What a day today. It started off with Paddy bounding upstairs and into our bed to play with Brice at about 7AM. Amanda got up not much later (a true rarity, her getting up earlier than me on a Saturday) and I promised to get up at 8:00 so I could start working on all the things we had planned for today.
By the time I got downstairs, Phil had already gotten a good start on the new ceiling fan we bought two weeks ago today. The pole on it is rather long and it hangs down further than we expected so we were a little apprehensive, but at the end of the day Amanda and I both agreed that it wasn’t as bad as we thougt it’d be.
After the fan was fixed up, Amanda and Karen went to Lowes for about three hours to get plants. They also got some Miracle Grow and other things, not to mention that they stopped to get me and Phil some lunch from Chick-Fil-A. We were very hungry when they finally got back.
In their absence, Phil and I picked up a little in the yard and looked at the front water faucet, which had been leaking since before we got here. It had been raining all morning, but it eventually cleared up. Neither of us was looking forward to putting up the bead board, and the tools were in the van anyway so Phil took a tug at the kitchen wallpaper and, lo and behold, almost all of one section came off in one piece! The main reason we were going to use the board was so we wouldn’t have to mess with the wallpaper, so between the two of us we had all of the kitchen wallpaper down just as the ladies were coming home. I thought Amanda would have it in her head that she wanted the board, but she was fine with switching gears to just painting.
We ate some lunch then Phil and I went back to Lowes to return the boards and get some primer for the walls. When we got back Amanda was wearing a bathing suit top and she and Karen were planting things. Phil and I had a couple beers then I helped outside by lopping off large portions of azalea bushes and Phil started taking down the downstairs bathroom wallpaper. He didn’t get too far though; it wasn’t quite as easy as the kitchen.
By about the time he got tired of that, I started hauling out bags of pine bark chips Brian and Angela had left when they moved out. A few of the bags were entirely infested with roaches. I killed enough with a trowel that I dubbed it Roachbane then snapped the handle of my only shovel in half trying to smash one. Amanda got some Raid out and took turns with her momma spraying down the suckers.
We met one of our neighbors, whose name I forget (something relatively common that starts with a vowel I think). She seemed pretty nice and offered us some soil from a truckload she’d gotten. After picking that up (she lives across the street and to the right one with her boyfriend, who was out of town) I went a little crazy with the hedge clippers and trimmed just about every bush and tree on our property. Karen and Phil eventually left and I continued on clipping while Amanda took a shower. She put a pizza in the oven after I came back in and we watched the end of Spider-Man 2 then caught up on some DVR’ed stuff.
I finally got back to working more on some of Jon and Denise’s photos, which I’m uploading even now. Well, I’m uploading the 48 I’ve finished out of the 274 I narrowed the shots down to. Once I get to the reception pictures though, things will go quickly enough. I joined up with a photo storage and selling service that I’ve been mulling over for some time now. It’s exposuremanager.com and seems to have a lot of nice features for a good price. I shouldn’t have much trouble getting a return on the investment if I do the two more weddings I’ve got lined up.