Random on Purpose

Under the Wire

Good evening, all!  I'm heading for bed as soon as I get this post up, but didn't want to be too much of a slacker during National Blogging Month!  I know, I know...I missed a day...  Work issues and random house stuff (electrician visit, the ongoing saga of The Wall...) have kept me busy!  I started sewing at 6:00 this morning, and just came down from my workroom to post this - long day!  I did break for lunch and dinner and make a couple of phone calls, so it wasn't non-stop, but close enough to say so...

As a result, I don't have any finished crafty, fun stuff to share (yet), but here's a little preview of what I'm working on:

I hope it turns out kinda sorta close to what's in my head!  Maybe I'll get it finished tomorrow... 

Here's a tasty (literally!) tidbit for ya:  I am a fan of hot chocolate (Stephen's when I can find it, Nestle's otherwise), but love it more with a splash of flavored creamer in it.  I usually get French Vanilla, but International Delights came out with Caramel Macchiato.  Oh, yeah, it elevates a humble kid's drink to gourmet heights!  Dee-lish!

Okay, beddy-bye time for moi - g'night! 

Under Construction

Welcome to NOVEMBER!  Unbelievable that the year is so close to being over...  Did you know that November is National Blogging Month?  Yeah, me neither - I just read about it on my niece's blog - she had a link to a website for it and everything.  Obviously, I'm not motivated enough to add it here for you - it's NaBloMo or something like that if you want to Google it.  (Fascinating that "Google" is now a verb, eh?)

Anyway, I've been absent for a bit, and thought I'd better post something!  Today I just have some random Same Subject musings, and just general tidbits, I guess...  An alternate title for this post would be "I Really Should Be Working", but I've hit total burnout on my "job" and can't seem to motivate or care about doing it (the downside of working for yourself - no one looking over your shoulder to see if you're actually working...or is that an upside...?)  I started dismantling a cushion cover to use as a pattern for the new ones, and that's as far as I got.

Have you seen the "Makeover Realities" show where people are remodeling their house and things go horribly wrong?  We're living that on a not-quite-horrible scale over here...  I've been completely offline for three days because the room where the computer lives looks like this right now:

That is the backside of the bathroom wall (note the medicine cabinet in its stark whiteness).  We're building a new wall in this room - technically a bedroom - it will be our office/guest room when we're done.  The bathroom is claustrophobically small (I have to stand in the hallway to dry my hair because there's no room in the bathroom for me to bend over to flip my hair down to dry it, for example), so we planned to bump one wall back 18" into the adjoining bedroom, and I had a painting fiasco, which bumped the priority for this project to VERY VERY HIGH!  

Here's the scoop:  We were having guests for dinner last Saturday evening, and I thought it would be a good idea to paint the bathroom so it would be all pretty instead of all patchy from installing a new toilet and patching holes in the wall.  I went off to Home Depot to get paint and chose what I thought would be a deep sage green to match the shower curtain (poppies and leaves), and got the new paint-and-primer-in-one on the recommendation of the paint counter guy.  DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS AT HOME!  The paint literally slid off the wall, didn't cover well AT ALL, and was a horrible smashed-peas-baby-food green.  I told Sherry about it and she said "It can't be as bad as you say", so I sent her pics, to which she responded, "Oh, dear God!  Ok, ok - you win!"  Here is the evidence:

That second picture is after Greg tried to cover the horribleness with sheetrock mud - it just pulled more paint off the wall - perfect!  Yeah - on to Plan B, which is to texture the walls with new plaster, then paint a considerably more neutral color.  We decided that now would be a good time to bump the wall back, so we didn't have to texture the old wall, then do it again with the new one later on.  Since demolition makes considerable amounts of dust and mess, I moved the computer out of harm's way into our bedroom until the dust settled - literally!

Here's where the Same Subject theme comes in...  I've known for quite some time that I need to make a career change and I see warning signs of moving back into depression because I haven't done it yet (refer to the burnout comment earlier).  As I was going about the busy-ness (not to be confused with business, which is a whole different thing) of this morning, I kept seeing that partially framed wall and thought it a fitting metaphor for my life - it's Under Construction.  Just as this house will always have something else requiring time and attention and re-working, so will I.  Every time I think I'm at an Ending Point, I will realize that it's just the Beginning of the next thing.  That concept is even in a song: "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end..." (Closing Time, Semisonic)

Another tidbit on the Domino Effect:  I've been working in really poor lighting because a ceiling fan and its little bulbs don't really throw enough light across a wide enough area to do the job very well.  It's fine for ambience, but not for sewing and stamping and all.  I bought a couple of flourescent lights (yes, the ugly shop kind) to install so I could see what I was doing (not to worry - I do have a plan for camouflaging them into something pretty), but thought that I should paint the ceiling before I did that.  Then I realized that when I cut in the ceiling I would most likely get paint on the un-stripped wallpaper, thereby gluing it permanently to the wall.  Yup - I spent eight hours Saturday stripping the rest of the wallpaper, and two hours Sunday morning scrubbing off the glue residue.  The good news:  now I can start making that room pretty instead of just workable!

