I could do that! (well, maybe)

Our Bed and Breakfast was booked again this weekend, with the CFO’s parents visiting us for the Fourth of July holiday.  They were scheduled to arrive on the 4th around 5pm, so I re-arranged my work schedule so that I could work on the 4th and be off on Friday the 5th.  That gave me a 3 day weekend instead of being off on Thursday and having to go back to work on Friday.  Who would want to do that and why was I the only one in our company to think of this solution?

Even though I wasn’t working on Friday, I still rolled out of bed at 4:40 and went to the gym.  The tough spin instructor (A.K.A. my favorite one [because I like to be abused, I guess]) was doing a 1.5 hour “challenge” ride instead of our normal 45 minute class.  Considering the fact that it was double the time I normal spend in class, I still managed to survive and enjoy it.  I cranked out 37 miles during the class... go me.  Unfortunately, I’m not sure how many calories I burned, because my heart rate monitor and the bike computer have stopped talking with each other.  I typically burn around 900 in a 45 minute class, so I could probably estimate that I doubled that number.

After I returned home and got cleaned up, we all drove up to the furniture store where we bought our couch.  The CFO and her mom love to shop for furniture (well, they really enjoy shopping for just about anything, expect maybe puppies or kittens) so we went looking for accent chairs and/or lamps.  We didn’t find anything, but had a good time roaming around the store…  We hit Chick-fil-a in Peoria on the way home, which was a huge plus for me!

Speaking of furniture, the CFO’s parents brought a chair back to us that they had been holding in their basement until it could be reupholstered.  The chair came from my grandmother's house (dad's side) and it is something that I have been wanting to redo for a long time.  There were some serious debate regarding fabrics for the chair and the CFO won out on this one… hence the pink back.  The final product ended up being very bold, but the colors do tie in with our new green couch.  I’ll admit that this isn’t the color scheme that I would have picked first, but it is growing on me.  We have one other chair from that same grandmother’s house, but we have yet to negotiate a color scheme for it yet.  Who knows how long that will take.

Before:

I don't know how old this chair is, but it had been this color as long as I can remember.  Some of the seams were ripped and it had just seen better days.  (as a side note, I've always considered this chair's color as green, several people have been arguing that it is gold, but I don't see that)

 

After:

 

 

 

I told you that it was bold... 

 

On Saturday, we tried to beat the heat and went to Uptown Normal for the Sugar Creek Art Festival as soon as the gates opened in the morning.  Evidently a lot of people had the same idea because the place was packed.  There were artists from all over the country, including a few from Georgia.  Some of them were really talented, some just didn’t suit my tastes and then there were a few artists whose work made me immediately think, “Hell, I could do that.”  Most of those were photographers who had broken a single landscape photo into 3 sections, printed each of them onto a canvas and then hung the 3 canvases side by side by side.  It creates a cool look, but not one that I would pay 800 bucks or more for…  Time to grab the camera and fire up photoshop!  We need some stuff to hang in the living room, so I think that I might make this is my new photography goal. 

By the time we walked the whole show, a couple items still stood out to us so we circled back and made a couple purchases, including this painting from a lady in Missouri.  It is brightly colored and ties in well with our glass pieces (and the new pink chair).

 

After church on Sunday, the CFO’s dad and I went to see the movie “White House Down” while the girls went out shopping.  The movie started out a little slow, but the pace definitely picked up later on, with a couple little twists along the way.  While I don’t really consider Jamie Foxx to be a serious actor (but more of a comedian), he did a good job in the film. 

The purple cone flowers that I seeded in the backyard three springs ago are putting on a serious show this year.  I really like how they have become a wave of color across the yard (just as I had planned it, I might add), but it makes me mad that the black eyed Susan's that I seeded at the same didn’t establish as well.  I really wanted sweeps of each color intertwined with each other… I will make a second attempt to reseed the black eyed Susan's this fall.

This is the view from the master bathroom in the house that they are building beside our house.  It is a nice view of our yard, I wonder if the future owners would mind if I took a photo from here next year?  You can see the wave of purple cone flowers in the back, don't pay any attention to the dead weeds in the foreground.

 

Which brings me to another issue: Since I have been knee deep in weeding, mulching and trying to get plants established, I can’t seem to really enjoy the yard yet.  People come over and say, “it looks beautiful,” and I can’t just respond with a simple “thanks.”  Instead, I have to say, “eh, it’s a work in progress,” or “well… there are a ton of weeds out there.”   I guess that I am the only one who knows that a plant over there has died and left a hole in the grouping, or the fact that the back area along the fence line is all weeds because the seeding didn't take, or that parts of the maple tree died and after I pruned out the dead, it looks lop sided.  It is one of those “I can’t see the forest for the trees” kind of thing.  I need to just build a fire in the fire pit, roast some marshmallows and sit back and enjoy the garden.