Easter 2008

This year for Easter we all gathered at Liz and Doug's house for dinner and an Easter egg hunt. As you can see, the snow is finally mostly melted from the neighborhoods in Sandy. Yeah!

The kids all got plenty of loot, too!

The cats are out enjoying the sunshine...

Even a little springtime yawn...

Our daffodils are just about ready to burst...

and our groundcover is in full bloom. In short, it's Spring!

Where Percy Sleeps

Finally Spring!

This week we are finally seeing signs of a Spring thaw! Yeah! I drove home from Heber on Monday evening in a blizzard, but since then the weather has been oh so pleasant.
We got a great sunset last night. This is the vew from our front yard facing west. I also had to get a photo of the awesome Wasatch mountains to the east of us.

I have been sawing up wood scraps this week to make blocks out of them. Can't bear to throw them out, you know? So anyway, my friend Cassie came by while I was sawing on Tuesday evening, and immediately built herself a house out of the blocks.





Progress on the house this week? Well, we got more of the woodwork finished in the bathroom, around the closet opening and up to the tub.

Molly, Seal and Sean demolished a pillow I had put down for them to sleep on,

Dave M. finished the molding around the new door at the base of the stairs and the molding around the study side of Mom's french doors.

We got a much more attractive cover for the attic door,

the old bathroom window is all prepped for installation of the new window tomorrow,

and we got a new doggie gate to keep the puppies out of the great room!

Remodeling progress at the end of January

Here's the new bookcase in the great room. Dave chose the detail on the top. Cool, eh?
The new window seat next to the bookcase. Notice two rolls of paper towels all ready to clean up after errant puppies. Thank goodness for enzyme cleaners.

These are the two bookshelves on either side of the fireplace.

Brian and Annalyn, with some much appreciated help from Annalyn's brother Ben and sister-in-law Renee, finally began tiling the entryway. We are doing a mosaic of the tree of life. We'll keep you posted on the progress.

Detail of the paneling over the staircase.

Ta da! The new banister. I saw a photo in a magazine of one like this, so we ordered the parts from Huetter Mill and Dave M., our carpenter, figured out how to make it!

Looking down the stairs.

Looking up the stairs.

Annalyn designed the modified square opening to the top of the stairs. We had to consult an architect, who consulted an engineer, to make sure it would stand up when it was built, but once again, it was Dave M. who figured out how to build it.

Home Remodeling Progress February 2008

Since we currently have no linen closets, we have to be creative in where we store things. I bought a whole bunch of large storage bins from Costco, but I still don't have room for these blankets and quilts, so they are on the ironing board in the laundry room.




Mom is getting a new closet in her downstairs bedroom.

Here is a view of the great room as you enter the house. Notice the new back door we just put in this week!

The main bathroom got a new door too, plus we removed the door that was on the linen closet you see here, and we are remodeling the closet so it will look good without a door. This is as far as Dave could get today, because now I have to remove everything including the old shelves from the closet. Then we're either going to panel the inside or paint it a fun color before he replaces the old shelves with nice new alder shelves.





Here's Tulla trying out the new see-through door to the basement. Dave wanted to remove the old door entirely, while I wanted to keep it because I use it to hold the dogs where I want them. So we compromised.



Here's a view of the front door (not new yet) and the french doors leading to the master bedroom. Our carpenter, Dave M., just finished building the coat lockers on either side of the french doors.



A closer view of Dave M. and the lockers. They will have coat hooks inside and trays for shoes underneath the seats.

The right-hand locker. Dave M. is waiting for us to decide how long it will be before we can afford a new front door so he knows whether to fill in the paneling between the locker and the door or not. The new front door will be 42 inches wide instead of 36 like it is now.

The new bathroom door from the outside.

Looking down the hall towards the fireplace.

Looking at the end of the hall from the great room. The hall will have family photos all the way down both sides, with a photo of the SLC temple at the end above the wainscoting. Dave M. is going to invent some nice way to panel the opening for the attic in wood. Notice the floor has drywall mud all over it. They assure us it all sands right out.

Percy's First Mouse

Ever since I got back from my mission in 1987 I have been allergic to cats, even though I love them. But we have a problem. The field mice from the backyard keep invading the house. A few years back when some of them took up residence inside one of the kitchen walls and I had to rip out the wall when they died because they stunk so much, I put out poison. I felt guilty doing it, and I worried about the dogs or, heaven forbid, someone's child finding the poison, but now I have puppies, dogs and chickens, and I babysit nieces and nephews frequently, so I really don't want poison anywhere around my house. Heck, I don't even use toxic cleaning supplies! To me, cats were the only answer to get rid of the mice.

