Saturday. I was the first one up, by a bit. Went into the office and caught up on SGL for the last few days, and did some Ruby class work. Dominica was up not long after me and went out to run some errands. Liesl was up around ten and her first thought was to head out to the atrium and do some gardening. She wants to take care of her new flower and herbs.
Today is supposed to be quite warm, almost ninety degrees here in Dallas! Where did this heat come from? It has been pretty cool until today. This is our first really hot day. Spring is definitely here, now.
Dominica made two runs to Home Depot this morning. Much of the day was spent spackling, removing the old shelf, repairing heavily damaged walls, and generally getting the girls’ room ready for its first coat of primer. That took a lot of time today, and I ended up having to make a third run to Home Depot this afternoon, too!
We did not get around to actually doing the primer today, but the room is prepped for it and that alone was a ton of work. And we need to wait for much of the wall repair to dry before we start priming, anyway.
It is amazing what bad shape that room was in. The walls were heavily abused during Rachel’s tenure living in it with loads of pointless shelves, posters, and all kinds of crazy wall hangings everywhere. And during Kyler’s stay, the room was painting the more hideous dark chocolate brown, and very poorly at that. And that shelf, while original, was never good. We are glad to be done with that. We took this chance to remove the old intercom from the wall by the door, remove the old telephone jack and other oddities like that. The room is going to be the best that it has been since the house was new.
While working in the one corner of the room, Dominica discovered some bubbling in the old paint and scraped it away to find old termite damage, probably from well over a decade ago. So that took quite a bit of repair to get back into shape. This little big of painting has quickly turned into quite the project, as it always does. Not on the same scale as the bathroom, of course. That’s a bit bonkers.
Paul is attempting to get back to Dallas on Tuesday now, instead of Thursday. But it will depend on what his real estate agent says about the state of his house and how the sales process is likely to go.
Liesl played Wind Waker on the Wii U pretty much all day. She played one of her Barbie games first thing this morning, but not for long. Luciana spent most of the day camped out on my bed playing on her iPad. She Facetimed with Clara for several hours this evening while they played some game online together.
At ten this evening, Liesl and Luciana played some Barbie game on the Wii U together in the living room. Dominica was in the bedroom watching house shows from England.
I did a ton of work, truly a monumental amount, on SGL today. At this point, 2018 has been all caught up for a little bit. Everything is caught up up until July 20th of last year. And everything after the middle of October is caught up. So there is a gap from late July to early October in which I still have a bit of work to do, but that is it. It is huge progress. And by far most of September is already done, and some of August is. August is the only month that is really bad at this point. What a lot of work that was.
Dominica and I are both really exhausted today. This whole week has been very tiring.
I had been planning to go hang out and maybe play some video games, but since the girls decided to play a Barbie game together I poured myself a glass of Winking Owl Red Blend and kept working on SGL updates.
Dominica switched to watching Bob Ross painting shows on Netflix. So funny.
Luciana spent nearly an hour just talking with me tonight. She was checking out the status of work in her bedroom and had a million questions. She wanted to know about the repair work that had been done, how the painting was going to go, where she would put collectables now that her shelf was taken down and that led to discussing houses and where I grew up and how I moved to a new house when I was about her age and what happened to my old house and what she wants to do with this house when she gets old and what grandpa is going to do with his house and so forth. It was a very long, in depth discussion. She is so funny, she is so incredibly adult in the way that she carries on conversations, but then breaks down emotionally from tiny changes like losing a shelf.
Luciana was hungry and asked for me to make her veggie bacon at midnight. She ended up requesting eight slices!
Before bed, Liesl was reading Charlotte’s Web. She is really enjoying reading it. Her homeschool book club from the library is really doing wonders for making her enjoy reading.
Liesl was so adorable tonight. She wanted to tell Dominica something about what she had been reading in her book, but she didn’t want to spoil anything, so she was super careful to make sure that Dominica had already read the book before telling her anything about it.
I ended up having enough time to get SGL caught up through August 5th. So all of July is now completed! That’s exciting. Now there is just a lot of August and a tiny bit of September and October left to do, that’s all. Home stretch, more or less. It will take no time now, all of the hard stuff is done. From a quick look, there are ten days in October, seven days in September, and then twenty four days in August left to fill in and I will be totally and completely caught up. Hard to believe after such a hard year of updates that everything is back in proper swing.
Half past midnight and time to shut down the desktop and prepare for bed. We are getting back in to reading Dragons of Autumn Twilight tonight. We took a bit of a break from our night time reading and Liesl and I are both not very happy about that. We really liked our night time reading that we had been doing, especially back when we were doing all of the Harry Potter stories which we finished the first week in February. Then we went on to this book, but we had some travel and stuff going on and we got out of the habit. So trying hard to get back into it now.