Excuses
Don’t you hate excuses!?!?! Well I’ve got a list for you. I haven’t posted in ages and ages, BUT I have been otherwise engaged. Let’s start back in March. I spent March and April living with a family with an illness. That is not a complaint. I love them more than I can say and it was a blessing for me to be able to do that. I wish beyond wishes that the need hadn’t been there, but to be able share the time with them was priceless. Towards the end of that stay, I got the call that I had been expecting for about a year. I didn’t answer the number the first time it rang because I knew when that number came up what it was going to be. My biological father had passed away. We hadn’t been particularly close, but death as a way of changing your perspective on that. In point of fact, we had been estranged for many years. But that is a story for another day. I did make the decision to leave where I was and attend the funeral in Houston. Luckily, another family member was due to arrive very soon to stay where I had been. During the time I was away from home, we found that we were going to take a new job and move from the Midwest to the West Coast, Northern California to be precise. So began a series of trips to look at our new surroundings and shop for a home, and back to our home to pack my car and drive out leaving most of our possessions in a house that was for sale…a house that we had just finished building in July 2014…a house that I loved. In all our searching, we never found a house that we loved in our new town, but we did buy a house. We closed on a Monday and left that Friday for a 2-1/2 week vacation; a few days in Amsterdam and a 2-week cruise on Celebrity to Scandinavia and Russia, and a throw back to early June when I had a ____ year high school reunion back in Houston for a long weekend (great time, wonderful people)…and then in Vegas in late June to attend my nephew’s wedding (Joejoe Diggs), along with my daughter, Amanda, and her husband, Bradley. I got to see my bestest niece and nephew and their Mom! They are so great! All that traveling, especially the cruise, have added an ugly 10 pounds that I have got to shed. In any event, it’s been a very full year so far and not likely to let down.
We are now in the midst of a huge renovation to make that house we bought a house we will love. The people who lived in this house for the past 13 years did not have the word “maintenance” in their vocabulary. The air conditioner filter had about 1/2 inch of lint on them when we replaced them. The spa leaks, which they did not disclose, so that will be an entry for another day. There were a couple of other nondisclosed items, but they don’t make me as mad as the spa does. We’ll see how than story pans out. We are in the middle of painting all the cabinetry and walls and trim, etc. We completely deconstructed a wall in the living and that is almost finished reconstructing. Darned if I don’t have to leave in the middle of this to go to London for an interior design job. This may be the only time in my entire life that I am not biting at the bit to leave for a trip like that, but being in the middle of this makes it difficult. I’ll just end with a few before pictures and early reno pictures. I can’t wait to get back to cooking and food pix! Oh, and there is an election year coming up. That should be fun! And right now I won’t get started on the Muslim invasion that is taking place, forever changing the face of Europe negatively. I’m glad I’ve been able to travel there prior to this, although it had been getting worse over these past few years due to a smaller version of the same thing.
This post seems like such a short one when I think of all the things that have happened this year!
