Productive Day

The kids and I had a particularly productive afternoon yesterday. Well, to be strictly accurate, I had a productive afternoon, while the kidlings did their best to make more work for me. Oh well, c'est la vie, non?

The first part of the big job was completely changing the layout of the living room. Everything was where we put it when we moved in, and, while it worked okay, I had been thinking about how to make it work better for us. Yesterday was the day for making the changes.

For those of you that have seen our living room, this is what we did. If you haven't seen it, feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph! The entertainment center was moved to the other corner (at the other side of the sliding glass doors. The rocker/recliner went where the entertainment center used to be. The big white cabinet was moved over next the barrister bookcase (which stayed put, as did the piano). Then the sofa was moved so its back is facing the dining area. The little stuff (which has been pretty mobile all along) was put where it fit.

One result of the chaos was that I finally got a couple of things done that will be very useful. The picture at the left is pretty boring, but has a point. Two, actually. First, we finally put the outdoor thermometer out doors instead of on the shelf next to the base. I just tucked it between our storage bin on the back deck and the sliding glass door. While not ideal from a meteorological stand point (yes, I'm a freak that thinks about these things) it won't be visible to passers-by and will give us at least an idea of what to expect when we open the door! The second thing was that I investigated and discovered that there was enough give in the sliding glass door weather stripping to feed our Sirius antenna through, so we don't have to put it outside every time we want to listen and leave the sliding glass door ajar (pretty chilly this time of year). I got it situated and then put the antenna on top of the stuff in the storage bin and locked the cover. It still gets a strong signal through the cover, but is tucked away safe and sound!

The inspiration for all of this chaos was getting the our beautiful el-cheapo Target Christmas tree out. I have been bending branches around and things are looking better, but I swear, it looked like the tree Charlie Brown found when we first set it up! We haven't found our ornaments yet. They are buried deep in our rental storage thingy and probably won't be seen until spring, but the tree is pre-lit, so it looks okay anyway. Needless to say, Bug is absolutely enchanted with the tree! Since we can't find our auto-timer either, I had to unplug it before we went to bed and Bug pitched a huge fit! We finally convinced him that it needed to sleep, too, and got him upstairs. First thing this morning, he made a bee-line downstairs and plugged it back in!