Just for fun, I'm sharing a couple of Halloween tidbits, too.  I was really short on time, but wanted to do something for the folks I work with/for, so I made witch hat treats that I saw somewhere out there on the Internet:

Bad pic, I know, but that's the best I could do before I had to run...  This is all you need to make them:

You just squeeze a little blob of icing onto the center of the cookie, then smoosh an unwrapped Hershey kiss into the icing.  The hardest part is unwrapping all of the kisses!  One package of cookies makes 40 hats, and I had kisses and icing left over...  I took them to the office of the parent company, Decor, and also to The Fabric Mill, where the girls were all dressed up for the occasion:

They were havin' a yabba-dabba-doo time, I'm tellin' ya!  Jackie was Betty, Della was Barney, Kim was Wilma, Keli was The Grand Poobah, and Cindy was Pebbles (isn't she the cutest?)  Here's the shot before this shot:

That's Holly disguised as Dino sniffin' around in the foreground.  She lives at Della's house, along with three other rescued chihuahuas (Holly is a mix and I don't remember where she was rescued from, Josie and Lola were puppy mill mommies, and Alfie is a neglected pup rescue).  Della refers to them collectively as "the Mexicans", and is goofy about them - totally attached and smitten and all... 

Well, I guess I've wasted as much time as I can on this blogging project, so I'd better actually go cut out the cushion covers or paint the ceiling or something...  I'm going to try to post every day this month for NaBloMo!  We'll see how that goes...  'Bye for now, and thanks for stopping by!
  
  
 

The Ugliest, Most Beautiful Thing

If you've been following my blog for a while, you already know my philosophy.  If you're just tuning in, here it is in a nutshell:  Your opinion of me is none of my business.  I'm not a particularly proud person, and this blog is to track my own life and progress.  If something I share here overlaps and/or helps someone else or sparks a thought that leads them to something useful, then hooray for us all.  To that end, the good, the bad, and the ugly all get equal time here.  I'm just Keeping It Real.

Since this house that we bought needs SO MUCH attention, and much of it must be done "before the snow flies", to quote a popular catch-phrase here in upstate New York, my upstairs, out-of-the-way crafting/sewing/working room is not priority on the Make It Pretty or even Get It Done list.  However, I did need a large worktable to facilitate making a living (working on the floor just wasn't cutting it - I'm getting too old for that...), so here it is:

What you're looking at is two adjustable sawhorses at 33" high, with 2"x6" boards screwed to them to support a 4' x 8' sheet of particle board, with an inexpensive "tile board" laying on top, which makes the table 36" high (same as a countertop).  I started to put fabric around the edge to cover the mess underneath (mostly materials for jobs), but only had enough to cover the side facing the door, so you don't see the mess walking into the room.  You can see some of the mess and one of the sawhorses in the second pic.

What else you're seeing is the partially-stripped wall.  That knee wall that the table dead-ends into took 5 1/2 hours to strip (three layers of wallpaper), and I kind of burned out on that particular joy, so I moved on to more visible projects like curtains for the living room.

When I pulled all my boxes and bins into play for World Card Making Day, there was very little rhyme, reason or order to where I put things, it was just OUT.  The clutter was making me claustrophobic and crazy, and ultimately less productive work-wise, so I took yesterday to impose a semblance of order on the chaos.  Here's the makeshift system for now:

This is the portion of the closet visible when the bifold doors are open.  What you're looking at here is two shelving units stacked on top of each other and housing my cardstock, embellishments and some tools.  To the left (farther inside the closet) are bolts of fabric, some batting and a shelf with pillow forms, trims and more fabric for various jobs.  I also have the ironing board, cutting board, and sewing machine in here.

The shelf inside the closet is created by the enclosure for these drawers:

The top drawer has sewing supplies (thread, shears, bobbins, Velcro, pins, zipper chain, etc.) and the rest have stamping/crafting tools and supplies - Cropodile, crimpers, brayers, embossing powders, chipboard, stickers, etc.  Here you REALLY see how hideous half-stripped, unpainted walls and trim can be!  On the other side of the door we have the most-used stuff:

Yup -the starving-student crate shelves!  (Hey, I told you I'm not proud - this is what I have to do right now...)  Mostly ink pads and stamps here.  Also Cuttlebug, paper trimmer, etc. Most of what I use every time I make anything gets grabbed from here and moved to the worktable like this:

What you see here is my large guillotine paper trimmer, Cuttlebug, stamping pad, small guillotine paper trimmer, stamp scrubber, acrylic blocks, and these:

 
Cuttlebug plates and folders, small drawer unit with adhesives, specialty pens (calligraphy, white gel pen, Stardust glitter pen, Write 'n Rub, blender, journaling, etc.) and small tools like stylus, sanding block, edge distresser, razor knife, etc.  The red caddy has scissors, tweezers, mat pack, Bow Easy, more adhesives, etc.  My beautifully filed and indexed patterned papers are in bins under the table.

