Random Stuff About My Week

Hubs took off from work this week....he's got tons of vacation time as he never gets a chance with his work load to take time off, but he bit the bullet and took some off anyway.

We haven't spent this week doing any great and amazing things however.  He's done a few things around the house but basically he's just been kicking back when I haven't been bitching at him about something or other.   Yes, I do bitch.......imagine that?! lol

So let's see what's been going on around here......let me think.....

Oh yes!!
The big news is the crew showed up, bright and early(at least for ME!)at 8am on Monday to install our nifty new a/c and heating system.
After last week's mugginess I was more than READY for some conditioned air!

We were warned by the home office, that it might take up to 2.5 Days to get this job completed, so they might be here all of Monday, Tuesday and half of Wednesday.
But the guy, Mike, and his crew stayed a little past "quitting time" on Monday and got the job finished....completed.....done in one day!

And here are 2 of the units working away, one in the living room/dining room and 1 in the kitchen/den.....

There is another one in our bedroom upstairs that is just as lovely.

Yesterday I was out on the side of the house pulling weeds, where they installed the compressor unit on Monday.  One of the crew had pulled up some of the weeds where they put the compressor.  When I went over there on Monday to check out their work,  I was so embarrassed as the weeds were taller than me in some cases!  I just hadn't gone around to that side of the house since early Spring so I had no idea how bad it looked over there now.
And of course, Hubs and #2 Son, if they had seen the "forest" lately had just ignored it.
I can report that the "forest" is gone now.  I'll have #2 Son dig up the matts of grass that are so thick and tough you can't tame it with a weed wacker any longer and cart off the broken bricks hidden in there to the garbage sometime next week.

Speaking of #2 Son, he is currently in the wilds of PA, hopefully happily blowing on his flute.  We took the boy to flute camp on Wednesday.  Once we got off the Interstate, the drive wasn't as bad or as long as we had thought it might be.

Not much to look at, other than mountains and trees along the way, plus a few little towns.
Here's a wind farm I tried to get a picture of when we made a pit stop for "facilities"......

We feared the local road for half the journey was a little 2 lane divided highway  but  most of it turned out to be a limited access 4 lane job......

And I had Hubs pull over so I could get this shot of a local tourist attraction we passed, that I had ABSOLUTELY NO interest in checking out up close and personal......lol......

We found the college where the flute camp was being held easily since the college is about as big as the teeny tiny town it's located in. lol

I should say the "music camp", as opposed to flute campe, since they had other types of musical instrument camps going on jointly here, like brass and percussion.  There is a big old concert the last morning of the camp before the kids are slated to leave which should be nice.

#2 Son was a bit nervous as he didn't know anyone there and he had to audition as soon as he arrived so they knew what level of players to put him in with.  He was practicing his piece quietly in the car before we got there.
Here is where he is living for the next few days.....

It's the newest residence hall at this university.  And there was full on construction going on with what looked like 2 or 3 more fancy pants dorms going up nearby.
That residence hall was very posh inside with laundry facilities, lounges, conference rooms and practice spaces(music or dance, I couldn't tell)plus elevators that required swipe cards to be able to access the upper floors where the dorm rooms were located.  Plus #2 needed an actual room key to get into the double suite dorm room.  He had better not lose the card or the key because they charge big money to replace those. 8-(

These dorm rooms were a whole lot nicer than anything his dad or I lived in back in the '70s when we were in college!  His suite is 3 rooms.....2 bedrooms with a bed, a desk and chair, a dresser and hanging space for clothes.  Then there is the common area which had a small fridge, a microwave, a table and 2 dining chairs.  There was enough room in that space for a couple of easy chairs or a loveseat, if you wanted to haul some of that in.  There was a sink/mirror in the common room plus a bathroom(toilet and shower)located off of it.  And the whole shebang had central air and heat.

Anyway, here is #2 Son before we left him.....

