My new life without a job

   So, I just finished living my first two workdays as a free woman. The weekend felt like a normal one; the only difference was that I did not have to keep track of two phones! I keep hearing the ringer for my old work phone and I briefly get panicked looking for it. Then I remember… it is no longer my reality! I lived my job at ICHD so intensely; it is weird not to have other people to focus on. I think that the house/guest house situation is where my/our focus will be for now. 

   We already went to Lowes and bought $300 in home improvement stuff; I’ll return $50 of it soon because we had the do we need it or want it talk. Practicality and frugality won! In the last two days, my husband has installed a door handle for the guest bathroom (I’m thinking that 3 years with a gaping hole is long enough!), a new outdoor security light, new dead bolt lock for the front door, added weather stripping to our front door, and then fixed the problem that the weather stripping caused by existing where it never had before.  He then decided to work on our two bathroom windows and in the last few steps of nailing some decorative trim in place, broke the glass. I think that we will choose new, more modern glass for it…and maybe for the other bathroom window, even though it is perfectly intact. Again, the do we need it or want it question!  Our other plans are to install a proper light fixture in the front bedroom; we will cover exposed electrical outlets; and finally, install new carpet. These are things we have needed but lived without. Now that someone else will be living in our old space, we feel as though we need to make some improvements. This list is just for the inside…the outside requires moving large amounts of dirt back to where it came from. Our dogs love to redecorate our yard: a hole here, dirt there, pieces of torn up tennis balls decorate the landscape.  They were a little thrown off today because we got the Jeep running and it went to a new home; they looked at me like “Great, now we have more decorating to do!”

   So what have I done? Well… um… got dishes into the washer and did several loads of laundry.  Well…someone’s gotta supervise the husband and his tasks too! I manage the “to do list” and also and most importantly, the “honey do list.” Ha ha!

   Also, I finally sorted out all the family pictures that I have collected from both of our families and bundled them by size and not really by content.  I will be sending them off to get scanned in the next day or two; we should have them back, along with a DVD by the weekend. Once we have the DVD, we will upload pictures onto Picasa and also make copies for various families members with only pictures relevant to them.  Unfortunately, I have to do some of the scanning at home because some pictures are not "scanner friendly." This may mean that they are too small (smaller than 3x3), are hard Polaroids, are professionally taken and therefore copyrighted, or have gunk on them that make them too sticky to be processed. I may have to take pictures of pictures to get some of them into digital format, such as my husband’s 20x24 family portrait – I really don’t want to pay $34 to scan one image! Just for your information, scanning is a long and tedious process. Thankfully, I will have a TV mere feet away from me to stave off the boredom!