July 05th, 2023

Happy 247th Birthday America!  Dang, you look good for your age :)  heh

Hope everybody had a fun and safe Independence Day!  

Because the 4th landed on a Tuesday this year, Tim was lucky enough to mostly have a 4-day weekend. He had to get some work done for the job, but there was also non-work related time and Yahoo to that.  No matter how much a person may love their job, downtime is important too. That whole work/life balance thing.  It's real!

Most of the weekend was dedicated to getting stuff done. We did a LOT.  I mean a LOTTA LOT !  Including Tim  having to replace the battery in his car because it unexpectedly and without warning gave up the ghost on Saturday.  Dang.  He was smart and set up this large canopy thing we have literally over the car so he was working in the shade.  It was super hot out all weekend.  One of those Heat Index of 110F sort of weekends so that canopy was a brilliant idea.

​Tim also spent a lot of time getting the baseboards in the family room very nearly finished. The only thing left is around the backdoor and that has to wait for the door trim to be done. I really love the way it looks.  Harkens me back to our New England roots a bit and that suits me right down to my toes.  A little caulk and a little paint and it will be perfect.

I had my own project going that day.  At our most recent Minock visit we were the lucky recipients of this beautiful wooden planter that the Mister made for us!  Wow!  To keep the wood safe (as it lives outside where the elements are) I decided to paint it.  I am very pleased with how it turned out.  Now I just need to figure out what to put in it!  Isn't it fabulous?  

Another exciting part of our 4-day holiday weekend was our new table & chairs!  Here's the story behind that!  When we first moved here, we brought very little with us.  Our Colorado house was more than twice the size of our current house so first of all we didn't need nearly as much furniture but also the proportions of the rooms wasn't the same plus furniture with a Colorado feel just doesn't suit Florida.  So we decided (way back then, 7 years ago now) to just get rid of (most of) it and start over.  

Once we got here, after the kitchen was finished being reno'd and the ishkabibble of being under construction was done (for the moment) we began slowly buying new furniture that suited our new home.  When it came time to look for a dining table we ended up buying one of those higher tables. I think they call it a bar top or bar height.  It made sense at the time..  Because we have not just the table in the dining area of the kitchen but also a peninsula with a seating area it seemed (again, at the time) to be a good idea to have it all the same height.  That way, the chairs could be used in either place.  Eventually we got a second table, a round one for the family room, also bar height so that, once again, the chairs could be used at any of 3 places!  Smart eh?

Well, smart perhaps, but when the only place to sit leaves your little feet dangling all the time and you have to kind of climb up to sit down well, honestly, it kind of made me feel like I was sitting in a high chair.  Like a giant baby! Which I sometimes am,  but that's beside the point.    Additionally, and oddly, the higher chairs are also harder to push in, especially if you are already sitting in it.  Think about it.  If your feet don't touch the floor, how do you scootch in?    Answer?  You don't.  It's not possible.  And it turned out that Tim felt the same way.  So we started looking for a replacement kitchen/dining table.

We found several that we liked everything about except the price tag.  And so we waited. And waited. And waited.  Tim happened to notice a set that we liked during a huge sale!  We talked about it and decided YES!  The set was ordered and was supposed to take 6-8 weeks to arrive. We anticipated it's arrival some time in August perhaps.  Nope. It got here Monday! Awesome!

So Tim spent a lot of Monday putting together the new dining table and chairs.  And I spent a lot of Monday breaking down GIANT boxes and gathering up endless yards of Styrofoam and other packing material and then vacuuming like a fiend to get every last little bit.  Ultimately though, it was worth the time and the money because it looks great and we no longer have to sit in high chairs at our own table.  Now we just need to find a home for the old table!  Here's a few pictures of the new table and chairs.  There are actually six chairs but I only put 4 at the table for now. The other two are scattered through the house.  There is a butterfly leaf by the way, to make the table bigger when we need to :)

We did manage to find our way to the beach one evening. After all of the work we did all weekend, it was a lovely to hit that refresh button.  We just stood there and breathed, watched the water, the birds, the dolphins and the manatees.  There were lots of boats and lots of people but none of that mattered one single bit.    Here's a few photos:

Ahhhh. I feel more relaxed just looking at the pictures :)

 By last night, which was the actual holiday, we were too pooped to make the effort to walk over to the beach to watch the fireworks.  We heard them though, and I'm sure they were beautiful because they always are.

So that was our long Holiday weekend.  How was yours?

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