Is Life Moving at a Fast Forward Pace?

I realized last night I never posted a picture of our painted fire place! It was off white brick before with red mortar. Not very attractive to say the least. So Dave primed and primed and primed the thing (with colored primer). When I was in New York he painted a final coat and textured each brick slightly different so it had a more natural brick appearance (instead of looking just painted). We got this idea from Mike and Allison. They painted their brick fireplace white, and it turned out really nice. Since Dave's wanted an accent wall in the living room and I didn't, we decided a darker accent fireplace would be our compromise.

Over the next two weeks I'm working on finishing up the closet in the bedroom (installing a closet rail, building a top shelf above the rail, installing a few shelves inside the closet), finish painting the closet and bedroom doors, and finishing the bookshelf in the bedroom. I've made a list of all the supplies needed (I'll buy most of them tomorrow night, and the rest after we get paid on the 15th), and I've have several picture game plans set and ready to implement! After that all we have to do is build shelving in the living room storage closet, but I've decided that will have to wait until next summer. We're completely out of money with Dave's tuition coming due this month on top of construction bills.

Sunday night we picked up our year supply of wheat! Mike and Alison found a killer sale at Macey's grocery store (50 lbs for $8), so we asked them to purchase enough for us to make 2.5 loaves of wheat bread a week for a year. That's more than we currently eat in a week, so it should be enough for us and for a few kids. Now we just have to purchase a few crates to put it in! I buy the large tubs and the unscrew-able lids for storing all our grain. They're the best! The lids are $6 a piece, but well worth it. I'm thinking these tubs will end up being a Christmas gift to us... We're on a super tight budget right now, so we can wait until December!

I also started writing my life story about a month ago. I decided to put it in blog format, so if I get something wrong, people can tell me before I finalize it (for example, I can't remember when Heather was born what was wrong, I only remember she was sent to a special hospital). Eventually when I'm old and senile I'll probably have it printed and bound for my kids or something. We'll see when the time comes! I'm not great at keeping journals, so this will be the story of my life in replacement of the journal. Read it and let me know if you remember something differently than I do http://aplastowpast.blogspot.com/.

In other news... I had a company retreat Friday night to Saturday up at Snowbird. The company had a speaker come out in the morning, a service project in the afternoon (building bikes for the underprivileged in the Salt Lake area), our families came up for dinner, and the company paid for all of our hotels for the night and breakfasts in the morning.

The most exciting part of the trip? It's probably a tie between being stuck in an elevator for 20 minutes and having it drop 3 times (a total of 1 floor worth of drop-age), or heading down to the hot tub after dinner in our swimsuits and having the CEO and CFO and wives join us on the elevator. I've never been so embarrassed in a while. Maybe awkward is a better word for it. But Dave shoved me in the corner and stood in front of me so I wouldn't be easily visible (good job Dave). It wouldn't have been so bad if we weren't in our swim suits!

We're heading to Zion's with Dave's family for the Labor Day weekend. Since none of them have hiked in Zion, we're excited to get to share one of our favorite vacation spots with them! It should be a nice, relaxing weekend.