First of all, Happy 12th Anniversary to us!  Instead of a VA-cation, we are having a STAY-cation to celebrate.  Thanks to Freescale's delightful Mandatory Time Off Without Pay But Just Be Happy You Aren't Getting Laid Off program, we find ourselves with a week off.  And many thanks to Marc and Kandi for keeping the kids.  (Kids!  Mommy misses you and has cried every night so far!!!)

So here's what we have been up to so far.

We are building a path and flowerbed here in the backyard.  The path goes from the gate to the porch, the flowerbed retaining wall will have two separate tiers and will be up against the house.  If you look very closely you can see how Paul has strung the level lines between posts and marked the different levels of the stone wall.  Setup for this kind of project takes forever.  The light is because it is so dang hot he has been doing as much as possible at night.

Wow, that's a lot of stone.  Home Depot delivery ROCKS.

Working hard.

Starting to look like a path!

Yes, that says 106.5.  Time to stop.  Move to the garage.

While he was working on the path, my job was to get all of this junk in the garage OUT of the garage.  Now some of it is on the back porch, some in the house, some on the front porch, some just behind the gate...well, you get the idea.  This is all so we could etch and epoxy the floors.  But sometime over the course of the day we had a discussion about what other things we might like to do to the garage, and how it made sense to do it all at once while everything was already out.  And that's how this happened:

If I look a little crazy, well, heat exhaustion does that to you.  It also apparently makes you spend another $600 at Home Depot. 

You probably can't see it, but the car is full of shelving for the garage, not part of our original plan.  (Home Depot also tried to tempt me into some wood flooring for my office, but Paul got me out just in time.)  Hey, if you're going to put everything back IN the garage, you might as well put it back into a freshly painted, properly shelved garage, with a beautiful epoxy floor.  So far this staycation is turning out to be one of the most expensive vacations we've ever had.  But we'll have something to show for it in the end.

We worked until about 1 am, but we got the entire thing primed, half of the floor etched, and then this afternoon Paul degreased and etched the other side.  So tomorrow (Monday) when it is all dry we can paint the epoxy on, and when that is dry enough to walk on, we can paint the walls (we are NOT painting the ceiling again, it can just STAY primer white!) a nice garage-y beige.  But tonight, since it is our anniversary and all, we are going to go out for dinner and a movie and forget about home improvement for the rest of the night.

Speaking of, my date is ready, so I'm signing off!