To all of you wonderful people who e-mailed me, sent me a card or commented here to wish me a happy birthday, I want to say thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you! You all are the best friends a girl could ask for. I do not deserve or merit your friendship in any way. I hope you all know how much I love and appreciate each of you.
My husband gave me quite a happy surprise by posting on my blog.We have no secrets, therefore, he knows my username and password to get on here.However, I was still shocked that he did what he did! He posted while I was down at church for our Ladies Bible Study. When I arrived home, he couldn’t wait to say “You should go read your blog.” I was so touched. I don’t deserve him either!

If you are wondering about his reference to “Strunk” in his post, please see the section on this blog entitled “Books I’ve Read This Year”. Recently, he was teasing me about reading an English grammar book before bed. He said “How weird and how boring.” Well, maybe. But if you get The Elements of Style from your local library, you will not be weird or bored. For a book on English grammar and writing style, it is one good read. Mr. Strunk and Mr. White are hilarious. You will love it. And, at only 85 pages long, it’s a quick read. I enjoyed it, but then again, maybe I am weird.

I moved it into our school room (Terry screwed it to the wall for me because it was a little unsteady) and filled it with the books from our home school closet. Doing that led me to go ahead and clean it out too! Organizing is definitely a domino effect! :o)

TADA! I’m so proud of this, too! It’s amazing how during the school day, things tend to naturally go toward chaos. I don’t have a “before” photo, but take my word for it, it was cluttered! Leslie and Laci, aka the un-masked marauders, also loved ransacking my jewelry box. I moved it into a cabinet in my bathroom (which I also organized) and Terry made me this handy-dandy necklace hanger! My necklaces no longer get tangled and will never be jumbled my the grubby (but still sweet) little hands of the Marauders! Yay!Once things were in their rightful places, I began to clean!! (I LOVE to clean and organize!) I bought myself an early birthday gift. It’s the Swiffer duster. It’s great. It has an extendable handle and these disposable cloths that hold on to the dust.

The handle extends out, and then the brush end bends to either side and out straight.Isn’t this great? Aren’t we having fun!! It even reaches my ceiling fan with no chair!! I have FIVE ceiling fans to clean. I was having to get a bucket of soapy water, a chair and stand (precariously, I might add) to clean them. I always feared losing my balance and breaking my left arm. No more!! By the way, I like my left arm. I’m left-handed!YUCK!!!

I also organized my other utensil drawer in the kitchen. I have a divider for my main silverware drawer, but this one had everything just thrown in. I love doing this…

While I was doing all of this cleaning and organizing, I noticed a huge puddle of water on the kitchen floor. My dishwasher had leaked! Terry was out soul winning, so I was alone. I’m so glad I had two mops! I used them both! I’m also thankful that my little marauders were asleep during this. They would have had a hay-day in all that water. I would have had a bad hair day trying to keep them out.When Terry got home, he looked at our faithful little kitchen helper and said it was gone. We all had a moment of silence for our dearly departed dishwasher…and then I got online to see how much a new one would cost. We had the new one installed that evening. Praise the Lord for tax refunds, and a very handy hubby! (I do not know where that gift wrap bow came from. Must be part of the fall out from my cleaning rampage.)

On Monday we (okay, Terry did it all, I just cheered him on!) got busy on another little nagging project. The photos below are of my bedroom. My closet is to the left, the master bath is to the right. In between them is this little, I don’t know, retreat or alcove, something. When we moved in 2 1/2 years ago, there was no carpeting here. We found some carpet scraps that almost fit, but we never tacked them down or anything.They just lay there, scooting around periodically and thereby having to be tugged back into position. We bought some sticky tile for our bathroom about a year ago and then decided to choose another pattern. The problem was that we couldn’t return the first tiles we selected because they were special ordered. So, for a year we’ve had this tile lying around. Finally, (DUH!) we realized we could put it on the bare spot in our bedroom and closet! (I know, at times we amaze even ourselves with our stupidity.)