Bring it on!

My washers and dryers were up and going Thursday morning, so I gave them a spin (really). It was amazing to stuff them full of clothes and watch them go. I was completely mesmerized by the see-through doors on the washers. It was astounding, too that in 22 minutes I had clean clothes ready for the dryer. I did 8 giant loads start to finish in about 2 hours. It was a happy time. It really is my own personal laundrymat. I had to program the washers and dryers for different scenarios, but now that's done and I've got my p-touch labels to remind me which cycle I want, I am all set.

The day was a little disrupted, though by a severe pain I kept having in my abdomen. It had woken me up at about 2am, and it just kept coming and going throughout the day. I just kept thinking it would go away--just some tummy trouble or something. I kept saying that until about 4:00 on Friday afternoon when I was on the floor in pain. I knew that it may be tummy trouble, but it was very severe tummy trouble.

Kristy was in town, and Mark was hunting with Josh, so I called Kristy at about 6:00 after I had decided to go to the emergency room. She came and stayed with the kids until Mark and Josh got home later that night. I drove to the hospital and sat for 3 hours in the waiting room, feeling like I was seriously going to explode.

After I got a room in the ER, I got some morphiene and life was better. The doctor couldn't decide if it was a rogue ovary or my appendix. I was thinking more colon obstruction, but I let her figure things out. After an exam, bloodwork, ultrasound and CT scan, it was discovered I had colitis as the cause of my pain and my white blood cell level was high. By this time it was after 2:00 am, and since there was no impending surgery or other procedure, I called Mark to come take me home. Until this time I didn't see the need for anyone to be there watching me lay on a hospital bed. I'm pretty low-maintenance, and I didn't want an audience. They sent me with an antibiotic prescription, and home I went. I crashed for pretty much all of Saturday and Sunday. Today I feel like myself again. I still have to go see a specialist to figure out what is causing colitis. Hopefully it was just a crazy, one-time infection.

When I was in the hospital and the pain was so bad, I kept going to my happy place. Normally that is the Caves Branch River in Belize. But this time it was my laundry room. I kept picturing those shiny silver washers spinning my clothes around and around and it made me feel better.

Some pictures

Mark's camera has too wide of an angle on its lens to take any pictures of the inside of our house. He is wishing for a new 24-70mm lens, maybe for Christmas. In the meantime, I realized I could use Abram's camera to take a couple of pictures today.

This one is of our new green great room.

This is the other side of the great room. Just so you know how dang high this wall was to paint, those paitings you see are 7 feet tall.

Guess who showed up with my stuff? I was singing, "Oh, the Wells Fargo Wagon is a coming..... Oh PLEEEEASE let it be for me," each time I heard a big engine coming down our street today. They've got all the machines in the basement now, and we'll see how long installation takes. For how much it cost, I hope it takes a long time. The front machine is one of the washers, and the 6-ft beasts in the back are the dryers. More pictures soon to come.

There are so many colors in the rainbow...

Another random old song, this time brought to you by Harry Chapin. It has been our theme for paint color selection.

"There are so many colors in the rainbow,

So many colors in the morning sun,

So many colors in the flowers,

So let's use every one."

It has been a little crazy at our house the last week. After the great room "Egyptian Nile" painting marathon, Mark and I rested for a few days, and then we began the basement painting marathon on Wednesday. The game room is a very, very deep red called "Chianti". It turned out so beautiful. Dark brown "Bear Rug" walls in the hallway lead to a deep "Provence" blue exercise room, bright "Turquoise Gem" laundry room, and a "Provence" blue bathroom, "Alluring Blue" bedroom for Abram, and, of course, a "Pooh Bear's Shirt" red bedroom for Jake. It is so fun to have lots of colors instead of our blah blah boring light yellowish white everywhere.

After we get Abram and Jake moved downstairs, we will paint the upstairs bedrooms one by one as we shuffle kids into new rooms. Also, the kitchen needs paint, I'm thinking "Crisp Celery," but that's probably going to be last. I really like painting. I've never done it before, but it's quite invigorating. I'm ready to tackle the upstairs bathrooms, too. I've got to hide the fact that we ever had such boring walls. I know that someday I will say, "What was I thinking?" as I try to cover up some of our colors, but for the next several years, I know I will love it.

I had piano movers come today and take our piano upstairs to the loft. That way it is still in the great room, but not in the way of people and furniture. It looks great up there.

The picture above is of the little treasure I found for our basement hallway. We needed wall sconces, and I had not seen anything I remotely liked until I found this one online last night. It is me, and I'm so excited for them to get here. We'll see how brave I am at installing light fixtures. I took the old ones all down, and I'm assuming hooking up the new ones will just be the reverse. I'm going to give it a whirl with the laundry room light later today and see if I have the magic touch.

The delivery guys are supposed to be here today with my washers and dryers. It is a happy day for Jill.

In order to form a more perfect union

I love James Madison. Such a genius, "Father of the Constitution," and noble leader of our country. It was 221 years ago today that he and other delegates met in Philadelphia to sign our Constitution. What a happy day to celebrate. Good work, James.

Happy Birthday, Constitution!

Family pictures

Don't be surprised if you see one of these pictures in your mailbox around Christmas time. These are pictures from Canada, and were taken by Mark's camera with a delayed shutter. The kids all laughed hysterically watching Mark run to get in the picture in time. This was especially challenging, because right now, Mark's lens has 70mm as its widest, so he has to get really far away to get a picture of the whole gang of us.

