THE STRIPPER

YEP, That's what I'm known as...........around my house anyhow. You guessed it, we finally got around to stripping the wallpaper off of the kitchen walls, only to find another layer of wallpaper underneath. Neither of us were too happy to see that. So one layer is off and now we have to contend with the next layer and that is proving to be a challenge as that is the layer right next to the drywall.
Of course this layer of wallpaper is not the easy stripable kind either. This was put up with the good ol wallpaper paste. That wallpaper was put up to stay up. So I have been reading up on how to remove wallpaper and I come up with one conclusion. That I have to be patient as this will be a tedious job. With that said I now must go and enter into a period of meditation and prepare to tackle it tomorrow. I do know one thing though and that's when it is all done the kitchen will be BEAUTIFUL!!

DANCE? WHO ME??

I just finished watching FOX's "So You Think You Can Dance?" reality show. As much as I hate reality shows I actually like this one. Dancing, no less. Does this mean I've finally grown up? Watching those 20 - 30 year olds move around the floor was fun to watch and there is no way on Gods' green earth that I could even think of dancing like those people did. So I'll do what I do best and watch from my couch.

Merlot

That was easy and quick. Usually I would research this over and over. Last time I spent three months comparing and pricing and then all of the visits and the talking. I call it "wheeling and dealing". Didn't have to do much of that at all. I knew my requirements and what I wanted. Like I said it was easy and pretty painless. Now I just have to make sure I have a check in the mail the 15th of every month. Yes, if you haven't guessed, I bought a new car.
This kind of came out of the blue, sort of. Let me explain. I had a 2002 Hyundai Sante Fe that I really liked. in fact I liked it so much I had decided I would pay this one off as the last three cars I had never made it that far. I always traded before the loan was up. I truly liked the Sante Fe then I heard that Hyundai was going to make the Sante Fe a three seater, which to me means a larger vehicle. Knowing that I would probably turn around and buy another Sante Fe in the future I was upset. I don't want a larger car which means I will have to start all over again to find the right deal. Why did they do this to me? I finally find a car that I liked. The clincher came when I received a letter from my dealer offering some incentives, meaning my car just increased in value.
So why not? Next thing you know I'm sitting in front of the Finance gal and I now own a 2005 Merlot Hyundai Sante Fe. Which I have started calling "Red". I'm sure other names will come on later. Now I'm just hoping I'll be able to pay this one off before I buy another new car.

SUMMERTIME

Most of the nation is in a heatwave. Here in the NE the weather has been more humid than hot but I guess it will get hotter in the coming days. I've said this before and I'll say it again. Heat is one thing but the humidity just zaps a guy. I'll take the heat anyday but please leave out the humidity.
All of our doors are so swollen from the humidity that none of them close properly and the poor a/c are getting an overtime workout. I was going to poly some woodwork in the house but I'm putting that on hold until the humidity is gone for a few days otherwise the poly will never dry.
There is no use pissing and moaning about the weather cause there is nothing a guy can do about it except grin and bear it. One positive thing though is that you don't have to shovel sunshine. Soon the cold and snow will return which give people something else to bitch about.

BORDERTIME

This past week we painted our old bedroom which is now the computer/schoolroom (we homeschool). The painting part of it went fine, changing the room from a pretty pink to a bright lime green.
To finish it off we put a sunflower border around the room and it nicely compliments the color scheme.
We bought the border not realizing that this was self stick border. I'm used to the dip the border into warm water get it good and wet and slap it up and you're done. Gee, I thought with self stick this will be a snap. No so. I could have painted that room three times in the amount of time it took for me to put that !@#$$%%^&*() border up.
Lesson One: Self stick border is unforgiving, where it sticks is where it stays. There is no adjusting like what you can do with the other type of border. Lesson Two: Your room has to be square and ours wasn't cause I could not run the 15' of border and keep it square with the room. It kept "inching" up the farther you went along. If I were to keep going half of the border would be on the ceiling. So I ended up cut the border every 3 to 4 feet and starting over. Thank God that the pattern was forgiving as you couldn't see where I spliced unless you looked really good.
So next time we will make sure we get the pre-pasted border and save us a lot of headaches.

FANTASTIC STAR WAR BATMAN

Usually during the summer Ryan and I try to take in as many movies as we can cause during the school we usually don't have the time to go to a movie theatre. This summer though we've seen four great movies over the last three or four weeks. We first sat Star Wars-Revenge Of the Sith, then we saw Batman Begins and then War of The Worlds and today we saw The Fantastic Four.

The Fantastic Four was a great movie though not the top movie for us. Though the actors we relatively unknown, in my books anyhow, Michael Chiklis (The Thing) also known for The Shield and The Commish carried the movie. The other three characters were good in their own right but I just enjoyed The Thing. I look forward to seeing many sequels to this movie.

The top show so far has been "Batman Begins" which has been the best for my money. Coming down the pike though is a new Zorro starring Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. I have always been a fan of the Zorro character right back to when Guy Williams played the TV Zorro. This will be a must see for me.

