One Man's Junk....

...Is one woman's treasure!  I found this wonderful thing in a yard sale for $2.  It's about chest high on me (I'm 5'6") and the minute I saw it I knew what I was going to use it for.  It was a sickly shade of pink and was pretty banged up but that didn't deter me in the least.  It also had some markings in the middle of the shelves that made me think it might have had drawers at some point.  This is not fine American craftsmanship, it's clearly something someone with less than stellar woodworking skills put together; the wood doesn't quite meet at the corners, nail heads are sticking out in places (tried to bang them in, but they refused), but it's very sturdy and pretty heavy.  It had a million tack holes in the sides, and I can only assume some little girl had it in her room and was tacking pictures to it.  I like its banged-up-ness, it has personality. Still, I wasn't having that pink.  I debated about it for a couple of weeks.  It could have been purple, and I already had purple paint (of course haha) but for some reason it had to be green.  It just couldn't be anything else,.  So green it is, a shade that was called "lettuce alone".  I will also use that green, AND the white, in finishing the little bureau I bought two years ago (wow), whose time is coming very soon.  I might add that the paint cost me more than what I paid for both pieces of furniture.

Can I have my TV back now?

7'2", are you kidding me?  I didn't know they made humans that big.

Well, it's over.  We have been watching the Olympics for 17 days.  Everyone else I know either didn't care or was outright annoyed with all the to-do about it. But we watched it, all of it.  Or at least everything NBC showed.  Here's what I took away from my Olympic experience:

1. More commercials than you can imagine. We recorded it day by day and played it back, and it took about half the time as watching it live.  I love my DVR.
2. Track cycling is the weirdest thing I’ve witnessed since curling.  Plus watching water polo is kind of like watching paint dry, IMHO.  I must admit to pressing the FF button.
3. How is it possible to perform a physical exam on someone to determine their gender and have the results be inconclusive?
4. It made me happy to see the likes of LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and Kobe Bryant jump around with glee like a bunch of 5-year-olds instead of the jaded professionals I assumed they were.
5. People who badmouth Gabby Douglas for giving all the glory to God for her win have obviously never seen a boxing match, where men regularly thank Jesus for enabling them to beat the living crap out of each other.
6. Mo Farah needs to gain 5 or 30 pounds. Man looks like a very happy skeleton.
7. How can 17 days go by so quickly and at the same time seem to last forever?
8. I bet the man with no legs never gets used to hearing that he may have “an unfair advantage”.
9. McDonalds’ and Coca-Cola, who produce stuff that no one should put into their body, sponsor an event that involves the healthiest (presumably) bodies in the world.  Does anybody besides me find that strange?
10. I need to go to the gym.

And now, back to my regularly scheduled life.  Since today is a holiday (!!!) I will be spending it painting the bookcase i bought in a yard sale, hemming drapes, and cooking Quinoa with stir-fried veggies at Sparky's house.  That last is an experiment, we'll see if the finished product measures up.

Mystery Fruit

Ah Monday.  Back to the grind.  Actually, when you work for yourself, the grind never stops.  Worked all day yesterday, as powwow is next week and I still have a ton of regalia to finish! Plus the mundane stuff.  I'm thankful to be so busy, people I know are unemployed and hurting pretty bad. Feast or famine, as they say.

I did spend Saturday morning in the best way, tooling around the tri-town area with Sparky, cruising for yard sales and listening to Willie Nelson, and ending up at the farmer's market.  Our usual Saturday morning!  Doesn't take much to make us happy.  I did find a new shelf/bookcase thing for the shop, all it needs is a coat of paint but that will have to wait now till after the powwow.

Where I come from, we call these "plums".  But what do I know.

I haven't revisited the subject of health food, but I'm still making a valiant effort. As a result I'm spending a lot more time in the kitchen, it seems, than I used to but the kitchen is not a bad place to be.  Something else I've learned is that the healthy food thing only works (for me, anyway) if you plan ahead. I never go without a list and a menu for the week, for which my phone's notepad app is indispensable because I can't even tell you how many times I've made a list and left it on the counter.

It also takes me way longer to shop than it used to.  Which is also ok.  I plan for it, and although the grocery store is not my favorite place to be it's a lot less stressful when you're not trying to get in and out as quickly as possible.  I'm doing a lot of reading of labels, and as it turns out there are also quite a few photo ops at the grocery store, like this one.  They used to have a preprinted Stop & Shop sign over the salad bar that read "Sate law prohibits sampling".  Wish I'd gotten a photo of that.