I can't believe it has been nearly a month since my last update. It seems that every time I sat down at the computer, I needed to be doing something else and had no time for writing. Alas...
I've actually been doing some webdesign again for a friend who is holding a women's conference this summer. You can check out the site at
www.everywomanintheworld.com. It's been so long since I started a site from scratch so it was a pretty fun thing to do again. And really frustrating at times.
I refinished our kitchen cabinets over a (long) weekend with a lot of help from Mum. We sanded, scrubbed and painted our little hearts out. Plus I got to rent a kick-ass mitre saw rented from Revy, uh, Rona (I hate it when stores change their names) which I didn't end up using as much as I'd expected to because I realized my initial plan for the project was insanely ambitious and would have taken us forever. Since what we did seemed to take forever anyway, I'm so glad I backed off with the plans. Those photos will be posted shortly - and
here they are.
We had a great visit with Theo's brother Murray, his wife Laura and our 2 nieces Emily (3) and Julia (4 months). They stayed with us for about 5 days and we had a bunch of fun showing them (or directing them) around Vancouver. We went to the Maplewood farms with the kids one day where they got to pet goats and bunnies, see a cow get milked and all sorts of other farm fun. Several friends and all their kids joined us too so there was lots of excitement over the animals. I was pretty excited about the goats and bunnies myself.
We'd been having the dishwasher floods again despite all the various plumbing repairs we'd had done under the sink and we finally worked out that it was coming from where the sink sprayer joined up with the pipes from the fixture. It is only around a year old but I was pretty much ready to just go buy a new fixture to get the problem solved. Thankfully, Murray is exceptionally handy and gave us a whole bunch of good advice about various house renovations, including the sink, and he came up with a $0.68 solution involving a hose clamp that completely solved our problem. I've been running the dishwasher flood free since then. Woo hoo! He also reinforced our deck railings with approx $3.00 worth of lag screws rather than us replacing the whole wobbly railing this summer. Plus he gave us good advice for creating a cement water barrier to prevent any more rain water running down the path and under our foundation. PLUS, (hard to believe there's more) they arrived with a beautiful compound mitre saw as our housewarming gift! It is so awesome! I literally jumped up and down with joy. Now I can easily do the baseboards and will probably add chair rails and crown moldings all over the place. It is sooooo good!
I've been loving the summer-ish weather despite a couple mild sunburns because I didn't realize the sun was that stong already. I've heard it has been snowing in Calgary and a couple other places around the country as we're toasting ourselves on the West coast. Is it cruel to laugh? How 'bout a mild chuckle under my breath? Okay, I'll play nice. *snerk* Okay, that was the last one.
