Week In My Life Day 1

                            I needed a kick in the pants to get blogging again on a regular basis. So when I saw that Melissa from over at Adventuroo was hosting a linky party and asking people to blog about a week in their life I figured it was the perfect opportunity.  

As many of you know on July 24th our life was changed forever.  Our home was set on fire by a serial arsonist that was terrorizing our neighborhood.  In that fire we lost our cat, our car, and our home.  We are in the process of rebuilding but it has been a long and emotionally draining process that we could not get through without our family, friends and faith.  The one bright spot is that the arsonist was caught almost 2 weeks ago and is being held without bail.  Having said all that my pictures this week will be a lot of going over to the house to check on progress and answer any questions I can.  

My husband was off today so we went by the house to check on things and found that our kitchen cabinets, trim and doors had been delivered.  Yippee!!

After that we off to Home Depot to pick out lighting fixtures and paint colors.  I have to admit that last week when we went to pick out flooring I figured it would be painful to get us to agree and we agreed on everything right away, it was scary.  However, lighting fixtures were not so easy.  Oh my goodness why do I want all the expensive fixtures????  Oh well that is not to be but we did finally agree, for the most part, and I will give the list to the project manager tomorrow.

From there we went to Barnes and Noble to pick up a camera guide for my camera since I lost all my reference books in the fire.  Unfortunately they didn't have the one that someone recommended so I had to order it.  I figure when you can't get what you want you should eat ice cream....nice motto huh?  Works for me.

We decided comfort food was the order of the day so we ate baked mushrooms for dinner.  Now you know I am not the healthiest of eaters.  These were delicious.  Unfortunately, I forgot to white balance for our apartment's lighting and since I couldn't figure out my lightroom 3 trial today I couldn't do any post processing on any of these photos.

I hope everyone participating in a Week In My Life is enjoying it and I look forward to seeing your posts.  If you want to see everyone's posts be sure and check out Melissa's blog.

A house update

It is truly hard to believe that tomorrow will be 2 months since a fire destroyed our home.  The fire ran the roof life of our house so that all the ceilings had to be removed to be able to stop the fire.  A lot of the damage was due to water, soot, smoke, debris and of course the fire itself.  Here are some pictures that I have taken over the last 2 months.

Here is a photo from the first day after they tarped our house.  As you can see the car didn't make it.



This is after the new carport and side wall was built.



This is as the new siding was going up.  The siding is now finished.



As progress is being made we are still trying to understand all of this.  I haven't been on here much as I try to deal with my emotions over the fire.  I am going to try to get on here more. 

Gotta love productive days 192/365

Today was a productive day around here and I LOVE that!   One of things that always interest me is how people divide duties within their household.  For us we both do outside stuff and we both do inside stuff.  Sometimes I cook, sometimes he cooks.  Sometimes I clean the pond filter, sometimes he does, you get the picture.  For outside I do the plants and flowers and he does the vegetable garden.  Here in Maryland they say May 1st is a a good day to  put your plants in.  Last week we went to the local Master Gardener plant sale and today those veggies got planted.  I have to confess that the plants we bought at the sale I put in last weekend since we were expecting so much rain I figured they were better off in the soil than sitting in a pot.  Today, I did some transplanting and planting of some other plants we bought during the week and I am becoming happier with the beds.  Patience is not a virtue I have in abundance but gardening is teaching me to be more patient.

After we finished outside we ran some errands and one of those was to buy a blind to replace the one that is in our main bathroom.  When we bought this house 3 years ago (I can't believe it will be 3 years in a couple of weeks) we replaced a lot of the blinds but left the bathrooms as they were livable.  However, the faux wood blind in the main bathroom has become unbearable as of late as all it does is collect dust and no matter how often you clean it it still looks like you have never touched it.  Now that the new blind is bought I took down the old blind and decided that the mustard color on the window frame had to go so I have started to sand that off but since there was a mint green color underneath I am still not done.  Before you comment and tell me I could have just painted over and didn't need to sand it down the paint had a weird rubbery feel to it and I thought it wouldn't take another layer of paint well.  Here is the before picture and hopefully I will have an after picture soon enough.

So how do you divide the chores in your household?