I think he was pretty glad to be able to get out of our small town for a while as he's been  having a rough time with an ex-girlfriend and all their friends who seem to run hot and cold toward him since they are not an "item" any longer.
He's had such a rough time lately that he actual brought up the idea of doing cyber schooling in the Fall instead of returning to his high school for his Senior year.  There are other reasons why going on here, but I'm not getting into them now on here.
I think he was pretty jazzed, though you'd never be able to tell from his demeanor, to be with all these other music geeks, especially since it seemed like the girl/boy ratio was 4/1. ;-)

On the way home from dropping the boy off, we stopped for dinner as it was after 5pm.
It was a little hole in the wall pizza joint with high prices called Santino's.
Hubs got one of the dinner specials, cannelloni.....

And I got a Veal Parmigiana sub which was too big to eat it all, so I took half home.....

Every time I hear the name Santino all I can think of is this guy.....

I half expected him to come out of the back while I was munching on my sub and do a Tim Gunn impersonation.....




Then yesterday we took a big step to move forward with "The Great House Fix-Up & Purge of 2013". 
As I have said previously, my Plan A-having the guys who do home improvements for us we have used in the past do a bunch of house projects this year-didn't pan out, as these guys have a 6 month waiting list of customers.  So I proceeded to Plan B, which consisted of using one of those licensed franchise Mr. Handyman services.

Well Plan B was a bust when I found out that the Mr. Handyman franchise closed up in these area for whatever reason.
So I proceeded to Plan C-calling another handyman service, which also happens to be a franchise, called "House Doctors".  Actually, I contacted both House Doctors and a local independent handyman guy in a neighboring town.
Local independent handyman guy never returned my call but the House Doctors guy did.

So yesterday we had the HD guy come out to show him the projects we want completed.  He didn't immediately turn and run after hearing/seeing the list of jobs so we took that as a good sign. ;-)
He is off now, getting an estimate ready for us and hopefully we don't need to sit down before he presents it.  (I would insert an LOL here, except that the price could very well be one so high we will fall down upon seeing it.....and falling down is not anything to laugh about.)

So now we are in "waiting mode"....awaiting the estimate on having all this work done.  The estimate doesn't include either the paint we need for the painting jobs or the flooring we need for the flooring job.  Those costs are separate and we have to add to the price of getting them done.

Today, let's see what we did today other than sit on my fat ass and surf the web.

The big thing was I shoveled out #2 Son's room while he is away for a few days, then vacuumed it, then swept all the hairballs up that the vacuum didn't remove and then I stain treated the carpet and then I shampooed it.
That all took over 2.5 hours.  The a/c is running in there now to lower the relative humidity so the carpet can dry out.

Late tonight, I'll go pick off the remaining hairballs that the shampooer formed(when the spinning heads rotate on the carpeting)and then put the mobile furniture pieces back in the room.
#2 Son will get the honor of clearing and cleaning off all the piles of crap that I put on his bed to get it off the floor and out of the chair.

I don't know why we gave him a dresser since he obviously either hasn't a CLUE that your clothes are suppose to go in it or he just doesn't want to bother to put them in there when the chair is so much more a convenient place to toss them.  Maybe we should add a second chair in his room and remove the dresser, then he can have a chair for the clean clothes and one to put the dirty ones so they aren't all mixed up together.
Or am I just being too picky now? ;-)

And the child wonders why I won't let him move into the much large room vacated by his sister......

I also treated both the sink and the tub drains in the bathroom that #2 Son uses over the past 2 days multiple times.  I used up the entire gallon of Hubs supposed "heavy duty" drain cleaner/unclogger.
It did nothing......
So we'll pick up a better/different agent later this weekend and try some more.
I told Hubs I think we could stand to call out a "drain cleaning/clearing expert" service while we are spending $ on the house, as I feel all the plumbing pipes could use some attention.  That's something I don't think we've really spent on since we moved here 13 years ago.

So other than making hotel reservations, rescheduling a dental appointment, clearing out one of the freezer compartments, going through and tossing more crap in the garage, going grocery shopping at 2 store, balancing my checkbook, paying bills, sending for a liquor rebate, putting books on Amazon to sell, fussing at dogs, playing bubble land on F/B and making meals, that is what my week has been like.

What's up with you this week?

Sluggy