Busy, Busy

I know the holiday season is supposed to be a busy one with shopping, decorating, parties and road trips here and there. But I'm already wiped out and I've done none of those.

After stripping, scraping, sanding, staining and putting two finishing coats of Miniwax on our front room floor, I'd only just begun a run of home improvement efforts. I spent much of this past Saturday gingerly replacing the furniture in that same front room lest I scratch the finish. Do you know how hard it is to gingerly move a piano?

Then on Sunday we ordered carpet for two other rooms, hoping the installers can get here before Christmas. To ease the financial pain, I volunteer that we will tear up the old carpet, the padding, the tack strips and any stray nails and staples. Somehow I'll find a way to dispose of all this too before the carpet-layers arrive. The ordering salesperson asks if we have a garage where the carpet can be cut. We answer in the affirmative.

What we didn't confess is that our garage has been used mainly for storage and is a jumble of clutter from one end to another.

On Monday, I called the local car dealer and told them I wanted a deal on a new mini-van like one advertised by a competitor down the road. Fortunately, I was speaking with a lady salesman whose father was sales manager. She said she would call me back. When she did, she offered a fairly competitive deal (I get the feeling dad wanted to help her make the sale). Wendy and I were at the dealership till almost 10 p.m., but we signed the papers and now are proud owners of a 2010 Grand Caravan.

But that meant a trip to the bank today to get a cashier's check for the down payment, a phone call to the insurance agent to make sure our vehicle was insured and twenty minutes of wrenching to get the rusty old plate off our old mini-van (in the end, they gave us a brand new plate free since the old one was in such bad shape).

Meanwhile, Wendy was camped out at home, waiting for the carpet people to do the preliminary measurements on the rooms we want re-carpeted. The technician arrived at the same time we promised the car people we would be at the dealership to pick up our new mini-van.

Somewhere during all this, Wendy managed to put up outdoor Christmas garland and to secure the gate on our backyard fence since we had to also dog-sit our son's rascally Boston Terrier, Simon. When he was here previously on Saturday, he pushed open the gate, ran down the block and across the street to terrorize a woman and her little girl walking their two big dogs. I was seriously worried that we might get visited by the police afterwards.

Maybe the woman was somewhat forgiving since Simon was wearing a University of Michigan sweater and the Wolverines were getting pummeled at the time by the Ohio State Buckeyes. U of M fans of all types needed to release their frustrations somehow.

So it's been and will continue to be busy, busy. OH, and I almost forgot. I still have to write my blog.

OK, so this is it.