Operation "No Fun 'til the Dining Room is Done"

Hey guys!! I hope your weekends are all going well. I'm just enjoying those last few minutes before both my "boys" are up and things get rolling.....

It's been a busy week here in Nashvegas. Swim class on Mondays.....now we're working on endurance and speed drills. Endurance drill to build our lung capacity and speed drills to build our speed (duh!) She had us do several sprints against each other and I took Brent in freestyle and he blew me away in breaststroke. I fully expect to see him in Beijing next summer swimming breaststroke. The rest of the week I've been working on my breaststroke, but I know he'll still lap me when we go and practice this afternoon. I'm still hitting my goals in my quest for a half mile non-stop freestyle by Dec 31st. I'm up to 150 meter sets, with the ultimate goal being 800m. Hopefully today I can hit 200 meters and by the end of this week be up to 250 meters.

And now Pippin is up and in my lap.......the #1 reason blogging is usually a little difficult!

Wednesday-Thursday we had more rain than we've had in months, which you can see we really need. The down side is that all our Halloween chalk art washed away and our frontporch cobweb decorations are a bit more than thinned out now! We're having a pretty big Halloween party Friday night, so we'll need to work on that before then. They were all so cute!! We still have tons to do before the party, #1 being I need to figure out what I'm going to make. There are so many cute Halloween dessert items out there, and not as many good looking food items. I guess an all dessert party isn't that bad, right?? I'll probably just end up doing regular food stuff and save the cute things for desserts. Martha Stewart has some really cool looking Halloween food.

Friday night we got the chance for a blogger meetup!! Nicole and Tom were in town, checking out Nashville while he was down here for a job interview. And if someone is going to be here deciding whether or not they want to become a Southerner then we should by all means try to do our best to sway them in the proper direction - which of course is Nashville!! Where else can you get a fried-anything-you-want??? We already know what we're getting them as a housewarming gift. =) I'm always absolutely nervous and scared meeting up with bloggers. I'm not sure why because we've yet to meet a bad one, but you just worry if you'll have anythingt o talk about, if you'll get along, if they will be "difficult". I guess that's because it seems like a large majority of people out there are just plain annoying. And even when you have that first conversation with them on the phone you can't tell (and honestly I have the most insane time trying to understand Northern accents on the phone. I can finally understand Mouse but I swear there's a whole uncomfortable time delay in my brain. I think it's the speed with which Northern people talk or something.)

But ANYWAY, we picked them up at their hotel Friday night and from the time where we decided if we were about to approach the right couple and ask them to get in our car until we dropped them back off at their hotel we had an absolute blast. They simply must move down here. It's funny, but for a couple of "running bloggers" I think we only talked about running for about 5 minutes, because really, in life, is running such a big deal? For me it's such a small component of who I am and who I want to be. After we ate we showed them around our neighborhood a little (since that is the clear choice of where they should live, when they move here) and ended up at Vino. We hadn't been there since it changed over from a great little Italian place where we always carbo-loaded, so it was an adventure for us, too. But it was great - we ordered some dessert and a bottle of absolutely one of my favorite dessert wines I've ever had. It was some sort of sparkling red, and it went wonderfully with the chocolaty mousse dessert they were serving that night. A soulful jazzy woman was performing and for some reason at some point she had everyone go around the room and introduce themselves. It doesn't get more Southern than that. (Although I do have to say we've never had to introduce ourselves, but live music while you eat is pretty common around here.) Anyway, I'm so glad we got to meet them on their journey and hopefully we'll have a chance to get together again either here or in Chicago. Because I'm thinking on our next trip to Chicago we've got a lot of people to hang out with now!!! (And Pippin does too!!)

So the goal for this weekend was "No Fun". And obviously we had to blow that Friday night......I mean, if people are in town you can't have no fun.....but the main goal for this weekend was to get our dining room primed for the love of God. We started priming it literally a year ago - the can of paint was dated 10/20/06. But a lot of other projects have taken precedence and taken over the dining room. When we redid our bedroom in Nov and Dec all that furniture was in there. And from Feb-August all our kitchen stuff, old and new, was in there during the remodel. So, for a year we've had patches of the wall primed. And it's even worse because sometimes people think the electric, and I mean, ELECTRIC, blue portions are the color we're going for!!! And we didn't want anyone thinking that at the party this Friday! So, Saturday was devoted to painting. Until Brent got into a matting class. So, now I was on this quest alone, for the morning anyway. By the time he got home I had rolled everything 2-3 times (because electric blue is a bit difficult to cover) and was starting in on the trim. By the end of the day everything had been trimmed out once and there is FINALLY no more electric blue in our dining room!!!!! We need to go back and do the trim again, and I need to paint the trim and window as well as the ceiling, but the blue is history! We're just priming right now, we're going to change around the doorway, build some built-ins and add extra storage, and since the paint in there is a gorgeous metallic paint (pictured there) that's $40 a gallon, we're only going to paint once we have the room all figured out! I've taken a lot of pictures I need to upload.....

Anyway, it's time to get this party started and Pippin is getting a bit uncomfortable in my lap while I'm trying to type! Have a great day!!