Salmagundi

It has been a while since I've typed so now it's time for the latest instalment. This one very well may be all over the place and fairly random but just hang with me, or just move on.

First things first- I received an email from a reader that said that they found one of my posts on Minneapolis to be "anti-climactic." I had written about a fairly recent business trip up there and stated several nice things about the Minneapolis/St. Paul area but then ended the post by saying something to the effect of even though it is a great place to visit, I'm not sure that I would want to live there.

He said that in light of it being a decent post that he was confused as to why I would leave it so open-ended like that...and then made the comment that after then seeing my hair that perhaps it made a little more sense.

Sorry if you don't like my hair. Sorry if you're so shallow enough to really truly try and stoop to the level of judging a person by their "cover." As a writer I am open to constructive criticism about ways that I can improve the quality of my posts but when someone starts throwing jabs about intelligibility being linked to the fuzziness of someone's hair then, pardon me if I say....well, fill in the blank with the phrase of your choice. The conversation has been ended.

OK, now that that is out of the way....

A loooooooong time ago, sometime last year, I was talking about a renovation project that I had started in my house. It was a big deal. We had this room that we didn't know what to call. It wasn't a closet, it wasn't a bedroom...but it did have a 1/2 bathroom in it which made it that much more quizzical. Well, we decided that we wanted to get some kind of use out of it, but the problem was that it was the only room in the whole house that we were certain had absolutely no insulation, no real good source of electricity, and no heating ducts going to it. I think you might be able to track where I'm going with this now.

In order to make this room work, I had to really just start things over from scratch. I removed everything from the bathroom and covered up the pipes. We moved everything that we had been storing in there to another room. I then went out to my garage and got a few hammers and a pry bar and started having a field day. The room was once mainly bad plaster work that was later "patched" together with even worse wallpaper and then sealed up with paint. Not any more. I took things down to the bare frame.

I ran more wire to accommodate more electrical outlets, split off 2 existing light switches, re-did the ligthting for the room. I then insulated the room the hell out of the room before putting up brand new sheetrock. When that was done I mudded, textured, painted, and now I am in the very last stages of putting up the last of the trim around the doorways. So a year later I almost have this mamma-jamma under wraps.

Work at my regular job has been what it is, but I don't like to blog about that.

Because of all of the stuff going on in my life right now I really haven't had much time for family, relaxing, or leisure. But once things are finally to a near stop then I've got some things on my list to tend to-

1. Reading- I have books that I would like to read but I've just not had the time to read any of them lately.
2. Working out- I have not worked out in.....too long. I now finally have the room again to get my equipment back out and use it. I am tired of being tired and I know that working out again will help.
3. Catching up on the shows that I've missed- Thank God for Tivo.
4. Playing with my kids- I can finally come home from work and not be distracted by everything else that is going on.
5. Write some much needed music- Last night I was listening to a tape or 2 that I had from 2 concerts that my college band did several years ago. We really didn't put everything into our group that we could have and we weren't as good as we could have been, but in my estimation, for a half-assed band we also really weren't that bad either. I miss writing and playing music and I once again feel inspired to do something about it.

We currently have company in our house. My wife had a friend from high school who was a foreign exchange student from Germany. She is now back here in the States visiting us. I have to admit that it feels kind of exotic to have a foreigner here in our house with us to give us different perspectives and such. She has a lot of interesting stories from around the world. Thankfully she seems to feel right at home here with us and I hope she really does. I also hope that we've made the stay nice enough that she'd want to come back. Hopefully we can all meet up in Ireland someday as well and have a tour there.

Well, with all of that now having been said my children are now awake and ready for breakfast so I need to go get that ready for them.

I'll be back much sooner next time than I was this time.