How to get House Projects Done

This weekend was pretty good. We got a lot of things done around the house. We put up the Boys Day decoration. Actually my husband put it up. It's a very elaborate doll with a sword and mask and a fancy paper thing. I'm not allowed to touch it. He even wears white gloves when he puts it out and when he puts it away each year. For those who don't know, Boys day is May 5th and it's a big deal in Japan. My kids are excited although I have nothing special planned... yet!

This year I reminded my husband that Boys Day was getting close and he should set up the decoration. I did this for two reasons. First, I do think its good for the kids to experience their Japanese roots and of course, the more holidays, the better, right? But also I knew that the only place to put this elaborate and fragile decoration was on top of the entertainment center. But there was no room on top of the entertainment center because my husband already has an elaborate set up there. We have a cable modem, a cable phone, a router and I'm not sure what all the other electronic looking devices are, but they take up the whole entertainment center! It could be worse, we used to have a whole computer up there for a while. But I made him move it last year for the Christmas decorations. My mistake was that I thought when he said he was going to move the computer that would mean moving all of those computer accessories too. But I was wrong. And since I have no idea about how these things work and all the wires involved, I did my best to strategically arrange pictures and things in front. But it still looked like pictures in front of computer clutter. So when I reminded my husband about Boys Day and he couldn't think of another place to put the decoration, he finally moved the computer clutter! It only took me about 2 years and now its finally gone! The clutter didn't move far. It's on the bookshelf next to the entertainment center, but at least its not the first thing you see when you walk in the room. And the decoration does look very nice. Feel free to stop by and see it sometime :P

This weekend, we also got a new swingset. Well, new to us at least. Our neighbors had moved and left it at the house and we ran over and stole it. The new neighbor kids are in high school and college so they have no use for it and they offered it to us. Today we took it apart and carried it into our yard. Then we disagreed about where to put it and now its still in pieces along the fence. Hopefully by next weekend it will be reassembled. My husband decided he didn't want it on the UFO landing pad. Did you know we have a UFO landing pad in our backyard? The people who lived here before us had an above ground pool. It killed the grass and we planted new grass there. The new grass is a lovely green, one shade darker than the rest of the yard and it makes a nice circle, like a UFO landing pad. So now the aliens know where to go whenever they get lost. Oh, so my husband wanted to make sure the UFO landing pad was kept in tact, or I think he may have something about it not being completely level. So he wants to move the swingset to the bottom of the cliff. Yes, we are lucky enough to have both a cliff and a UFO landing pad in our backyard! I call it the cliff but really its a very steep slope covered with ivy. The bottom is a little swampy towards the middle. But there is a good amount of level space there for a swingset. The other nice thing about the bottom of the cliff is that I can see it easily from my kitchen window and I won't need to install one of those huge convex mirrors so that I can watch the kids playing on the UFO landing pad more on the side of the house.

Since I had to agree with my dear husband that it would be a great idea to put the swingset there, that would mean that he would finally have to put steps down the cliff slope so that the kids can get down there easily without having to trip over the ivy. And he agreed! Only 3 years on this task. But it's not really over. We have 4 steps in now and pieces of a swingset lined up along the fence right. Hopefully this will get done soon, because I still need to find a way for him to stain the deck. His excuse for not doing it so far is that it can't rain for at least 3 days after he does it... have I mentioned before that we live in the Seattle area??? I suppose we could move to LA and that might help with the rain problem.