awhile. It’s usually the way I do things. I get several years from a used car purchase. However, I am going to have to have some work done on this one, including having the AC fixed and a good tune-up, if I’m going to continue using it. In my opinion, it would be more economical to replace some car parts on it and just buy gas than it would be to pay car payments plus gas every month. The price of gas is really what’s got me thinking along these lines.

If I have a little work done on my car to make it more fuel efficient, and I get the AC running in it, then there really won’t be any need for another car for quite awhile. I can drive this one payment-free for probably another two years.

Technorati Tags: air conditioner, tune-up, fuel efficient

This house would be great for entertaining family and friends. The layout is
such that there is a great flow from the kitchen to the living room. The kitchen has plenty
of counter space and a large bar to allow for serving food and drinks. The dining table
sits just beyond the bar, between the living room and kitchen, but can be moved over to the
wall for extra traffic flow.

The living room isn’t huge, but it is open to the point that there is plenty of room for
extra seating if it’s needed. People can go out onto either the back deck or front deck, so
the living room is expanded by the use of those two decks.

Under the bar in the kitchen is wide, open shelving. Those shelves make a good place for
appliances that aren’t being used daily but I am also thinking that they would be good for
something else while entertaining. Maybe it’s time for me to look at wine refrigerators to
see if I can find one that will fit in the shelves there. They are pretty roomy and I think
there’s enough room for something like that.

Technorati Tags: entertaining

I think the first room I’ll tackle is my own bedroom. I’ve got it partly arranged and partly decorated, but there’s still more to do to make it the haven I really need after a hard day at work. Right now, there are books still in the boxes I moved them in, and a variety of other things that need to be put in place. I have a corner picked out for my rocking chair and ottoman. I’ll put a hanging light in that corner and a small table so I can have my laptop there beside me or just sit and read.

I also need to put the mirror on my dresser and get my personal things in the drawers. I still seem to be living out of a box and a laundry basket!

My closet has some things in it that really need to go upstairs to the room I’ll use as my craft and actual office space. There’s a lot of work to do there, as well, getting things organized so I can access them easily. It’s a small, third bedroom but it’s a lovely space with lots of light that streams in through the high, transom-style windows near the ceiling, the 15 pane door that leads to the balcony, and the regular window on the wall opposite the transom-style windows.

We live in a hectic world. Always on the go. Always competing. Stressful. I need a place to remove myself from all of that on a daily basis and get back in touch with my true self. Don’t you?

Technorati Tags: haven

My younger daughter is enjoying a few days in New York City. Thanks to our cell phones, she has been able to call me daily and catch me up on what’s going on and how she’s doing. Now, I have to tell you, even though she’s 20 years old, she’s still my baby and I had a hard time not having a crying fit when she first talked about flying to New York.

She’s there with her boyfriend and a lot of his family members for the West Point graduation of the boyfriend’s cousin, so I know she’s safe. There are a lot of people around her that she knows, and she’s a very careful individual anyway.

She is using this time to explore New York City’s highlights. Places like Central Park, the Statue of Liberty, and Ground Zero are on her itinerary. This is a trip she’ll never forget and probably will rank pretty high in her memories of luxury vacations. The only drawback is that she got terribly air sick on the plane and it took several hours for her to recover from that. She was left with a bad headache at the end of the day after they landed. See, she had forgotten to take motion sickness medicine with her. I bet she’ll get some before she flies home again!

Other than the air sickness, she’s super excited about being in The Big Apple and enjoying herself immensely. She took my digital camera so she can get lots of pictures. I’ll download them to my computer and post some of them right here!

Technorati Tags: New York City, cell phones, West Point, Central Park, Statue of Liberty, Ground Zero, digital camera

I had a wonderful family gathering yesterday. We cooked out and had a great time together. I can hardly wait to have an excuse to do it again!

Older Daughter came by early because she and children wouldn’t be able to stay for the cookout. Two of her children play instruments and sing, so they entertained us with their talents.

Oldest Son and his family came, too. He has four children and one on the way. In fact, he has the fifth child now because his wife had a C-section this morning! So now, he has a third son in his arms.

Younger Daughter came, and her boyfriend came over later, after work. She helped by bringing a fantastic dessert as well as a sweet potato casserole. She also set up the buffet line and helped me get things cleaned up.

The only thing I’m lacking here is sufficient seating for this many people. I have four kitchen chairs and two lawn chairs. Older Son brought two lawn chairs with him, and it wound up being enough because the children wanted to sit in the living room floor to eat, picnic style.

I really want to get more patio furniture so we can all gather out on one of the decks for events like this. I’d love to have some teak, Adirondack style chairs and chaises, as well as a couple of round tables with umbrellas. I might even want to run some outdoor speakers to the decks and put a ceiling fan out on one of them. It has a partial roof over it.

Living part of the time outdoors would help with the electric bill a lot. Cooking, eating, and entertaining outside is just so elegant, too.

Technorati Tags: family, Adirondack

I am still working on getting settled in to this new-to-me house. I’m especially working on my own bedroom, to make it the welcoming retreat I need to come home to after a hard day’s work. I’ve got a lovely brass bed with a quilt comforter and pillow shams in my favorite colors. My antique sewing machine serves as a bedside table and the lace curtains on the windows reflect one of the colors in the quilt.

I’ve got a very old ladies dresser that needs to be repainted and have the mirror mounted back onto it. The roomy drawers on the sides will be great for my lingerie. Everything else I have goes on hangers in the walk-in closet.

I’ll recover my platform rocker and footstool to blend with the colors in the room - sage and burgundy - and will hang a beautiful hurricane style fixture near the chair to serve as light for reading. Of course, I’ll use a compact fluorescent bulb in the fixture, but the oversized glass hurricane globe along with the antique brass accents will certainly give the room a feel of country Victorian comfort.

I need this for my bedroom. See, I spent about 2 years (since my husband’s passing) sleeping on the couch. It started when he got sick and needed the bed to himself. I needed to sleep where I could keep an eye on him and help him when he needed it, so the couch was the solution. After he passed away, I couldn’t bring myself to sleep in our room anymore. Now that we’ve moved, I can make this new bedroom all mine. So far, what little I’ve done has helped and I find myself gravitating toward it the moment I arrive home from work. It’s my haven. My retreat. My comfort place in the world.

Technorati Tags: bedroom, retreat, haven

One of the great things about this house is that the doors, and there are quite a few, are positioned in such a way that you get a good air flow through the house. I can reduce the amount of time the central air unit runs just by opening doors on the shaded side of the house and letting in the natural, cool air. I just love being able to do this. Along with the cool air, I get the songbirds voices and the fragrance of honeysuckle.

I’m going to get some birdseed and some deer corn to see if I can attract some wildlife closer to the house. We could sit in the living room and observe them through the three large windows there, and they’d probably never realize we were present.

I think I will have to get some screen doors, though, to keep out other wildlife, like mosquitoes and flies! I don’t need those creatures invading my space.

Technorati Tags: central air, songbirds, honeysuckle