"I don't wanna work, I just wanna bang on the drum all day!"

Yech, back to work after a full week off. Plus, I have a class at VC starting tonight (Geography Info Systems - - i.e. mapping) which will be useful at work to map out all my collection systems (sewer lines). I miss John and the kids already. I thought school was supposed to start today for the younger ones, but for some reason I had my dates all messed up. So I have a full week to buy school clothes. You know, I never enjoyed that task as a child, and I still don't. I hate Back-to-School shopping! Actually, I'm not much of a shopper at all, I just hate wandering around looking at stuff. I like to know what I want, run in, and just buy it and leave. Which makes my whole "mystery shopping" hobby kind of ironic. For the record, mystery shopping is really about observing and reporting, rather than shopping. That's why I am so good at it, I don't get distracted by the shopping.

I hated to return the big van on Saturday. While the gas mileage sucked, it was a roomy and easy to drive! For my next road trip, I am mulling over the idea of driving to South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore, then heading back through Montana and passing through the Grand Tetons. I'm pretty sure that will take more than a week, though.

We came home and our addition is nearly completed! The paint looks marvelous. The funny thing is, I originally intended to do one of those faux finishes, and glaze over the base coat with a color wash. So I never really saw the color of the base coat, I just chose it because it is what the card said to get. But now that I see it on the wall, it is so pretty, I am afraid to mess with it. Plus, with the soffet we have running around, and the angles over the fireplace, I'm not sure how I could do the colorwash without making it look disjointed. So I am keeping it just the way it is. The color is called Yellowstone, but it looks like dark honey. My neighbor says it looks like my tube of Burt's Bees lip balm, I think it kind of looks like an "Inter-Department Mail" envelope, like a golden manila. So now I have to really think about the dining room and kitchen colors, since the floorplan is so very open now, you can see all three rooms at once and I don't want them to clash (too much). the tile is being laid tomorrow, and the fireplace was mostly done this weekend. John met Justin at Lowe's today to pick up the final touches, like the baseboarding, the counter material, and lights.

Okay, enough gabbing, I have to wrap up some stuff here to stay on schedule. I am seriously considering sneaking a day off later this week to camp at the beach with the kids, one last hurrah before school starts. The motorhome looks so sad without a place to go...

~Lisa