Seven - Seven

Jason started 2nd grade this past week. Second Grade! How did that even happen?

Of course, his mommy posted pictures of his first day - because it's the thing to do. My facebook feed has been full of first day of school pictures for a month or so. Yep, some of these poor kids go back to school early in August or even at the end of July. In Wisconsin they still go back at a civilized time - the day after Labor Day.

Anyway, a few days after Beth had posted Jason's first day of school pictures, Facebook reminded me of some pictures I uploaded several years ago - pictures from the time that Beth, Jason's mommy, was also 7 years old. Her birthday is in September, so she had just started 1st grade, but thinking about how they were both about the same age made me want to compare them side by side.

In case you can't figure it out, that's Beth on the left and Jason on the right. :D

What do you think? Do they look a little bit alike?

I love them both. So much.

I Finally Changed It

I've been meaning to change the pictures in my header for ages. I had a picture of Jason as a baby - it was a super cute picture, but he's not a baby anymore. He's 7 years old and starting 2nd grade this year. He can read! And ride a bike with no training wheels. And jump off the diving board into the deep end of the pool. It was definitely time for an update.

And Jason's little sister wasn't on there at all, so now I've got it fixed. Maybe next time it won't take so long...

Be sure to check it out and let me know what you think. Or just look at the pictures I used, because I like them quite a bit.

Amara and me

Cory and me

Jason on one of our walks

Amara and Jason

Tim and Beth

Share the Magic of Storytelling

Love this Dark Tower series by Stephen King

What if getting books into the hands of kids in need was as easy as taking a picture and sharing it to social media?

It is!

For every 'shelfie' - a picture of you with your favorite book or in front of a bookshelf - posted to Twitter or Instagram this month with the hashtag #magicofstorytelling, Disney will donate one book to a child in need.

Simple as that.

There are a few other ways to donate, too. But this one is lots of fun.

Show me your shelfies!

First Days

I had a memory pop up on Facebook this morning - some pictures I'd scanned in a while back. There was a really cute one of my precious daughter Beth. It was kind of weird to realize that she was not that much older in that picture than her son is now. How did that happen?

And that's when I thought it would be fun to put some pictures side by side. Jason started first grade this week. What if I put his first day of first grade picture next to his mom's first day picture?

Aren't they cute?

Here's what my baby girl looks like today (with a brand new first grader of her own):

I think we're pretty blessed to have both of them. <3

Because I Have So Much Free Time

When I first started blogging, I used Photobucket to host a lot of my images. Thinking about it now, I'm not sure why. I've used Blogger for ages, and I can just use Google for all the images I need for my blog. They even make it super easy to add photos from my phone - which happen to be pretty much the only pictures I seem to take these days. (see example 'eclipse' photo on the right)

And now, after all this time, Photobucket has decided to change things (read: they want money) so that I can no longer use my Photobucket images on my blog - not only all images going forward, which would be OK since I haven't actually used them to host any blog images in ages (did I mention how easy it is to use Google?) - but every single image that I have ever used. So, everywhere that I have an image I hosted on Photobucket (and included in my post with code provided by Photobucket), I now have this super ugly graphic telling me that I need to upgrade my account. Oh Yay.

So now I have to go back through every post looking for those ugly graphics, figure out what image was supposed to be there, and then get them downloaded from there and re-uploaded (to Blogger and Google), and then fix the code so that the images display properly. Because, of course, I have nothing else to do with my life...

Thanks, Photobucket. I love you too. (jerks)

And, yes, if I wasn't such a perfectionist, I'd just let it go. They're all old posts anyway. Except for those things in the sidebar - what were those, anyway? And the background on my recipe blog. That is the final straw! (or was - got that one fixed at least)

(jerks)

Look What We Did!

I know, it has taken me forever (2 weeks) to show you the rest of the updates we've made to the house.  You've been hanging on the edges of your seats, right?  OK, maybe not, but you do want to see, don't you?

After the dining room and living room were painted, we took out the carpeting,

and started putting down new wood flooring.

 We started in the dining room and then, when that was done, we moved the furniture from the living room into the dining room, and we did the living room.  We had never done anything like this before, so it was an adventure and really quite fun.  It's kinda like putting together a puzzle, and kind of addictive as you start to see things coming together.  Not quite so much fun spending a couple hours one afternoon taking up about 19 rows and putting them back down again because I noticed an extra-wide gap right there in the walkway between the dining room and the living room.  (But I had to get it done so we could continue that evening when Jeffrey got home from work.)

