Finished Project

BEFORE:Sometime last summer, when we lived in the apartment I was taking out some trash and found a wooden, glider rocker out by the dumpster. I thought, "Hey! Free chair, cool!" I hefted it up to the apartment and began my standard prodcedures for dumpster treasures--lysol, lysol, and more lysol. I trashed the seat cushions that were on it and planned to fashion something myself (the before pictures show something along the lines of what I was planning for new cushions). Around the time that I pulled out a staple gun to get to work on the bottom seat cushion, Marty said, "Why don't we strip it and really do it up nice before we put new cushions on?"

OK.

We did a little research and made many quick trips to Lowe's and we worked on it some. And then we let it sit for months. And then we worked on it some more. And a little bit more. And finally, more than six months later, it's finally finished. Around the time that we were staining it, I realized that no cushions I could make would do the chair justice; thus, the cushions you see in the after photos.

Now that it's done, I absolutely love it, and as you see, so does Cher.

Now I just need a glider ottoman to go with it...

AFTER:

Fortune Cookies

The other evening Marty asked me to go to the store and pick up something for him. It was late, and I was tired, and I had a multitude of other excuses as to why I couldn't or shouldn't go and I would do it the next day.
He persisted.
Finally, I picked up a fortune cookie left on the counter from take out Chinese food we'd had a few nights earlier and said, "We'll see what the fortune cookie says."
So I broke open the cookie and read the fortune: "Don't put off until tomorrow that which you can accomplish today."
I went to the store just a few minutes later.

The street where we live, sort of

Hey, do you see my new picture over there? Off to the right. Yeah, that one. Cool, huh? My big little brother sent me that. It's awesome. So is he. Thanks, John.

The street where we live

We returned home from Utah very late Sunday evening. On Monday when I went outside I noticed that some changes had occured while we were away. Here's what our street looks like now.

Kittens

Early last week I had a minor meltdown (OK, it wasn't minor at the time). To make a drawn out and painful story short, basically, I managed to delete every copy of my final version of the presentation I was going to give out at BYU. Gone. Not in the recycle bin. Removed from my flash drive (OK, 2 flash drives--I'm a moron!).

I told Marty he needed to pause his movie because I'd done "something really bad." And for the next 30 minutes while I paced the house swearing (and dug through the trash to find the original flash drive), he worked on getting things fixed. An important factor in getting things fixed was an emergency phone call to Coach to see what suggestions he could give (Thanks, Coach!). Fortunately, Coach's suggestion directed us to a data recovery program that worked beautifully and restored my lost files (yes, files, plural--have I mentioned that I'm a moron!).

In the time that I was waiting for good news, I wondered if I'd need to change the focus of my presentation--from my research to something like the following:

Kittens. Kittens are cute. Here are two cute kittens.

Here are two cute kittens, dancing. One. Two. Cha, cha, cha.

Three cute kittens. Three cute kittens with black ears and blue eyes.

This grey kitten does tricks.

One kitten and one puppy. Snuggling.

In conclusion, kittens are cute. Thank you.

P.S.--Boss, I hope this helps you feel better!