Yesterday I went in Wally World (aka Wal-Mart) and low and behold they were playing 'It's begining to look a lot like Christmas' on the loudspeakers. Only a few minutes earlier we were in Cellular 1's office and they were already completely decorated for Christmas and playing Christmas music softly in the store.
When I managed Radio Shack stores, I seem to recall ALL retailers pretty much waited until Thanksgiving day to drag out the decorations.

I've done a decent amount of drywall work in my life as a homeowner, even prior to buying this old hag that needs a massive facelift. I've always sanded the drywall joint compound after applying, then apply the second coat, then sand again. I'm not that skilled with drywall, despite my familiarity with it, so it always takes me a bit more sanding than it might someone more experienced. This generates a great deal of drywall dust, requires emptying the shopvac multiple times, and immediate showers after finishing a shift. I tend to look like a ghost when I'm done.

It can get really cold here. Really cold. We have a main gas furnace in the living room, but it's blower is electric and all the other heat in the house is electric, except the small gas heater in the wall of the upstairs bathroom. We decided it was better to be safe than sorry, so we ordered a 5000 watt generator that should be large enough to run the blower, refrigerator, TV and maybe even my computer ;-)

Okay, not that fat. REALLY not that fat. But at least I don't own two houses anymore. Closing took all of 45 minutes including the 30 minute wait in the waiting room for everyone to get there.

Wow, we really went all out this year - too bad the digital camera wasn't working or I'd have got some pictures. We have a nice screened in porch that became the setting. Out front were several tombstones, some of which glowed. I took the old rotted step from the back of the porch and painted 'BEWARE' on it in glow-in-the-dark paint. We stacked straw bales in the corners of the porch, had glowing jack-o-lanterns, halloween special effects CD playing and 3 14' black lights that lit up glow-in-the-dark spider webbing that was all over the inside of the porch. We strung one of these ghosts up across the porch and it would go from one end of the string to the other, moaning and howling while glowing in the black lights.

Mikel dressed up as a scarecrow without a head and sat on one of the bales of straw. His head was laying on the ground. When older kids would come to trick-or-treat we would ask them to put his head back up because it fell off, and just as they reached to put it on his head he would jump at them and growl. It was hilarious!!!

Our total trick-or-treater count? About 15. imported-59

I recently updated my blog software, which is always a good idea to keep people from exploiting holes in older code. Well, I tested everything and things seemed to work perfectly. Low and behold the RSS feeds were screwed up and reporting the wrong URL for stories. If I wasn't subscribed to a feed that incorporates entries from my own RSS I never would have realized it.
So, I got that problem fixed, hopefully all is good in the world again. imported-58

Well, I've gone back to working on the bedroom. I figure the house has settled enough after leveling it that the cracks shouldn't open (or close) any more than they have. So, in what little time I had this weekend to work on things I started fixing the cracks in the bedroom that opened up after leveling the house. Thank goodness I hadn't painted. I hadn't planned on jacking up the house, but when my brother-in-law came over, he just kind of did it.

I'm soon to be done with my old house. Not that it's a bad house, but making an extra mortgage payment every month is not the higlight of my life. So, on November 3rd, at 3:00 PM, I get to turn the keys over to the new owner.
On another note, it must be plumbing time, because in addition to my last post, I just saw two other plumbing related posts I thought you'd get a kick out of:

It's like the story of my life, and probably pretty darn common when renovating an old house. Check out This family's experience with remodeling a bathroom.

It's been snowing for the past two days. It's not even Halloween yet! I'm not used to having snow with spring flowers and snow before Halloween too.
We finally fired up the gas furnace. I'm shaking when I think of the gas bill I'll have soon considering they say natural gas is going up 20%. We picked up a couple of oil filled radiators and are using those to take the edge off, so we don't have to use the large furnace as much. imported-54