So in September of this year I got our friend Ardie to cure me of the cat allergy using EFT (see http://www.emofree.com/ to find out more) and voila! We started looking for cats! We got Percy from the people who rent my Aunt Beth's apartment. They found him as a stray, but already had two cats, so they couldn't keep him. Aunt Beth told me about him when she was giving us a ride home from our Workman Family Reunion in St. George in September, so a week or so later we went over to see him on a Sunday afternoon. He got interrupted as he was playing with their other two cats, so he didn't seem terribly friendly, just dang cute, but after I held him for a couple of minutes, I looked over at Dave and asked him what he thought, and he just emphatically nodded his head yes. It was love at first sight. He's such a confident, feisty little guy. And very friendly, when he wants to be. The people who found him told us he could already beat their cats in a fight, even though he was less than half the size of either cat.

We got him home and started looking through name databases on the web, and Dave made a list of the possibilities. After a few days of looking, Percival was the one that stuck out to me, and Dave said ok, so that's his name: Sir Percival. We call him Percy for short.

When I took Percy to the vet for his first exam and shots, they told me he was about 4 months old. Then they gave him tests for all the horrible diseases that strays in our area commonly get, but he got a clean bill of health. They checked him for a microchip, and he didn't have one, so I got him microchipped under our names, and he was officially ours! Yay!

I think everybody should get pets in pairs, so they have each other to play with. That meant getting one more cat. At first Dave wasn't so hot on the idea, but I talked him into it and about a week later we adopted one more cat, a Siamese, from some friends of my sister Laura. They were going to move to Singapore, and couldn't take him with them. He was a year and a half old, his name is Nimitz, after a cat in one of their favorite books, and he's gorgeous. He got his shots updated and got a microchip as well, and then we were the proud owners of two cats!

When we brought them home we were camped out on a mattress in the basement, crammed into the smallest bedroom ever constructed. (It has now been reborn as the study, where I am typing this.) The room is connected to a bathroom, so we put the litterbox in the bathroom and kept both cats in there for a month or so, until we felt they were adjusted enough to let them out into the main basement areas. Then I spent three incredibly boring days sitting around with each of our dogs (we had three large dogs at the time because Becky's dog Mickey was staying with us while she was in Germany) one at a time, on leashes, jerking their leashes and saying "no" whenever they went after Percy or Nimitz, until they learned not to pay attention to the cats. In retrospect it was totally worth three looooooooong days, because now the dogs and cats all get along fine, but at the time I was seriously considering gnawing off my own arm, just for entertainment.

We never saw any mice until I found Nimitz in the bathroom chasing one, the day before I took these photos of Percy with another mouse. I didn't get any photos of Nimitz with the mouse, because I had to leave the room. It made me feel kind of sick. The mouse in these photos was already dead by the time I noticed it, but Percy was still having a great time playing with it. The next day I watched Percy kill a mouse in a window well, and in the morning we found a dead mouse left outside our bedroom door as a present. So between the two cats, they have killed at least 4 mice so far, without us ever having seen a live one except with a cat in hot pursuit. Go cats! (I do like mice, and I feel sorry for them getting killed, but I draw the line at letting them live in my house.)

This Week's News

1. Dave passed his series 66 exam on his first try! There are others he knows who didn't quite manage that. He needed a 71% to pass, but he got something like a 78%, so he's getting razzed by the guys at work for "over studying".


2. The dryer is still running.


3. Annalyn and Brian made some more progress on the tiling job in the entryway. It's ready for our carpenter to build the lockers next to the front door.


4. The new master bedroom has been primed, we bought the paint today, and tomorrow our friend Ruthie starts painting the mural in there.


5. We went to an excellent "Leadership Training Meeting" at the Stake Center on Saturday evening. Did you all get a chance to see the broadcast? If not, you should. You'll love it. It was all about families.


6. 
12. OK. I just have to show you the cutest photo of Dave on the night the puppies were born. This is him holding Mikey, who is now owned by my sister Katie's family. Can you believe how tiny they used to be? Mikey now weighs about 23 pounds.