Another Whirlwind Weekend

Are there any other kind of weekends besides the crazy busy whirlwind kind? We don't seem to have any laid-back boring weekends any more. Every Friday at work, my co-workers (most of them single and living in the fun & fast lane...) talk about the coming weekend and inevitably someone will ask me about my plans ... and I always say that we don't plan our weekends, they just sort of "unfold" one hour at a time - the weekends happen to us, there's rarely anything that can be planned ahead of time.




The one event that was definitely on our schedule was a family birthday party on Saturday evening - Abby's 7th birthday! She received many wonderful presents with the biggest one being a new bicycle - with a banana seat in dark purple velour! And tassles hanging off the handlebars! How cool is that? She had to wait with her hands over her eyes while her dad carried it into the living room. She'll be the talk of the street as she rides around!

There were two other special birthdays on February 11th - my far-away niece Stephanie (above, about a year ago) in Montana and my best friend Jenny who I have known since 8th grade (that's 35 years to save you from trying to figure it out....) (No current pictures of Jenny) A big Happy Birthday Weekend for all.

Kelly went to the Valentine's Dance at school with a group of friends and came home at midnight tired and happy because she danced with .... I'd better not name him, but she's on a cloud. I never did see her in the lavender dress because she got ready over at a friend's house, and Matt picked her up when the dance was over. By the time she woke me up to say she was home, she was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans. But she loved how her hair was done - very un-Kelly but pretty, wavy with a sparkly butterfly pin on the side. She usually wears it in a pony tail or just stick-straight. Here's how it looked (I took these pictures when I was half-asleep, having been dragged out of bed to see her hair):

Now on to the guy stuff. We finally started the painting in our living room-dining room-hallway. Actually, we just started in the hallway because it's the smallest area (like any part of our house is BIG?) and we're doing this in stages to make it easier. In typical thorough Chris-style, the walls were patched, sanded, patched some more, sanded again, vacuumed down, wiped down and then finally given a quick dusting with a tack cloth. Whew. Lots of work for a dinky hall, n'est-ce pas? Then we commenced to doing the cutting in .... for being such a short hall, it has 5 doorways to trim around. I'm absolutely no good with the detail work so I moaned and groaned as I made a mess, while Chris zipped around doing all his cutting in FREE HAND in nice straight clean lines. I'm not the man for that job, for sure. Finally the rolling, which went quickly compared to the previous exercise. One coat down, one to go. Thankfully, Chris did a lot more of the painting than I did today, so it looks great thus far. The color is called Pismo Gold (what's pismo, anyway?) and is kind of a gold-tan shade. Very warm, and a very nice change from the pale green.

More snow flurries this weekend. Most of it's melting as fast as it lands which is OK by me. Another bad call by the weather forecasters - they were trying to get everyone whipped up into a frenzy by predicating a couple of inches of snow ... wrong again.

Someone starts a new job at Lowe's this week - Team Lead in the Lawn & Garden Dept. He finishes a second day of Orientation tomorrow and finds out his schedule for the coming week(s). I think he'll like this a job lot because he not only believes in great customer service ... he loves things like lawnmowers, chain saws and grills!

OK I need to wrap up, but I have to tell you the highlight of the weekend: we may have found the vehicle that hit Matt's car 4 weeks ago!! Chris and I drove back over to the neighborhood in Anderson Twp. where the accident happened with the intention of distributing flyers to homes on 3 streets in the immediate area of the incident. As we arrived in the subdivision we decided to just drive the streets to get an idea of the layout before we parked and started dropping off the flyers. We weren't in the neighborhood for 3 minutes before Chris spotted it: a black Hyundai Sante Fe, parked in a driveway. (We had narrowed it down to a Sante Fe because of the specific debris found at the scene, and a newly discovered witness who said it was a dark colored SUV.) BINGO!!! Chris quickly parked on the curb in front of the house, left the car running and told me to stay put. He walked up the driveway, made a fast inspection of the front end of the vehicle, and meanwhile, I saw a man come to the front door of the house, look out, then step out on the front porch. Chris continued to walk quickly back to the car, avoiding looking at the man, and we made a speedy getaway. He said it was obvious that the car had been re-painted and worked on because of less than perfect workmanship and some flaws in the paint job. I wrote down the address and license plate information while we discussed what to do next. We ended up calling the police, an officer met us at Schlechter's house (where the accident had happened 4 weeks earlier) and he took all the information. We're leaving it in their hands for the moment, hoping and praying that they try really hard to follow up and discover whether or not this is the vehicle. I bet if it is the man/vehicle we're looking for, he must know something's up! I hope he's a nervous wreck right now as he waits to be contacted by the police. I want so badly to believe that this story will come to a positive end. Pray hard!