Now, we have this gorgeous hardwood floor in there.  And, yes, I still go in there - often - and say, "Look what we did!"   Or just look at it and enjoy it.

Pictures of all the furniture moved back into place coming next!  (I promise not to wait two weeks.  Really)

Related articles

• The Before and the After
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Progress

We've been busy making changes to the house - which is why I haven't been doing much updating.  (OK, I may not have been updating this blog regularly anyway, but that's as good an excuse as any)

If you'll remember my last home improvement post, we had just stripped all the wallpaper off the dining room walls, and we needed to get the paint.  Here's what the room looked like before we started:

Photo courtesy of my wonderful husband
who actually took some Before pictures

And after he painted it, a lighter, brighter color (Artist's Canvas) on top, and green (Stone Walls) on the bottom:

 

The light color is also on the ceiling in both the dining room and living room and on the walls of the living room.  The green goes around the corner from the dining room into the library area off the living room, though  the lighting in this pic makes it look a bit lighter. 

 

 And since we really like this green - it's the same one we had in our old house when we had it repainted after the tornado - the wall in the family room, too.  It looks so much better than the blue it used to be - see kitchen wall picture comparing colors further down in this post.

 We* also covered the blue in the hallway leading from the front door to the breakfast area.  There's really no light in this hallway, so having light colored walls really helps to lighten things up.  I find that I have no pictures, but you can just catch a glimpse of the entryway here.  It wasn't blue, but the color was dark enough that it really needed some lightening up, too.  (*I use the term 'we' loosely because Jeffrey is the one who did all the painting.  I usually try to stay as far away from fresh paint and other such things as possible.  Thankfully the fumes weren't too bad this time - they must have improved the paint since we had our house painted in Wisconsin - but I still didn't want to spend too much time in close proximity.)

And then we covered the blue in the kitchen and breakfast area with a lighter shade of green:

I do need to take some more pictures of the kitchen, but trust me - it looks better.  Not that I hated the blue.  I know some people love blue, my mom included, but it's not a color I'd ever actually choose.  It was OK, but the green is just so much warmer.  It looks so good.  I'm really loving the color and the way it looks.

And... that's not all the progress we've made, but that's all I have time for right now.  Stay tuned for some really amazing changes.  I keep walking into the room saying, "Look what we did!"

The Before and the After

I am horrible at remembering to take Before and After pictures.  The house was fine when we moved in - of course, not exactly what we might have chosen if we'd been the ones to choose the paint, light fixtures, etc. ourselves, but definitely liveable until we could change things.  After seeing some of the houses on the market with the gaudy wallpaper and/or different bright and obnoxious paint colors in every room, that was a real plus!

Since we've moved in, we've taken the stair rail out, so we could get my new dresser upstairs. I didn't even think of taking pictures of the old stair rail until it was already gone.  The new one isn't up yet, so I'll have to wait on the after pictures.  

We've changed the ceiling fan in our bedroom -

The new one looks really good with our new bedroom furniture, and it's quiet.  The old one was a bit noisy for sleeping, and it looked like - Well, I forgot to take a before picture.

We changed the light fixture in the dining room, too -

It's much nicer than the old one, though you'll have to take my word for it, because I didn't take a before picture of that one either.  However, this could kind of be a before picture for this week's project.  See that wallpaper on the dining room wall?  We pulled it all down this week.  And, again, I didn't think about taking any before pictures, not until we were almost finished and there was just one area of wallpaper left beside and behind the china cabinet -

The wallpaper wasn't horrible. I mean, I didn't hate it, but it wasn't something we would have chosen, either.  Thankfully it came off the walls fairly easily, and the more stubborn spots scraped right off with a little warm water from a sponge.  Now we just have to get the paint.  But, for now, no more wallpaper!

This last picture should qualify as both an after pic and a before pic then - after the wallpaper and before the paint.  Right?

I'll try to do better from now on.  It is kind of fun to see the changes. 

This Kohl's Store is a Disgrace

Every time I walk into our local Kohl's store here in Anderson, IN I am absolutely appalled.  And embarrassed.  I haven't worked for Kohl's in years, but it still bothers me seeing one of 'our' stores looking the way this one does.  It is an absolute mess.  I have never seen a Kohl's store look this bad, or any store for that matter.  Either customers around here are even bigger slobs than customers anywhere else, or the associates in this store have never heard of recovery - or they just don't care and the manager lets them get away with it.  I'm thinking it's the latter, because even the Kmart here in town looks neater than the Kohl's store.

