Friday Date Night

Please join us for a special evening "out" during lockdown.

Your table is being readied for you.





The waiter will show you to your seat


and bring your appetizer.







Enjoy your meal!

The eclectic music is provided by various cars driving through the neighborhood just down hill.

Display Shelves for Tea Cups and Tea Pots

On our way back from Minnesota, we stopped at the flee market in Cullman, Alabama, mostly so we could get out of the car and stretch our legs for awhile. I came away with this new piece of furniture.



It wasn't an attractive paint job and it turned out that the paint had been used to cover burn marks from candles and other damage. The paint had also been applied without removing previous varnish. The price was right, though.

This was the result of an entire can of spray-on Goof-Off brand paint remover and a lot of scraping:



This is the result of a larger can of paint-on paint remover, Klean-Strip.



The rest of the paint was removed with the help of extra strength spray-on Klean-Strip, which is scary stuff. It was burning my hands through a pair of vinyl gloves, so I replaced that pair with two new pairs, but it still burned my hands, even through the double thickness.

There was also a lot of sanding and rubbing with steel wool involved.

The "Warm Cherry" wood stain from Wood You (unfinished wood furniture) was left over from the dining room table.

I decided to put new knobs on the drawers, because the white porcelain knobs looked like they belonged in a bathroom.



After a week and a half of working on it, it was ready to go up on the wall today.

Quality of Life is Improving

Our apartment complex has been upgrading. They tore down the building with our common room and also the building that housed the office and laundry room. In their place is a new building that houses everything.



The new laundry room just opened this past Tuesday for the first time.



The filtered water fountain is part of the laundry room:



The play room opened at the same time as the laundry room, but the rest of the building is not ready for use, yet.



If anyone remembers the pictures of the ugly common room where Blaze had his 10th birthday party, this room will be its replacement. Through that door on the far side of the room, is a very nice kitchen.

Out With the Old

Our apartment complex common room was not an attractive space, but it's hard not to feel a little nostalgic for it as it's being torn down. It was the place where Blaze had his birthday party.





I think it's been about two years since the University started this constant construction on our family housing complex. I'm sure it will all be lovely for future University students and their families, but it's been a bit inconvenient, loud, and dirty for us at times. Most recently, we were without internet for three days.

Along with tearing down the common room and the laundry room/office to build one large building that will house all of that, the workmen are also completely gutting and redoing one apartment building at a time. This is their second one:

Under Destruction (oops, I mean construction)

As many of you already know, we are living in a small apartment that is part of a Family Housing apartment complex at the University, while my husband is working on his PHD.

The university has decided it is time to do some major work on the pipes and grounds here this Summer, which is making this a not at all pleasant place to live.

First there were the loggers:

These were the beautiful old pine trees we could see out our living room window




And the temporary plastic safety fencing went up everywhere, making it much more difficult to get in or out of the apartment. This picture was taken the day that we had trouble getting back into the apartment to change Blaze's clothes after swimming class.


As you can see, I wasn't really exaggerating when I called them loggers. They've had a portable saw mill in the parking lot for several days now, turning those logs into boards.


This is what the little hill in front of our apartment looks like now:


and we are not the only ones. Trees were cut down all over the complex


Blaze and I saw this board next to the portable saw mill and decided that it was the face of the Lorax, who is sad because so many of his trees have been cut down.


Then the digging began. We've been referring to these as giant gopher holes.


The point of the pits and trenches everywhere, is that they are replacing the underground gas pipes.


This meant that for two days last week we had no gas. To make up for that, everyone who lives here was invited to a free Vietnamese Cooking Night in our common room. The problem was, everyone who lives here really showed up. They've had special meal nights in the past, when the gas was still turned on, and they never had much of a turn-out, so that's what they were expecting this time, too.

Dinner service began at 7:00 p.m. and we didn't get there until 7:15, so we were pretty far back in the line, but there were at least that many people behind us, as well.


By the time we got to where the food was inside the building, this is all that was left

I've been calling it "my dinner of sorrow", but really mine was not as sad as Blaze's, because he doesn't like shrimp, or DH's because he says all he got was a piece of shrimp with an extra helping of sorrow.

When we got home from swimming today, this was waiting right outside our living room window.

We had a notice on the door warning us that there will be no gas tomorrow.

Blaze has a positive way of looking at all this, though. He says that the men want to protect us. The trench they have now dug across the front of our building, is a moat to keep us safe and to catch all of the rainwater we've had this week.