The Olympic Spirit & Home Improvement

Jose was sick when we headed to Florida last weekend, so it was really only a matter of time before I caught it too. Sure enough, my throat started to hurt on Thursday, and I woke up Friday morning feeling like a train had run over me in the night. I stayed home from work, which in effect gave me a four-day weekend since we were off yesterday for President's Day. That would've been great, except each morning I woke up feeling like crud. Fortunately, each day I also felt progressively better as the day went on, so the weekend wasn't a total loss.

Jen, Becca, Rich, Jen and Gavin get into the Olympic spirit (Whistler, 2005)

It was a lazy, lazy four-day weekend. I spent Friday moaning and groaning around the house before watching the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics that night. After that, the TV was on pretty much constantly as I watched just about all of the Olympics I possibly could. I love the Olympics. Love them. I'm even a total sucker for all the "feel-good" stories that NBC puts together. Can't help it. LOVE.

I'm a silver medalist! (Whistler, 2005)

My friends and I visited Vancouver and Whistler in 2005 for a ski trip. They had been awarded the games already, so Whistler had a little area already set up in the village with a few random items, like a medal stand with fake paper medals, a bobsled, and hula hoops in the colors of the Olympic rings. I dug up the photos to remember, and they make me laugh. The little kid in bronze medal position was a total stranger, but he really makes this photo, I think. :)

It wasn't until yesterday that I finally pulled my butt off the couch and actually did something productive with the four-day weekend. (Aside from cooking, that is. I did a lot of cooking over the weekend. Which is great, but dang, I felt like I was also washing dishes the whole weekend. Which is less fun.)

Our breakfast room has featured a number of paint splotches for...well, for quite some time. (These are best seen in this photo of Jose's cousin dancing in our kitchen -- which was taken in AUGUST. Yes, 6 months ago.)

Yesterday we finally finished the breakfast room painting! And there was much rejoicing! It still needs to be carried into the kitchen above the cabinets, which I will hopefully take care of next weekend, but at least it looks mostly finished for now.

Halfway through, I was really regretting the decision to paint the kitchen at all. There were SO many windows and doors to paint around, not to mention the odd angles of the ceiling. But now that it's done, I think it looks great. When we built the house, we purposefully chose tile and countertops that were very neutral, since that's the stuff that's harder and more expensive to change. But paint? Paint is cheap. Paint is (relatively) easy. Resale value be damned, I wanted something colorful!

Jose picked the gray for the dining room, and I picked this deep turquoise for the kitchen. The good news? We both like the other's choice. We've got a lot of painting still to do in the house at some point, but who knows when that will happen. Next on the list is the bonus room. Once its painted, we can actually put together all the bookshelves we bought last month!