Also next summer comes ICEAGE 2-The Meltdown. Saw the trailer for that today also and it was quite quite funny. But that will be next summer. Gotta wait til then.

THE MIDDLE OF THE WEEK

I have reached the middle of the week and I must say a bit has been accomplished. First of all though I must say that War Of The Worlds was good. Great graphics for sure, but the acting had a lot to be desired. Tom Cruise or not all he did was run from the aliens and all Dakota Fanning did was scream and scream and scream some more. May be I am being a biased as I knew how the ending was going to be. Now, however I want to see the earlier release of this movie which is now out on DVD, just for the giggles. Batman Begins is still my favorite for the summer.

I also have a DVR at home which is nice. If you don't have one, get one. You'll never be sorry. I recorded the whole season of Stargate SG1 and Atlantis this past season and am now watching it. The thing is though, the new season starts Saturday for both series and I'm just finishing Stargate-Atlantis. I only have 100 hours of recording time so now I'm trying to free up some hours for the rest of the family. The DVR is great but I have to watch what I record more frequently.

The painting of the computer/school room is coming along nicely. Tomorrow the walls will receive their final coat and the doors will get some poly. The border has been bough and will go up in a couple days once the paint if for sure dry. After that it will be the kitchen.

WHERE DID MY GET UP AND GO?

OK, I have my projects lined up for the summer and so far not much has been done. Now what have I accomplished is easy to write about. I mowed the lawn, painted the back deck and put up the canopy. What I need to do is paint the computer/school room, strip wallpaper in the kitchen, clean and poly the kitchen cabinets, poly all of the downstairs doors, six of them to be exact. Then when all of that is done I want to shampoo all of the carpets. So a lot of work to be done and it will get done. May take all of the summer but that's okay.
So today I'm going to take the day off and take Ryan and one of his friends to see War of The Worlds. A couple days back Ryan and I Saw Batman Begins which I thoroughly enjoyed. I'm hoping WOTW will be just as entertaining. Fantastic Four opens today but I'll wait a week or so for the crowds to thin on that one.
I usually don't get to a lot of movies during the school year so the summer is movie time, otherwise it's Blockbuster DVD's where I think we should have part ownership in the company for all the movies we rent, though we do have the movie pass which gives us unlimited rentals for one price. Nice.

HAPPY 4TH OF JULY

It's the 4th of July and sticking with tradition of the last few years I took my Christmas Lights off of the house. Knowing very well that I will be itching to put them back up in October I could leave them up year round but I figure that would be just plain laziness. I do have a nifty extend a pole Debbie got for me last year to put the lights up and it works good, also good at taking the lights down. The only lights left up, yes they aren't all down yet are the one in the bushes/trees which no one will see only if you look really really hard.Those will stay up. Someone needs to look at the tree that hard to see my lights have been left up then that person doesn't have much to do.

Yes, it's the 4th of July. We had the fireworks show on the 2nd which was practically in out back yard. The only other fireworks show we'll see is what is on TV. Supper tonight will be the traditional burgers on the grill, potato salad and ice tea and a freshly baked cake, eating out under our canopy on the back deck with music coming through my new outdoor speakers. Surrounded by my lovely wife, Debbie, Step-son Ryan, and Clarence & Sylvia (Dad & Mom). The only thing that would make this perfect is for my two children (Paul & Brian) their wives (Jeri & Jennifer) and children (Jonathan, Mark,Sabrina, Annabelle) and Debbie's children and significant others (Eric & Jennifer, Amy & Chris and Katy & Doug) be here also. Someday.

THE RETURN

Yes, we have returned from our little trip to Vermont. I must say the people in Vermont are the friendliest people. We had such a good time chatting with the people there, but of course there could be an ulterior motive, like "I had better be friendly to these people otherwise they won't buy anything from me". Never fear, we usually bought something and for those that didn't or wouldn't talk to us except to say "Hi" we pretty much left them "high and dry".

Overall the trip was a great, we ate some terrific food there and outside of our room was a jacuzzi hot tub just waiting for us. I must have gone in the tub a good dozen times, I lost track after six. Oh what wonders it does for the aching back and other parts too. We would love to have one of these at home but for one thing we can't afford it and for the other we have no place to put it. So we shall spend our vacations at places that do have them. This way we won't tire of them plus we won't have to clean them also.

The Black Bear Inn is a Ski Lodge like I had mentioned before but it gets a lot of summer traffic also. The place pretty much fills every night. It is on the Bolton Valley area of VT and we have about a 5 mile climb up a mountain before we reach the place and above us are the ski slopes which we didn't use for obvious reasons.

The owner has two Bassetts, Oscar and Rufus. Rufus was the more active and younger dog even joined us for dinner one night, but then we found out he does that to all the newcomers as he didn't join us the next night. There was fresh "meat" around the corner, but of course we weren't allowed to feed him.

We both decided that we would love to come back in the Fall for the colors as I'm sure it will be breathtaking.