Today is Ketchup Day...

Oh wait, let's call that Catch Up Day

We got back into town last Sunday evening after our 10-day vacation and today is my first full day at home to catch up on all my chores.

You'll be happy to know that since I got up this morning I'm on my 3rd cup of coffee and 3rd load of laundry. The grocery list is nearly done, half the mail is sorted, the bed is made, and dishwasher is unloaded and reloaded, there's meat thawing for dinner and the cat box is clean (is that last one TMI?).

I really LOVE having Fridays off. It's a great day to catch up on everything around the house so I can relax and have more free time with family and friends when the weekend comes around. Thanks God for allowing me to have a job where I get to have Fridays off. It really is an answer to prayer.

Oh, and on a related note...about ketchup, not my schedule.

When we were on vacation we went to a restaurant that served their ketchup in a shorter, wider-mouthed jar than the standard one shown here. It wasn't a squeeze bottle and it wasn't the little mini bottle like you get on airplanes. It was a shorter glass bottle, but the wider opening at the top made it SO much easier to pour. I thought it was GENIUS! Strangely, I can't find a picture of it online. Not even on the Heinz website and I'm pretty sure it was Heinz ketchup. Now, I'm not a huge ketchup fan. I only use it for french fries, nothing else. But just thought I'd share that little tidbit to brighten your day. Isn't it nice to know that after so many decades of making ketchup, they can still come up with improvements to make your life easier?

Also, I promise to post more pics from vacation VERY soon. Hopefully by tonight, but definitely before the end of the weekend, so stay tuned. Now I need to get to the grocery store and finish up the laundry so I can truly relax this weekend. We're looking forward to catching up with a few friends. Can't wait!

A Fresh Coat of Paint for the Old Lady
Our house has really needed a paint job since we moved in several years ago. We even had other colors picked out and got a few estimates last year, but for some reason never got it done. I don't even remember why.

Last year I had chosen a light tan with off white trim and a touch of a deep steely blue, but during the time between then and now I've just grown sick of beige. I will say that 9 out of 10 houses on our street and probably in our neighborhood (really, in all of Phoenix) are some shade of beige or tan. We live in the desert after all, so I guess it's understandable.

Right now the house is beige as you can see, with a faded out, peeling mauve trim. Lovely, right? It may be lovely on some houses, but not ours. The photo above was taken last year at the peak of our (African daisy) wildflowers that pop up every spring. We had less this year and they have already died so the yard is full of brown dead plants about ankle deep. We are in desperate need of a face lift!

So, because I LOVE color and get bored easily (with beige) , we're going with this color scheme. It was really the photo next to it that caught my attention. Even though you don't see any of the "Sea Fern" green and very little of the "Pale Sagebrush" in the photo, I love the look of the green plants against the white trim and pale green walls. I'm hoping that it will enhance the small amounts of green that we'll have in our front yard in the desert landscaping (when it's in). Plus I hope these will be nice cool colors to highlight any desert flowers that bloom.

The dark green will only be around the front door, on the plant shelves under the front windows and MAYBE on the corbels that stick out up at the roof line. Our painter suggested the corbels, but we're going to try one first and see how it looks. Eventually, I'd like to get some shutters for the front windows, but that will wait for another time.

Fortunately, we're on track to have the job started this week and not a day too soon. They start with prep on Monday and I am so excited! Not sure how long it will take, but looking forward to the finished product. I'll take a pic when it's done, as long as the lack of landscaping isn't too distracting.

Landscaping (front yard only for now) is next on the list and we're hoping to get it done before it gets too hot. I hope to get some estimates while the painting is being done so they can start right away when it's finished...we'll see. So if you know of any good & reasonably priced landscapers, please let me know. We need a little help with design, although I have lots of ideas. I'm just not sure what will work and what won't. I love the process though!

So, next time you see the house it will be a cool shade of green. Can't wait!

A weekend of choices & checking tasks off the list -
Colors, Books and Technology Day

We're getting closer to the reality of getting our house painted! Yea! We are hoping to get price quotes in the coming days and have picked out our paint colors. Saturday we went to Home Depot and picked up samples of the colors and tried them on the outside of the house. Basically I wanted it to be anything other than the beige/tan color family. If you've been to Phoenix, you'll quickly notice that about 90% of the homes are some shade of beige. For those who know me, you know that I LOVE color and just couldn't settle for beige. Nothing against that choice for others, but I just can't do it myself. Now I'm not going to be too radical on the outside of the house, so as not to upset the neighbors, so it's going to be a pale sage green with white trim and a few splashes of fern green here and there. Or to be a little more specific, go to the Behr paint website and look up these colors: Pale Sagebrush, Icy Tundra and Sea Fern. I think these will be good colors to help bring out whatever green we have in the plants in the yard. I can't wait! Next big project will be the landscaping in the front yard. Looking forward to that one too.

I'm very excited about another change around here as well! We've had our wireless network set up for quite a while, but it's also been unsecured for a long time, so anyone - neighbors, strangers, or whoever happens to drive by - could access it with no resistance. Lately we've had some issues with our computers that have concerned me and prompted me to want to reset our password for the wireless connection to protect it against unauthorized access.

So today I dug out the original disk and jumped into the instruction manual to try to figure out how to set up the password again. Now, you need to know that I'm really NOT good at anything relating to hardware on a computer, especially networking and cofiguration, etc. It's all very intimidating for me because I'm afraid I'm going to click the wrong box and everything's going to crash. Also because when I work on this kind of thing, I inevitably come across one or more questions that I have no idea how to answer. In this case, here's just one example: Please choose the encryption type. How in the world am I supposed to know? Both choices are just 3 random letters that mean absolutely nothing to me. Fortunately there were only 2 choices, so I was able to determine it by process of elimination.

Anyway, it took me a few HOURS and I thought I had totally messed up the whole setup at a few points, but I finally stumbled through the process and got it to work like I wanted. The cool thing is that while I was in there, I figured out how to connect wirelessly to our printer and documents from the laptop to the other computer in the office, so I don't have to go back and forth between computers to print or access documents or pictures that are on one or the other. Spiffy, huh?

Now I still have a few technical things that I need to figure out, like:

• How to get my Outlook to auto-complete my email addresses when I begin to type them. It drives me crazy that it won't do that.
• How to sync my contacts and calendar from Outlook to my iPod touch. (I may be calling Randy or Shawn - our resident iPod geniuses for help)
  
• How to download audio files to my computer, then iPod touch - Terry should be able to help me with this.

So I guess I'll need to have another technology day soon.

Also, my mom has been cleaning closets and is getting rid of some of her books. But, before we give them away, I thought I'd check and see if anyone wants any of the hard covers. There are also quite a few Reader's Digest Condensed books, but I'm guessing that most of the reading purists won't be interested in those. Plus some paperbacks, but most of those are romance novels.

So, open up these pictures and look at the titles. If you're interested in reading any of these books, let me know and I'll set them aside and give them to you when we see you again.

Once we see if anyone wants any of these, we're going to donate what's left to my nephew Daniel's fund raising yard sale in March. He's raising money to go on a basketball mission trip to the Philippine's next summer.

If you have anything you want to get rid of, let us know and we'll have Daniel get in touch with you to pick up your "treasures" before his big sale. Or if you just want to send him a check, let us know that too and we can give you his address.