The first time I was there this fall, I thought maybe someone had been sick or they'd had a really big sale and just hadn't had time to get caught up.  Not that either of those would have been legitimate excuses for the place looking like this:

If it was just a rack or two, that would have been one thing, but it was basically every single rack and fixture in the Men's department, and most of the fixtures in the other departments, too.  We spent most of our time in Men's, so this is the department that really shocked me.  This is Kohl's, the store that had to get rid of shopping carts so they could carry Dockers - because a store with shopping carts is not high class enough for Dockers.  Oh yeah, well there are no carts here, but the Dockers are a huge mess.

Along with everything else.  Stuff on the floor, unfolded and tossed on the fixtures, and just a huge disorganized, disgraceful mess.

How did they let it get this bad?  I'm hoping things will get better and back up to Kohl's-like standards one of these days.  The last two times we were in there, I actually saw people straightening and organizing, which I had not seen before.  Maybe they got a new manager or someone from Corporate came in and told them they better straighten up.  I was going to post these pictures ages ago or send a note to Corporate after we first went in there, but I didn't right away.  I just kept putting it off, and then thinking that since I hadn't been there in a while maybe they'd improved, so I should wait and see.  Then I went back, and it was just as bad, and I still kept putting it off.  Just so you know, it's been bad since at least September. Pictures in this post are from September, November and December, and there was another time in there that I forgot my phone so I didn't get any pictures, but it was just as bad then.  I don't know about before September, but it had to get this way sometime.   And now, because they let everything get into such a mess, it is going to take a very concerted effort to get it back to the way it is supposed to be.

In the meantime, the Kohl's associates are going to need to keep on top of things, because the customers have obviously gotten used to the total mess of this store and see no reason to change their behavior.  Even racks or fixtures that have obviously been straightened recently had a few items thrown over the top or lying on the floor.  Customers as a rule seem to be pretty messy creatures, but I'm thinking they're more likely to at least try to leave things neat if they're already that way - but if they're already messy, why bother?

I used to work in those departments.  You spend your entire day roaming the department, straightening what needs straightened, picking things up, hanging things back up, etc.  (In between helping customers, setting ads, doing markdowns, putting out new merchandise, and all the other stuff that needs done)  And, when the store closes, everyone stays until all the departments are recovered. 

It never ends!  But, if you don't keep at it, it will get out of control.  Like this store.

We Never Had To Do This Before

We have trees now!  We get kind of excited about that because our last two houses were built in newer subdivisions that had previously been some farmer's field.  No trees.  At least not for years and years, and even then they weren't very big. Then we lost a couple of the trees we did have when the tornado went through a few years ago.

But here we have trees.  The one out front is really pretty right now, all yellow and orange.

And dropping leaves all over the ground, too - so today we raked up a whole pile of those leaves.

We've never had to do that before!  I guess we better get used to it, because there are still plenty of leaves left to fall!

Do you think I'll still think they're pretty by the time we've had to rake all the rest of them?

Hanging Out With My Buddy

I spent today with my little buddy Jason.  His mommy had something she had to do, so he spent the night last night and then all day today.  We didn't do much - just read lots of books, colored, snuggled, etc.

We had breakfast on the deck this morning and took some pictures, too - just because.  I really like the way Google puts pictures together into an animation.  It's kind of fun.

I don't get anything done when Jason's here, but we have fun.

What's Yellow and Green and All Over?

Oh, my husband hates seeing these things in his yard!

I never knew they didn't belong, until he started waging his war on them.  It's a pretty hopeless case.  They're everywhere.

And they are kinda pretty...

Of course, Jeffrey wouldn't agree with me.

Speaking of pretty - have you checked out Flickr recently?  I snipped all these dandelions off my flickr photostream, which now includes every photo I've ever uploaded - and 1 Terabyte of FREE storage!!  AND makes all the pictures look pretty, oh so pretty, and makes it easy to see all the newest photos from my contacts - like this one that just happens to also be of a dandelion.

Yeah, I haven't been using Flickr much for a while, but I am going to have to get back to it.  And start taking more pictures with my camera instead of just my phone.

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