Happy New Year

OK - so now I've got the Christmas thing off my chest - happy new year everybody!

2008 looks like it's going to be a big year. First off the husband wants to move house - which sounds fine if you say it really quickly but that entails:
a) getting your own house in order so that it looks somewhat more desireable than a "renovate or detonate" proposition
b) keeping your own house actually in order so that it's ready for inspection at the drop of a hat - this is hard when two parents are working and the three kids are at home - eating (plate? what's a plate?) drinking - (coaster? what's a coaster?) and going for swims (think wet cossies and towels dumped in sodden piles along with several changes of clothes a day.
c) keeping the garden in order - it's summer and a reasonably wet one at that - so all the plants (and more especially the weeds) are growing like mad to make up for the last three summers when it was so hot and so dry they weren't allowed to do anything above barely survive).
d) finding a house where one would like to live - we've found a couple but they are in a different area so would entail changing schools for all three kids. I don't even want to go there!

Maybe it would be easier to get a divorce -hmmmm.

Now you may well be thinking why not just renovate, detonate, put on an addition etc. to deliver what we want? Well - that's all very sensible but as we have had gee - I don't know - at least 1 million iterations of this question the one thing we know about ourselves is that we are not knockdown rebuilders, renovators or anything else like that - mate - we can barely maintain!

So we will search for the perfect place and hope we eventually find it. We did see this place - but someone bought it three days before Christmas. Who buys a house three days before Christmas I ask you? We're also thinking about this place - but it may well go before we get our act together.

So how did I spend my one week of the year off?

Painting.

Steven is a great starter ( I call him the gusher) - he is however totally crap at finishing- anything. So he started painting the laundry, the outside bathroom and the inside bathroom ceiling with great gusto. I of course finished them all - you know those boring fiddly bits where ceiling meets wall, second coats - that sort of unimportant stuff which requires going up and down the ladder a thousand times? I also repainted our bedroom and took down the curtains and washed them, stripped the bed and washed all the linen including the quilt and dusted and mopped every nook and cranny.

Basically I've come back to work for a rest.

Now apart from all the moaning the exciting thing is that lovely Patti Culea has asked me to do a project for her new book. A great honour and the timing is pretty snappy which suits me as the longer I have to procrastinate then that's exactly what I do. Mind you the inner critic is having a lovely time with me - but I think I've got an idea that will work - knowing me the overachieving perfectionist will do at least two different ones - you know - just in case.

Better go and extract my digit!