the last few weeks

Ugh. I've been MIA from blogland for two weeks! That is unacceptable. I promise to do better. What's been going on? A lot actually...

We had a Memorial Day fiesta at Casa de Rosedale, complete with homemade peach salsa, fajitas, and friends (and some It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, hilarity!). Good times!

That following weekend, Cassi and I got our rears out of the house super early (7am!) on Saturday morning to go bargain hunting. We made our fantastic finds at garage sale #3: a dryer for a mere $60 - delivered!, a Fossil purse for me ($3) and a Chinese Laundry purse for Cassi ($2). Yes, I said Fossil and Chinese Laundry. We should have gone back and purchased every purse they had! The next stop brought loads of DVDs for a buck apiece, a coat rack for $1 (stay tuned for the Before & After project), a lovely Carmen Miranda-esque bust for Cassi's room, and a few other knick-knacks. We were famished by 9:30 and stopped for breakfast at Cracker Barrell (yum!), and thus ended our garage saling. It was a good morning!

We bummed around the house for the rest of the day, watched a few of our bargain movies, and then went to cheer on the Ruff Riders (Abilene's indoor football team). Cheap tickets, good football. Yep.

On to Sunday. Lazy Sunday morning, late service at Beltway, and then some perusing at Home Depot. I bought a few things we needed for the washer and dryer and then headed home. After lunching, I got to work on my coat rack (full post on that coming soon), and then, while waiting for paint to dry, I got to work installing washers in the hoses on the washing machine (it was leaking from both ends). After several minutes of cursing the blasted hoses, and turning them 1/8 of an inch each turn (stupid!), I finally got all of the washers in place and hoses reattached. Then I put the vent hose on the dryer (which took longer than it should have, those things are hard to cut without wire cutters). I decided to do a test load in the washer, and then (mistakenly) went back out to the garage to finish up the coat rack project. A few minutes later I went back in the house, and found a flooded kitchen!! EEEK! Apparently a clamp for the drain hose is not an optional part. But after all the craziness (and retrieval of necessary parts), washer and dryer are now fully operational and there has been no more flooding. Yay!

I was pretty proud of myself for fixing things on my own (even though there was a bit of trial and error). Is a handy-woman career in my future? Ha, not likely. But it's good to know that I can take care of the small things.