Weekend wrap up

So my long weekend was nice, but I'm more tired today than after a normal 2-day weekend. This weekend seemed all about work. It started on Saturday when we moved a good-sized armoire from the 2nd floor guest bedroom to our top floor bedroom. Anyone who's seen our house realizes that that's no mean feat. To start with, there's a short flight of stair outside the guest room with no real place to stand an armoire at the top. Getting into our bedroom is even worse since you have to go up one step, make a 180° turn before you run into a wall and immediately go up another flight of stairs. After getting stuck only once on the turn (but really well stuck), we finally got the thing broken free and up the stairs. I'm thinking that now that it's up there we'll simply have to sell the house with the thing in place if we ever move. After we got the thing up there we had to rearrange everything that had been in the smaller dresser and find it a home. Even worse was taking everything that had been in the armoire and finding room for it in the guest room. We got it figured out but the whole process ended up taking about half the day.

On Sunday we started painting the living room. Anyone who's seen our house realizes that that's no mean feat (didn't I say that once already?). The ceilings are over 12 feet high and there are lots of angles, wood trim, windows, and other obstacles to paint around. I spent at least 2 hours masking things off before we could even get started with the paint. We used a dark red so it ended up taking about 4 coats of paint and we finally finished around 20:00 on Monday night. We're both wiped out after 2 full days of painting. The sad part is that we only got the red done. We'll be using a more neutral color on the rest of the room but we didn't have time to even get started on that. Of course, once we're done with the living room, we'll be heading up the stairwell and into each of the three bedrooms and bathrooms. This process could take months…

I always find it interesting how a certain song can transport me to a time in my past. While we were painting on Sunday we had XM Radio playing in the background when "What Have You Done For Lately" comes on. It's not a song I ever particularly cared for, but as soon as it started it brought back a flood of memories. I'm on my parents’ boat, anchored in Nassau Harbor in the Bahamas in early summer 1986. There's a waterfront bar a couple of hundreds yards away on the shore and they used to play that song (and others) loud enough so that any boat within 1/8 mile could hear. I would sit in the cockpit of our boat listening to music coming from the bar and watch the seaplanes that flew to and from Miami take off and land in the middle of the harbor, not that far from our boat. We used to walk past that bar on the way downtown where my parents had found a little café called Parliament House just up from the Straw Market. We would go there for lunch once in a while and my parents would let me have a drink, usually a daiquiri or something not too hard  (I was not yet 18 at the time). I would go to the beach on Paradise Island with our friends Rodney and Carmen from a neighboring boat and we might spend the entire day by a pool at one of the hotels or sitting on the beach. It never bothered me to be spending all my time with people who were are least 10 to 15 years older. Or, I would take our dinghy exploring, sometimes down to the cruise ships when they were in town and marvel at how big they were from our little inflatable boat. So much of who I am today comes from that time period, but it feels like two lifetimes ago. Looking back, I am so fortunate to have had those experiences.

Even though the astronomical calendar still says it is summer, the weather decided that on Labor Day summer was over. Right on cue the weather turned cloudier and rainy. It's been raining and foggy all day today. Last night we had thunderstorms come in just after 22:00 and I loved it. It was great lying in bed watching the lightning outside the windows. I hope this weather holds…I've had my fill of hot weather and an so looking forward to autumn.