The top one is at Mt Edith Cavell and Angel Glacier. It was a beautiful little hike to get there, and so cool to see actual iceburgs breaking off of the glacier. The story of Edith Cavell is very fascinating, and I know why Canada went to the trouble of naming one of its highest peaks after her.

The second one is at Lake Louise. It is such a pretty place, but so over-run with tourists, that it's not very peaceful. The Chateau Lake Louise is a very fancy and expensive hotel right on the lake. We will never stay there, but we love to go in for the show. There is a girl with the world's puffiest sleeves who plays a golden harp, and it is so funny. She plays glissando after glissando, making simple songs sound fancy, and all these Japanese people stand next to her and have their pictures taken while she plays. She just looks at the camera and keeps running her hands up and down the strings. We were all laughing, imagining Aubrey in that spot trying to keep a straight face while people snapped vacation photos of her playing her harp. Anyway, Lake Louise is beautiful, but get there early, early in the morning if you want to see the lake and not the masses of tourists.

Think Green

I have always heard that when you are trying to choose a paint color, to go look in your closet and see what colors you have there. That is a good indicator of colors you like. Here's what I found in my closet:

Cole Haan Janell slippers (my favorite Nike employee store purchase ever), A new green jacket,

and this sweater. So we decided to paint our great room a shade of olive green, a little darker than these items, but the same basic color. It was a big step away from the light-yellowish-neural color that all of our walls were painted when we built our house 6 1/2 years ago. Back then I didn't know how to diversify our palette. I didn't really care, either because we had no furniture that matched.

Our great room has 19-foot ceilings. It's a big room, and it was a big job to paint. The hardest part was masking off the crown molding, and also taking down the can lights way, way up there. Fortunately, Mark is a pro on ladders. We had to buy a 16-ft step ladder to add to our ladder collection, but that was much cheaper than paying someone else to do our paint job.

I'm exhausted, though. Mark got home from work Thursday around 5:00. We jumped right in masking things off. We stayed up until around 2:00, and still hadn't opened a paint bucket. We started painting Friday at 8:00 am with the ceiling, and moved on to the 2 walls being painted green, and finished Saturday morning around 4:30. We slept for a few hours, and started up again around 10:00 on Saturday, this time moving to the 2 big walls being painted a taupe-ish-brown color, working until past midnight. But it is done (except for a few touch-ups around the doors), and it looks amazing. I never thought I would be brave enough to go for such a dark, bold color, but I'm so glad we did. It makes me excited to try out some crazy colors when we paint the basement. I'm mostly excited that the ceilings are only 9-ft high down there. That's going to be a snap.

Aluminum Chef

So I guess there is a TV show called Iron Chef. We don't watch a whole lot of TV, and when we do it is Mythbusters, Spongebob, or Leave It To Beaver.

Our ward youth had an Iron Chef activity last week. The day before the "competion" I was asked if they could use my kitchen for one of the groups. Of course, that was fine with me. Apparently I should have watched the show first to know what that meant and what I was in for.

I showed up at the church at the appointed time, gathered with my group in a corner of the gym, while someone immitating a Japanese guy introduced the teams. I was pushed into the center of the gym to stand with the 3 other chefs, and somebody had to turn me around because I didn't know I was supposed to face them. We were presented the "secret ingredient," which was a pineapple. I was told that we would need to make as many dishes as possible using the pineapple as an igredient.

As I was standing in the square facing my opponents, I was thinking, "Crud. We just got back from vacation and I have not been to the grocery store. I didn't realize that I was supposed to be a chef, or that I would need to provide food!" But I just stood there and smiled, and then loaded 5 kids in my car to head home.

We got into the kitchen and I started thinking. I had frozen chicken, a few potatoes, a couple of apples, and a pantry full of canned food, along with the staples of flour, sugar, etc. It was sad. I felt like Wesley in the scene from The Princess Bride when he and Fezzik and Inigo Montoya are planning their castle onslaught. But instead of "what I wouldn't give for a holocaust cloak" I said, "What I wouldn't give for a block of cream cheese." One of my guys called his mom, who was at the grocery store anyway, and she delivered a block of cream cheese 15 minutes later.

So while other groups had chefs who had planned in advance and had things already underway, we came up with the following:

1) grilled potato, teriyaki chicken, and pineapple kabobs

2) fruit pizza (a big cookie crust with a cream cheese sauce topped with pineapple, apple slices, frozen strawberries and grapes)

3) strawberry/banana/pineapple smoothies. Fortunately I had a bunch of frozen strawberries.

An hour later we showed up at the church again to see what everyone had come up with. One group came with deep dish barbecued chicken pizza (with pineapple topping) and cinnamon rolls, another had carved into the pineapple and filled it with a yummy pineapple salsa (big points for presentation), another had some fancy rice and chicken dish served on a slice of pineapple, and some other funky things. I felt like crap. My group did not win. I am not an Iron Chef. I figured I was more like Aluminum or Manganese. But our fruit pizza was excellent, I must say.

Next time the youth have an activity based on a TV show, I will make a point of watching the show first. Oh, the things I could have done if I had actually gone to the grocery store first.