New Window Screens

The biggest news of the week is that the entire inside of the house is finally all painted.  I had a painting crew come out this week to do the stairwell to the third floor which had a ceiling and trim that was out of reach of any ladder combination I could cobble together with my ladders.  It is nice to know the house is all redone.  While the painting contractor was here we also had the gutters on the house scraped and painted as there was some peeling going on there.  I would love to say the outside of the house looks so much better, but since we painted with the exact same color as before - there really isn't much of a change, except for a little less peeled paint.

That news aside, we did have a busy weekend.  We started Friday night off by having a small dinner party with Kathy, Jo's sister, and Linda, a friend of Kathy's who lives just two blocks away from us.  Mexican was the theme so we enjoyed an enchilada casserole and tacos while sipping margaritas.  We made both strawberry and regular margaritas and fortunately, I managed to keep my margarita consumption down to just two, so I was reasonably coherent for the evening.  Saturday morning after an early morning run, the three of us (Kathy, Jo, and yours truly) headed to City Market to enjoy their delicious cinnamon rolls, since that is what we do with Kathy here.  Afterwards we stopped by a couple of flea markets to pick up some paper back books and to enjoy the junk that people 1) collect, and 2) try to sell to someone else.  Since we walked to everything we didn't feel too bad about the breakfast treats.  Then Kathy headed off to Marquette graduation events while Jo and I caught up on some reading.  For dinner we enjoyed sausage and mushroom pizzas made on the grill. 

Sunday, Jo decided to see if she could exercise herself into the ground by going for a 90 minute bike ride, followed by lifting at the gym, and swimming for an hour.  After a lunch of homemade egg salad sandwiches on pretzel rolls - yum!!! - we biked to Bradford beach to enjoy the warm, sunny day and watch the volleyball games.  Jo finally collapsed on the couch for a short nap. 

During the week, I continued to work on finishing my window screens for the front windows.  I completed getting the frames together and then spent a couple of days getting them painted before I added to the screening material, as you can see in the photo.  I just finished putting on the screening yesterday and will post pictures of the final product later this week.  I puttered in the yard cleaning out flower beds and getting the grass to grow in the yards and not the flowers.  We also had the gutters scraped and painted.  Jo had her usual work week with a mix of stressful and really stressful days - how I don't miss that part of work.

We are still fighting the squirrels digging into our raised bed and to show our human superiority we placed chicken wire over much of the gardens.  To show us that we aren't so superior the squirrels promptly dug around anything not covered with the wire.  The battle continues.....