With the passing of Thanksgiving comes the painting of Holiday Windows on the downtown skywalks. Susan and I have been busy for a week now, spending every possible moment in chilly skywalks, making them look festive.

In order to keep it simple, everything is in white this year. Lots of sillouettes. Pictured above is one of my favorites. The first couple images that I painted similar to this were not quite as good as this. The subsequent images are getting better.

Pictured below is one of my least favorite images. I was trying something that didn't work. Give yourself ten points if you can figure it out.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We experienced too much Holiday Cheer last night and slept in until 10:30. Then we went out and painted for a while. It was about 35 degrees out.

It's a busy time of year for us. Now that Thanksgiving is here, we have to take down our Christmas Decorations and get Valentine's Day up.

Are You Too Drunk to Read?

Rcneelty, I cmae aorcss an alrtcie taht skope of the wendros of the hmaun biarn and how it is albe to diphecer wrods eevn wehn tehy are all mxeid up...as lnog as the frsit and lsat lteetrs are in tiher poperr pisiton. Fkrnlay, I dno't bilevee it.

Bathroom Progress (or lack thereof)

Work has been slow on the bathroom of late. We are entering the busy Holiday Season and Susan and I will again be painting windows downtown. That means we will be very busy with that project and so the things like the bathroom project suffer.

I had to move the main light switches last night. I did not place them high enough to avoid the wanescoating going in on the wall. I will get the hole patched up tonight.

I think we are pretty close to tiling the shower. That is the last big thing to do and our last big expense on this project.

I think things are going well and it looks pretty good. I'll just be glad when I have an upstairs toilet back.

Leaf Day 2007

My Tecumsah 2000 Leaf Sucker is out of order. Not sure what happened but I believe that it has something to do with the safety interlock connection to the bag assembly. If that is not in place, the damn thing won't start. I think I can do a MacGyver style repair on it, but maybe I'll just take it in to the repair guy.

So we had to resort to manual labor and we are beat. Thankfully the leaves were dry and light so they were easy to load. But there were so many of them. I took three loads to the dump and I'm going to take one more tomorrow morning.

Back on June 18th, I wrote about power washing the deck and this wayward spacey guy named Brian who came by the house looking for odd jobs to earn a little money.

Today he showed up with his Fiance. They had just been evicted from their apartment up in Mead. He went through a lengthy soliloquy about their hard luck times. It essentially all came down to the fact that they hadn't paid their rent.

He initially showed up while I was on a dump run and Susan was raking in the yard. She told him he would have to wait for me to return. I saw him as I drove up the street and started wondering what was up. Susan told me he was looking for work and we decided we could have them rake a little. We would throw him some money and perhaps a bowl of Chili. We had a whole bunch left over from Halloween.

Anyway, Susan and I where busy loading leaves and we put Brian and the fiance to work in the backyard with a leaf blower and a couple of beers. The fiance didn't seemed very inclined to work and let Brian do everything.

We got the truck loaded and I had to get to the dump as it was approaching Closing time. I didn't want to leave Susan with Brian and the fiance still there. So, I told him I had to get going and he had done enough. I gave him $15.00 and two beers for about 45 minutes worth of leaf blowing...and a little raking.

So what have we learned here today? That I am a soft touch!

Halloween Rules

I have spent some time reflecting on our recent Halloween experience and I have decided that next year, we must post some rules.

The following is my preliminary list:
1) No Costume, No Candy
2) A Sweatshirt and a bandana is NOT a costume.
3) If you don't have a costume & you come up for candy, you better have a damn good reason.
4) Move it along! Take your Candy and Begone!
5) It's Halloween and we are trying to be spooky. If your little darling is too scared to come up and get FREE CANDY, don't get pissy with us!
6) When the lights are out, the Party is over!

I'll be adding to that, I'm sure.

Another Major Holiday in the History Books

With Halloween out of the way for another year, we can concentrate on getting back to the Bathroom project. Remember the Bathroom Project? It has been 112 days since we started.
I've been trying to do some little things here and there but I have been unsuccessful at making it happen. It is time to buckle down and put Phil to work.

So, Halloween has passed. We had well over 650 Trick or Treaters come by the house last night. We spent well over $150.00 on candy. But that was spread out over the year. I'll probably be buying my first box for next year during our next visit to Costco. The first 312 were full size Candy Bars, which ran out at 7:00. After that, we went to Fun Size and had about 400 pieces of that variety.

Susan and I both dressed up. She was a witch and I was a skeleton. I would stand motionless out in the yard and scare the unsuspecting little urchins. It was great fun.

The best comment of the night I heard was one kid who probably got a full size candy bar. He and his friend were leaving the house and he said, "Wow! These guys must be RICH!"

No, kid! Not rich. Just stupid! And, I Loooooooove Halloween!

We finally quit about 8:30. For the first time we ran out of kids before we ran out of candy.