Just Another Workaholic Weekend

This weekend was the perfect end to a great week. Tuesday was my last day of working in the lab until January. My 6 month leave is partly due to the baby and partly because there just isn’t much money for funding right now. The California budget is a mess and the money for all those bond issues that our thespian governor supposedly reinstated (he put a stop work order on them several months ago) hasn’t actually become available yet. My department is mostly funded through the state and without that money we’re all pretty much screwed. (So I guess I’m having this baby at the perfect time!)

Anyway, I got to spend Wednesday and Thursday taking care of little things around the house—sorting all the gifts from the baby shower, shortening the bumpers to fit the used crib I bought, cleaning the house (I dusted EVERY horizontal surface in the house…except in the bathrooms but that’s just because I haven’t cleaned those yet), napping, cooking.

Dave’s Thursday meeting was short so he got home relatively early (~10pm) and even helped me with the dusting before we went to bed!

Friday morning before it was too hot outside he finished installing the flagstone walkway in the front yard. Edward and I had started it about 2 weeks ago. While he did that I installed a bunch of mini sprinklers along it so my to-be-planted groundcover between the stones will get adequate water. I want everything on automatic timed irrigation so I won’t have to worry about watering the plants once Eddie arrives. I didn’t take any pictures of the path yet but I will soon.

Saturday Dave started and finished the flagstone paths in the BBQ yard. Then we spent too long in the HOT garden shed installing an attic shelf thing I ordered a while ago. We didn’t look at the directions correctly (read: the directions and pictures suck) and had to redo most of it. Dave refused to climb back through the massive honeysuckle vine to get in the tiny, nasty space between the shed and the fence (there are TONS of spiders and webs back there and there’s only about a foot of room) to unscrew and re-screw the shelf support from the outside of the building. He did it the first time and I agreed to do it the second time around…if I could fit. I barely fit. This shelf was sort of a pain to install but it gives us an extra 25 square feet or storage space that would otherwise be wasted above the bikes, rototillers, and lawn mower.

That night we cooked up a variety of foods and got to see the fireworks—more on that in another post.

Today we spent the day reorganizing the garage/workshop. Our table saw was sitting against a wall and Dave had to haul it out every time he wanted to use it. It has a fence on it and an extension so it is huge, too. He’s been wanting to reorganize the toolboxes around his workbenches for a while, too. So we basically moved all the big stuff out onto the driveway, swept, and put it all back inside. We got rid of the ghetto mini fridge my dad gave us by posting it for free on Craigslist (it was really inefficient and ugly and we got a new one recently that is cute enough to go inside the house). That freed up a bunch of room next to the deep freeze for one of his cabinets. From there the room really opened up. We could practically park a car in there—imagine that, a car in the garage! Haha, our garage is definitely a workshop.

My friend Kristin, her boyfriend, Caesar, and their rambunctious puppy, Dante, decided to pop by for a visit this evening. There was a lot of licking, peeing, barking, nipping, and ball-chasing (with the dogs, obviously). Emmy is super dominant but she did so well with little Dante! Potatoes got lots of kisses from him and Ruby generally tried to keep her distance. (Anyone between her and her mama is bound to be growled at!) I kept telling Kristin not to get too close to me and Dave because we were SO dirty from working in the shop all day that I felt like we’d get her dirty!

After much-needed showers Dave and I watched an episode of Friends while snarfing down our beef stroganoff dinner. I'm really going to miss these weekends of working on the house with just Dave and the dogs around. Things are going to be wonderful once little Eddie is here, but I'll always have fond memories of just us love birds building (and rebuilding, I'm sure Dave would say!) our love nest.