A rose by any other name.

I have been surprised by how buying a brand-new house has made me even more excited about home improvement projects. I think with our old house, there was just so much work to do to even start to make it look fabulous that it just felt daunting.

My current dream to-do list is:
-Paint color in every room (and I would love to paint the inside of the closets a complementary color, just for the fun of it).
-Put in a patio in the backyard
-Create an edible garden (veggies for the summer)
-Create a rose garden (to put on my table)
-Install the garage door opener and make our garage into a usable space (for both the car and other stuff)
-Put in a storage door (we have a lot of dead space behind a couple of walls that I would love to take advantage of)

This weekend we are going to start some home improvement projects. My husband, R, agreed to painting the bathroom (we are starting small, but it is still a start). I am hoping to do a lovely shade of warm grey. It has hardwood floors and white fixtures, and 4 frameless glass pictures of roses, so I think that will work well. Maybe I will take a before and after picture.

We also have a couple of people coming over to give us an estimate on how much it will cost to install a garage door opener and put a small door in the wall to access some space for storage. If the price is right, we can have that going soon too I hope.

A project I am really excited about is my rose garden. I bought 5 rose bushes - all different shades, and i want to plant them this weekend. In Provo, we lived in a little house right across the street from the BYU arboretum. The arboretum had lots of lovely little paths through the plants, but my favorite place was the roses circle. They had so many types and I loved to walk through there and just smell them. I also fondly remember going to see a beautiful rose garden in Switzerland when I was a teenager. So when I saw rose bushes on sale at aldi for really cheap I couldn't resist the chance to create my own little rose garden - in the hope that I will be able to cut flowers for my table regularly.

A New Addiction

When C&C came out over Christmas, I had no idea they would introduce me to a new addiction. I am a not-so-closet Sudoku Addict.

In fact, I own 3 different Sudoku books and whenever I am watching TV or just experiencing a little down time, I indulge myself. I have even come up with a number of very good justifications for why I should do sudoku every day - maybe even spend hours doing it every day.

-It is a great brain stimulation and no one wants alzhimers disease
-It is a social sport - I can still carry on a conversation whilst enjoying sudoku (R may disagree with this one)

That is all I have come up with so far. I did however, come across the greatest thing yet - samurai Sudoku. It is 5 intertwined sudoku puzzles - could it get any better? Well apparently it does! There is killer butterfly samurai sudoku - I haven't tried that one... yet.

(see www.djape.net to try out some great free puzzles)

Domestic Help

Today was the first day with a nanny - whose name, ironically enough is Nana. She is going to be coming over every morning for 2 hours. It was really nice. She basically just read to Audrey and played with her and fed her some food. Audrey really likes her - she always smiles for her and goes right to her.

I must admit, it is a little awkward to have someone else here working for me. I don't know how to set the whole thing up. For example, as I was going upstairs to my office, I realized I had not given her a tour of our house or showed her where I would be working or where Audrey's room was, so I did that quickly before I started to work. I think there will definitely be an adjustment period for us to figure things out.

Nana has agreed to help by doing some light cleaning if/when Audrey sleeps. However, I don't even know what to tell her to do. Flylady suggests everyone keep a control journal to keep the house running smoothly, so I think I will try to use that. In the meantime, today I noticed that Nana had organized Audrey's bookshelf - so she may just find little things to do on her own anyway.

24

So I am finally, after 4 seasons, starting to watch 24. And last night they had a 2 hour 24. During which 40% or some other extremely large number of people working at CTU were killed by nerve gas. The premise that CTU only found out about it with 2 minutes until it was released and sent everyone running out of the building and only was able to seal off 3 rooms in the whole building, and so anyone in the building not in those 3 rooms died, was just crazy.

I used to work at DARPA - a rather small DoD agency. I knew within 10 minutes of starting exactly where each safe room in the building was. In fact, they gave me a card to attach to my badge that listed emergency procedures and safe rooms for each floor of both buildings. I also knew that each safe room had enough hoods and masks as well as other emergency supplies to protect each person in the building. None of these rooms was more than 30 seconds away from me at any given moment and at a panic run, I am sure that I could have found one very quickly.

A few jobs before that, I worked at a law firm in DC. Not exactly the sort of place known for high security measures. Even so, each employee was fitted with a mask - that we were given to keep at our desks - for any sort of emergency.

My point is, I appreciate non-realistic shows as much as the next person (Gilmore Girls is my favorite show), but this was a little too far fetched even for me.