Abbie's Real Life Blog

Wow, four day weekends are GREAT!  Woo!

I’ll take another one of those, please.

This one was like a regular two-day weekend bookended by another two-day weekend, so I came out of it feeling both socialized and productive.  Yay for purpose!

As far as socializing, the Fourth of July is always the weekend of a family reunion for my dad’s side of the family, and we all gathered for a late lunch.  For some reason, this reunion rarely has ever lasted long enough to involve fireworks.  We’re usually done by 4 or 5pm, not even late enough for some twilight sparklers.  The party is all about the food instead.  Tracy and her mother drove in from Kansas City, and carpooled with my sister and I over to the reunion grounds near Mineola, Missouri.  I did take some pictures, but mostly I chatted with family.  The weather was great.  It was a very pleasant July Fourth.

Later we watched Confessions of a Shopaholic and ate pizza instead of watching fireworks in Columbia.  That was disappointing, because the movie was truly terrible.  This despite the fact that I like Isla Fisher and I read and enjoyed (in a purely pulp sense) the first three Shopaholic books.  (What can I say?  They made me feel better about my spending habits.)

Tracy and her mother (who hasn’t booked a flight back to Florida as of press time) stayed in Columbia through lunch on Sunday, and then went back to Kansas City in the afternoon.  I took Monday off work.

The rest of the weekend was spent working on the house, and I made pretty good progress.  All the new furniture has been put into its proper spot, and most of the old furniture has been redistributed in the house.  The office is set up with the computers and the living room is pretty much set.  It looks and feels like a different place.  I have dusted and cleaned shelves and even moved around a lot of stuff in the house, so that linens and tolietries and vitamins aren’t where they used to be.  But I have a lot of storage space now that didn’t exist before, since some of the new furniture is big and empty.  And everything is getting a place, even if I’m not really an Everything In Its Place type of person.  I like for everything to have a place to go when it’s time for cleaning, though it gets scattered in the meantime.

In the meantime, I’ve surprised myself by keeping up with the dishes and taking the dog to the dog park regularly, both of which were things that Tracy used to do regularly.  I’m a single person living alone with a dog, now, and I have to keep up with my own chores.  The dog park one is pretty easy; the dog gets so hopeful and so mopey until she goes to the park on weekend days, so it’s just a matter of fitting the trip in at an opportune moment (when it’s not too hot).  I’m not so fond of dishes, but there is something nice about getting them done every night.  I used to leave them around for days; I’m sure I won’t do that anymore.  It’s kind of gross.  And I have a dishwasher for the regular stuff.

With the two weekdays off, I had time for errands, which was awesome.  I even spent some time gardening last night- weeding the flowerbed that was planted last year.  All of the flowerbeds are out of control, but they desperately need some new mulch and I haven’t had time to tend to them at all.  But I finished that one because the weather was so cool and comfortable (in the mid-70s).

Then I showered and went out to see the Michael Mann/Johnny Depp/Christian Bale movie Public Enemies to finish off my holiday weekend.  It was ok.  I liked the acting, especially the hundred and fifty character actors sprinkled throughout.  I also liked the use of the incidental lighting, which seemed kind of amateurish and 1980s but totally fresh and realistic at the same time.

Now I get the second of two four-day weeks in a row, though I have to get down to business.  I owe some photos and I might be shooting a wedding this weekend, and I’m not really that close to finishing the house.  But I feel like the weekend was a push, motivation-wise, rather than something I have to recover from.