T-minus 24 days

There are only 24 days left for us to get done with the house remodeling.

Suddenly I feel like I am on a very boring reality show with the lowest ratings ever. In yesterdays episode, I cleaned up the house. There was laundry to do, things to pick up, and the girls had a lot of stuff piled up in the front room that needed to be moved away from the windows. I wanted to go outside to trim the bushes down in advance of the windows being replaced, but it kept raining outside. I would go out, it would start raining, so I would go in. Then the sun would come out, and dry stuff up, so I would go out again, just to find it sprinkling again. Mid-afternoon we got a downpour. I had a pork chop, baked potato, and corn for dinner. Like I said, boring, at least for TV.

24 days, unless you exclude Sundays, which you should, making it 21 days. I only have about 8 unallocated vacation days from work, but I also have a few things that need to get done in the next month at work: HPUX patching (not hard or really time consuming, but will happen overnight, will lose a half day sleeping it off), Access Control upgrade (Big project - potential for a spectacular failure there), and I need to start writing a design paper for some of our High Availability stuff we want to do this year. I have 16 work days in the 24 remaining days, I don't think I can fit all 8 vacation days in that time period.

Drew told me today that he wants to help. This is a good thing. I think we can really jam through the two bedrooms once the windows are installed. But not really before they get in.

I still need to pick someone to do our heating and cooling. And we need to work on the electrical before they install an AC unit. And I don't know if I need the city to come replace the electrical meter or not yet.

24 days. Today I got a large carpet remnant from Drew. The people they got their carpet from sold them way more than they needed. I guess that means I did something.

Tomorrows main task? Make a list of things that can be done, some checkpoint or watermarks on progress, and what tasks have to wait for other things. Maybe I can do some half days at work, half days at home. That might help things a bit, if I can manage to juggle the important things at work properly...

I have a few pictures to post, including a snail that somehow got into the middle of one of the old bedrooms this morning. They are not posted here because Tara has the digital camera (she is working her way through a post a day. Don't forget to take a peek at her blog...), the convertor for the MicroSD card my camera uses is at my desk at work. Pictures need to wait for tomorrow...