I have my truck back, for the approximate value using the infamous blue book, it is fixed. Oh well, getting the tranny rebuilt was cheaper than a year's worth of car payments. And the current sermon series is over at our church so I got to bring home the hurried and painted on the fly posters used this time... see above. that gets me somewhat caught up on old stuff.

All hail the tree, the tree is gone. Just to make the money squeeze tighter, the tree guys showed up this week to remove 1 dead tree and 1 almost dead one. I now have a grassless circle in my front yard where a blue spruce USED to be. It looked good from the house, but the street side of the tree was dead and death was spreading fast. I have some grass seed down now but it will be a while before it looks like anything out there. The dead tree in the back needed to be gone last year... Hurricane Ike (yes, Ohio got hit by a hurricane last year) tried but the dead (undead?) tree resisted to torment us with it's thorns for another year. I'm sure even the power/cable/telephone dudes will be happy to see it gone as all utilities in town run through the backyards and that tree was right beside the pole.

May be this week I will be able to get to the multitude of other projects that are started but not finished...

The kids' room has gone from this:

to this (please ignore the sheets over the windows, still need to find the right fabric to make the curtains with):


Now I can get back to My project (yet unfinished) of paper mache angels...

after 2 days of staring at the same wall, all the paper is gone. No more stripey flowers; no more of the 50's looking bunnies, duckies, puppies and chickies that were scarily lurking under the stripey flowers (and would NOT DIE) ; and most of all NO MORE WALL PAPER PASTE! Tomorrow should be a day for sanding the joint compound now filling (I hope) all the holes, then priming the walls. Maybe the end is insight... or maybe I'll have to live with the disaster area from the room now residing all over the rest of the house...

I have converted the kids good and proper - they both swear that they will never ever put up wall paper in any house they should ever buy. They agree that there should be a special place in the Abyss for people who put up wall paper badly. And they both want to make lots of money to hire people to do this work rather than ever having to do it again. Until they move out, I'll bet this is the last time I have to do any decorating in that room. Hehehehehehe......

There should be a special place in the Abyss reserved for those who put up wall paper without properly preparing the wall first. This has been an all morning thing and there is only paper on one wall of this room. ARGGGGHHHHH!!! I have said it since the first time I ever had to help my mom put up wall paper back home - I will NEVER use wall paper in any home I use. Unfortunately, we bought a house that is full of it. I just wait almost 10 years between rooms in the hopes that it will just fall down on its own. I hate wall paper!

Did I mention that Its spring break and this is the kids room? The room that looks like an EPA cleanup site waiting to be found? They have been helping...