Where Have We Been??

Oh, my.
We have been incredibly busy as a family, and I've been so crazy-busy that my eye twitched until we arrived in Salt Lake for a two-week vacation.

For the last month and a half, I have been counting down the days until vacation, not so much as a happy "five more days until we get to go" thing as much as "I've got only five more days to get everything done." First on the list was to make a year's worth of strawberry freezer jam.This involved picking our own berries, a highlight of every year. This year, however, I was on my own. As soon as we pulled into the pick-your-own farm, Kelly and I realized that not only didn't we have a check to pay for what we would pick, neither of us had a wallet. So Kelly, ever chivalrous and noble, took Lucy with him to some friends' house close by to borrow a blank check. Yes, a blank check. Good thing we were on a farm in the middle of Wisconsin and not at Nordstrom, right?

Fortunately, we didn't have to pay for what we ate while picking. Daisy took very literally the charge from the farmer to come back all stained with red.
Once my jam was frozen, it was time to focus on the house.

The reason we had a garage sale is that we are trying to sell our house. We've lived in it for five years, 2 more than we intended. Between the turns in the economy and general complacency, we've made do with what we had. But ENOUGH!

The first step was painting the living room and getting new carpet. The painter spilled paint on the old stuff (good thing it was coming out anyway) and played polka music. Now I enjoy a good polka as much as the next Euro-American, but the anglophile in me can only take so much. I had to leave before I screamed, "A waltz! A samba! Anything in a triple meter! I officially ban accordian music from this house forever!" We will not be having him come again.

And after the paint and carpet, we got new counters. Here is the before picture:
The after picture is posted below, but it goes with a different story. It turns out that new counters don't look quite right without a tiled backsplash and a new coat of paint in the entire kitchen. But since the painter and his boombox wasn't allowed back in my house and Kelly had been watching HGTV again, we did the work ourselves. It turns out that you can find out how to do any project on YouTube. This scared me at first because you can find a lot of stuff on YouTube, but this is legit. Kelly did a phenomenal job tiling and I think I did a pretty good job painting, especially all the cutting work. No tape. Seriously. With a twitchy eye.

All this was done with two days to go.

Then, I had to clean out every drawer, closet, cupboard, and cluttery space in the house. No big deal. I discovered that if I kept a big garbage can close to me, it was easy to find a place for all my clutter.

As I was cleaning out a kitchen cupboard, I came across the girls' lunchboxes from last year. Lizzie's felt a little heavy so I tossed it to her to check it out.

Nightmare of nightmares, it was like opening Pandora's box.
That is a sandwich and grapes circa: late May 2010. I guess I should have started with this cupboard. But check out my new counters!

After all that work (and the staging... did I mention that I had to STAGE my house??), we crashed in bed at 11 and were up at 4 to start driving to Utah.

This is pretty much how Kelly and I both felt:
I don't remember a whole lot about that drive. I think I cried a little. But the house is ready to go. More about the trip later.