Catching Up

Wow, I am finally all caught up on my Google Reader for the blogs I follow!  My vacation at the end of July put me severely behind on my reading, and posting – I have finally gone from 300+ unread posts to 0! 

My weeks have either been really busy or really lazy since returning too.  The busy weeks didn’t allow me much or any time to post, and the lazy weeks were just that – LAZY!  I didn’t feel like doing anything at all, and in most instances, I didn’t.  I’m hoping to finally get back on track with things now.

I started a private dance lesson with a new student the week after coming back from vacation.  If I refer to her by “name”, it will only be “K” since this is a public blog and I do not have her parents permission to use her real name or anything else personal on here.  K lives in a not-so-great area of the city, which makes me nervous, and parking has been a real pain, but I’ve had 3 lessons with her now, and it’s been going great!  She says she has fun, she’s outgoing, and a good listener for the most part.  :)  This month I stuck to summer and Hawaiian music, and we’ve even begun a real hula dance!  It has been fun for me so far, and I look forward to hopefully continuing lessons for a long while.

My cousin also contacted me to ask if he could have a family get together here at our house (which happened on the 15th), since we all live all over the place and he was coming up from Florida that week to visit.  I agreed, as long as our backyard wasn’t under construction for our patio, since I planned to keep everyone outdoors for the entire time, or at least as many people outside for as long as possible.  My patio hasn’t been started yet, and unfortunately it rained – and poured – that day, so everyone was stuck inside.  I had spent the entire week before that cleaning my house from top to bottom.  It was time to do all the cleaning anyway, but I also care about how my house looks to other people, and I knew there would be family wanting to see it all for the first time, so I wanted it looking perfect.  I expected people in and out for the bathroom, a tour of the house, etc., but I didn’t expect to end up with 19 people crammed into 3 rooms, tracking mud, grass, and food all over my floors.  I was very stressed about the whole thing, and the only person from my cousin’s bunch that said a sincere thank you and related to how stressed I was was my other cousin’s wife.  The cousin that asked me to have it here, and his parents, brother and SIL (other cousin and wife mentioned above) showed up 2 hours late and stressed me out even more.  The cousin that asked to have it here decided it would be fun to joke around that he spilled red wine on my white carpet (he really did not, but thought it was hilarious to joke about it).  I also did not provide the wine, as I didn’t really want any alcohol here with the mix of family that came, but one of my aunt’s brought it because my cousin told people to bring whatever they wanted, never got a list of what people were bringing, and didn’t tell me that he told the rest of the family to bring stuff.  Long story shortened, I was kind of mad at that part of the family, happy to see other parts of the family, and have learned my lesson to never offer my house as the gathering location for something like that ever again!

My friend had her second baby last week and I’m excited to meet him and visit with her.  She teaches baton in the group I’m involved in too, but with having the baby and the week before having the baby, she hasn’t been at practice.  I’ve seen pictures, but I’m hoping to get to meet him in person this week and deliver her baby gifts!   :)

We haven’t gotten our patio started yet, but they have now marked the whole property where utilities are located under ground.  We are set to begin work anytime after tomorrow, so now it’s just up to the landscaper to get started – I’m very anxious for that!  I can’t wait to have that done and hopefully enjoy it as much as possible before the fall turns too cold.

So, that’s my catch up for now.  I finally took pictures of my new jewelry set I made before vacation, so I would like to do a post with those, and I definitely have more vacation fun to share.  :)