Labor Day weekend...

Monday September 7, 2015 Labor Day

Labor Day indeed! As per usual, we pretty much worked throughout the day, not that I had made plans for much in the way of leisure, but odd jobs kept cropping up. We weren’t the only ones laboring, mind you. One of my coworkers said she hoped to complete a bathroom renovation, and a friend from church said she was putting up drywall in her garage. Also, while I was outside working this morning, I heard various outdoor machinery being used by our neighbors who were obviously not taking the day off to rest and relax.

My plans for the weekend included: making cake pops, doing laundry and going through whatever I could get sorted (purses, papers, t-shirts, photos, etc.). Also on my list of things to do was to put ads on Craig’s List/Columbus Freecycle/Nextdoor Ridgewood to sell various household items.

Of all these items I’ve listed above, I got everything done, except sorting through my purses, papers, t-shirts, photos, etc., though I did go through one small box of papers on Friday evening, so that was better than nothing.

Of the odd jobs that cropped up, the one most time consuming was washing the walls of our front porch. I hadn’t planned on doing that, but when I took down my spring wreath (yes, I know spring was two seasons ago!), I found a whole mess of trouble behind it. The wall had several yellow stains and my wreath, complete with a bird’s nest, also came with a bird, which had long since expired. Sad, yes, but so goes the circle of life. I suppose I’m just a bit jaded about these things having grown up in the country, and having gotten used to removing various creatures from our house which our cat has brought in.

Two to three hours later our porch walls look spic and span, and I’m sure I traumatized at least a couple spiders, but it’s a chore that was long overdue considering we had never once (not that I recall anyway) washed the porch walls in the ten years we’ve lived in our house. 

Seeing how hard I was working on the porch inspired Andrew to wash all our windows – the outsides at least, so they look pretty good now too (but I still have kitty nose prints to remove on the insides of some of them).

We were very successful with our eight Craig’s List/Columbus Freecycle/Nextdoor Ridgewood ads. We sold four out of our eight listed items which included: a computer, a (music) keyboard, an antique trunk, and a set of three plastic dressers. Now we have some spending money for our vacation next month!

The cake pops turned out pretty well and there’s a handful that I’d even say turned out perfect in terms of taste and appearance. There are three dozen in our freezer and we’ve been gradually eating the rejects that fell apart when we went to dip them in chocolate.

I used two boxes of leftover brownies and two boxes of leftover chocolate cake from City Barbecue which yielded almost 5 dozen cake pops – some I called Cookies and Cream (the ones made from the brownies) and the others were more traditional cake pops. Andrew said he thought the Cookies and Cream ones actually tasted better because there was more of a contrast between the chocolate we used (white Ghirardelli disks) and the texture and taste of the brownies (which were a mixture of choc chip and caramel). Whenever we get around to eating some of stockpile, I hope to next make Oreo cake pops using the same formula/recipe.

Besides doing stuff around our house, we went over to my sister’s house on Saturday night and helped her do a little moving (after a free pizza dinner. Thanks Karen!!!) in the way of helping her empty out her old kitchen of food in the cupboards and refrigerator/freezer. It was kind of fun laughing about how old some of the items were. In fact, there was a large jar of pickles that was absolutely stuck to the top shelf in the refrigerator. We eventually pried it loose, but not sure how long it had been there! I always assumed Karen was more organized than me all around, but at least in the kitchen, I have her beat, though I’m sure many of my condiments and spices are probably several years old, but maybe not as old as hers! Of course we have a lot less inventory with there only being two of us, so that makes it a little bit easier to keep track of things.

As far as arts and entertainment go, we watched the director’s cut of “Cinema Paradiso,” which I had bought on Andrew’s birthday from that funky old electronics store in Huber Heights. We also just finished watching the BBC series, “Ashes to Ashes,” which I received (on dvd) for my birthday about a year ago, and which was on TV in the UK about 10+ years ago I think. It certainly had an interesting ending and definitely not in any way predictable. I finally finished reading The Martian by Andy Weir. It was an excellent book, and I am very much looking forward to seeing the movie which is due to come out next month.

Monday afternoon I finally decided to put the cartridge of film I had bought earlier this summer into my Polaroid SX-70. This was as much about seeing if my camera worked as well as testing out Impossible b/w film. I am happy to report that it was a successful experiment and I am quite pleased by the results. I have a couple more ideas for pictures, but am going to hold off for now until the weather cools down a little (which is safer for development purposes).

Andrew’s weekend achievements, besides washing all the windows, include finally getting around to tidying up his home office, as well as washing the cover to the Ikea chair both he and Tamsin takes turn sitting on. The cover had about as many stains as the wall on our front porch, but fortunately most of the stains seemed to come out in the wash (and my sunflower wreath seems to have covered the stains on the wall that I couldn’t remove).

Saturday and Sunday mornings we both went for a run around the neighborhood and managed to tally around five miles between the two of us over the course of two days. I am curious how many miles we accumulate by constantly going up and down all the stairs in our tri-level house. I guess someday I’ll have to put on my pedometer and see.

Of course I wish I had another one or two days off so I could designate a little leisure time between chores, but I guess that will have to wait until another day…

Have a good week everyone!