Whirlwind

Um, Yeah.

Can you say "Not one minute to BREATHE?!?!?!" Welcome to my world. I mean, I am SURE I could find a minute to breathe somewhere, but it's so dang hard these days. I wish I could have just ONE week where I have a grip on everything. But then I would be bored, right?!?! Yeah.

So this past week has been a whirlwind of very busy work days and crazy chaotic nights at home. It's been a good one though. On Monday, I actually went to the gym during my lunch hour because I knew I would miss Jazzercise that night...How PROactive of me. Yep, that's the last time that happened this week.

I had to let our cleaning girl go. Poor thing just didn't show up sometimes - and I would be sooooooooo disappointed when I would get home from work, expecting a clean house, and then I was hit in the face with NOTHING. (And we all know I cleaned before the cleaning lady came...so that pissed me off that time was wasted. haha) Another fishy thing was that she never called us once. She always e-mailed. I gave her our phone numbers several times...but never got one in return....and she never called to tell us that she wouldn't make it. Maybe she didn't like confrontation in person. Who knows? This last time she didn't show, there was no e-mail. I e-mailed HER and told her "thank you for your work thus far, but we no longer will need your services." She E-MAILED back her sob story about how her grandma had a stroke and she had to rush to West Virginia where there were no cell phone signals for her to call.... Blah blah blah. I'm sorry about Grandma, but come on. She said that this is her primary form of income and would like more notice. I wrote back with some "feedback" on how she could be much more successful with her primary form of income - like SHOW UP.

I found a new house cleaner on Craigslist - she's a beautiful Russian lady named Olga. She came over Monday night to meet us and see the house. As we were talking, I heard some weird noise from the bathroom so I walked over and peeked in...and there is my daughter scooping up toilet water in one of her play bowls. Nice. When Olga left, she told Stella "Next time I bring you russian candies. They taste better than toilet water." ha! And she DID! She came back on Wednesday and cleaned while we were at work. Do you KNOW how wonderful it is to open the door and smell bleach and lysol and murphys soap on the wood floors??!?!?! There was a note on the table with 2 russian candies - "These are for little girl. I wish I could see her today." I think we found a good one.


Ok...so it is now 12 hours later. Today got away from me!!


The deck construction began today. You guys are going to flip when I post before/after pictures tomorrow. It is AMAZING. I am so excited and thankful. The finished deck is over 300 square feet. That's as big as my old studio apartment in Shockoe Bottom. And in the middle of the deck construction, we also had a home security system installed. Uh, yeah. That was not in the plans. However, there is a new company called "Platinum" and they are doing an advertising blitz right now. They get 5 houses in the same area and install an entire system for free. Our friends Mike and Jacqui got it installed...and so did several other neighbors. All you have to do is display a sign in your yard and pay the monthly monitoring fee which is $42. This system has detectors at both doors, a motion censor that covers the "heart" of our house, and a special smoke detector that alerts the fire dept at the smallest bit of smoke - in other words, before the house is burnt to the ground. Another cool thing is that the system is connected to a key fob (keychain) and I can just hit the button from my car to turn the system on and off. No trying to beat the clock to get in and put in the pin number to disarm. And on the system is a button to call the police and one to call for an ambulance in case of a medial emergency. It is very cool....although I was PISSED at Toby for telling the guy YES to everything before even talking to me...and then bringing the guy inside to me and saying "Gotta go finish the deck!" and leaving me to deal with it all.... But I'm over it now. And I think we got an amazing deal (if we paid outright for this, it would have been over $1500) and we are protected. And most importantly, Stella is protected.

So we added a lot of value to our house today...and we get to buy PATIO FURNITURE!!!

More to come....