Day Trips

So this morning Alice and I dropped off Daniel at work and drove down to good old E-town for some party time. Ok not really. We got a call from my mother last night askign if we would go help Rachel peel off wall paper in Rachel's room so the Relief Society could do thier service project and paint. I said sure because my mom gave me $50 last time I went down there, so why not.

Well lets jsut say, one of the beauties of a good old 1880s home is the loverly plaster walls. They are great. Getting to them though...dang. There were two identifiable layers of paper, as well as at least one layer of paint. That meant lots and lots of scraping. and lots of little bitty pieces of plaster/wall paper paste/ paper everywhere. By the time I left I was covered in it, as was Jesse.

So when I got there, no one was working on it, my mother was in the garden picking green beans and Lyd was doing whatever. I went in and tried helping, but lets just say, the tools they had were not right. The only other room they had de-papered was the living room, and the paper was so old, and there was only one layer, so it came off really easy. They used a putty knife to start the edge, then pulled the whole strip down. Well things just aren't always that easy. less than an hour later I had cut myself. Yeah seriously. On the thumb.

That will teach me to try and use the scraper like that. So I took Lydia to the store to get supplies, including paper scrapers. $50 later I had a replacement curtainrod (cause one sort of had issues when I was taking it down), two painter tools, drywall joint tape, joint compound, a floor lamp (they only had table lamps in the living room and I thought they would appreciate it), as well as light bulbs to go in it. Yeah, thats right all sorts of supplies. So we went back, assembled the lamp, fed and changed the baby, did a little bit of scraping, and the like.

Pretty soon my mother says she wants to take us all out for Lydia's birthday. Its Thursday. Sounds like a waste of money and time to me, who no longer eats out and has to leave in 2 hours to get Daniel. After about an hour of attempting to make Lyd help, we went to a buffet. How can you tell you are cheap? You eat the 3pm buffet. The foods not that pretty, but its $3 less per person than dinner. So after that I dropped Rachel off, helped Jesse scrape for a while and talked with thier Relief Society president when she called. Good old Sis Good. A fitting name for her.

I also attempted to convince Lyd to have the singles do a service project for thier FHE (which meets on Tuesdays since they aren't supposed to use the building on Mondays), but that resulted in her going to the library for over an hour printing out a copy of the ward roster and spyign around. Yeah, for real, the library is like 7 blocks away. I was annoyed.

So I left late. The paper wasn't completely removed. I did get some patchign done, and soem had dried enough I could sand, and yeah it looks good. But still. Anyway, I wanted to leave around 4, but decided 5 would be ok so I could help them out some more. I was in scraping with Jesse, Alice was sitting in the living room shrieking at the cat, and my mother was sweeping the living room. Then my mother dropped her broom. The handle hit Alice. Alice fell over. Alice screamed and cried. I held her while doing some more damage to the wall paper.

We packed up at about 5:05. My mother who has moved across state, but still visits Emporia often enough, it doesn't seem like it, wanted to take a desk she got from her mother before she died. In her car. It was hard to fit. Really hard. Finally Jesse and I laid down both of the front seats, put it in through the passanger side, turned, shoved it against the side and got the driver's seat back up AND the doors shut. Done, and done. It was 5:30.

I left.

Alice had to eat and get changed halfway back.

20 minutes or so I was back on the road and she was sleeping.

We got Daniel at 7pm. He did lots of OT today. I didn't spend any money except money that doesn't exsist. (Thats how cash from non-work sources goes in our house) And we have at least 3 lbs of fresh green beans. And so does my mother, and so does Rachel.