I realize NONE of this is pretty, but I just need it to be accessible and serviceable for now, which it is.  I started making a card for the Featured Stamper challenge, but Greg wanted to go watch football OUT for a change, so I cleaned up and went with him.  Did you know it's about twelve billion percent faster and easier to clean up when everything has a place that it actually belongs?   Shocking, that!

I will, of course, share pretty pictures if/when this room does get the attention it needs and I get more permanent solutions for all the needs my job and hobbies require.  I do, in fact, already have the paint for this room - I just need to find the rest of the walls and finish patching them (that's why the walls look like chicken pox with calamine lotion where I did already strip them - spackle isn't pretty, but it's got to be done...)  I even have the fabric for the valance!  All in good time, my pretties!

Alright - enough blathering for one post!  Gonna go see how the current football game's going and how Greg's doing...  If I finish my card, I'll be back to post that, too!  G'night! 
 
 
 
 

Oops, I Did It Again...

No, I'm not Brittney Spears, and I'm not playing with your heart(!), but I did say I was gonna do something, and then not do it, and this isn't the first time - so sorry!  I mentioned that I had begun an experiment and that I would post the results over the weekend, but the weekend didn't quite go the way I'd planned...

Saturday ended up being a "house" day - rain gutters and window shades and I finally finished my curtains for the gigunda picture window (just the short privacy ones, not the long decorative panels for the sides),and so I couldn't finish the experiment then, and we'd already planned on doing this yesterday after our usual visit to Greg's parents:

After the benefit we went over to our friends' house to hang and it was too late (and I was too tired) to do anything but go to bed when we got home.  I didn't win any of the raffles at the benefit, but I did get a patch for my jacket and a sticker for my helmet:

I think the reason the "LOVE" is in quotes is because that was Brenda's middle name, so it has a double meaning.  It was an emotional day, and quite exhausting, but there's some closure.  We were talking to one of the guys who went up to the hospital right after they took Brenda there, and it was his opinion that she was pretty much gone on impact - felt no pain and all of that, so that was helpful information.  I got to meet her parents and her aunt and uncle, too - they came up from "Pennsyltucky" for the benefit - and it was great insight into where Brenda's openness and "I love everybody" nature came from.  Great people.  I don't know how many people were actually at the benefit, but they sold 2,000 advance tickets, and there was still a line out the door of people who were buying them there.  Standing in line for anything to eat or drink was a looooooong wait!  All the proceeds from the raffles, tickets, patches, shirts, stickers, etc., go to Brenda's boys (she has three, ages 10-18).

Greg is driving Chris' work truck now instead of the rusty beat-up van, and I rode with him in it yesterday for the first time.  Weirdness, for sure...   It has provided some humor, though.  I'm 5'6" and Greg's 5'9", and I think we're both at least several inches taller than Chris, and we're trying to figure out how Chris could see over the hood of this truck to drive!  Greg says Chris had the seat all the way back and all the way down, and so he had to move it up and forward to see out, and can't figure out how Chris was driving it the other way.  I was trying to figure out how he could climb in and out of the thing - even with the running boards it's tricky, at best!  We both had a good laugh about the whole thing, so that's good, right?  We can talk about him with humor and fondness and not so much with tears - progress... 

We're hopeful that the worst is behind us and that no more of our friends will die any time soon, and we're living our lives slightly differently now.  Things that we used to talk about in future tense are getting more priority and moving closer in timeframe.  Things that we feel strongly about are getting more time invested while petty time-wasting things are falling by the wayside.  We're quicker to tell those we care about that we do, in fact, care about them.  We're in each other's space more.  Little things that matter muchly...

I plan to carry on with the experiment later today, and I'll share that tonight or tomorrow, for sure!  Hope your week is starting off wonderfully, and thanks for stopping by!

Gonna Get Me Some Happy

Just a little heads-up for anyone still following here:  As soon as I find the charger for my camera I will charge the batteries and upload some pics to share, and I will be participating in World Card Making Day this Saturday, posting as I complete projects, so there will be some new things there, for sure!

My craft/sewing/workroom is VERY un-pretty, and not even remotely put together (as in everything is still in boxes, bags, and bins), but I plan to spread it all out anyway and PLAY!  Stay tuned for some FUN for a change! 

A little aside to those who've sent well-wishes and sympathy and all - thank you SO MUCH, and know that it did, in fact, help.  I'm on my way to "normal" (whatever that means) and plan to stay OUT of the doldrums for a long, long time!  We'll see if the powers that be will play along with that plan...

One More Update

One more "Chris" post, and then I'll move on...

In case you thought I was making it up that Chris was a "footprints in the heart" kind of guy, consider this: His calling hours were from 4:00 to 8:00 Thursday.  We got there just before 5:00, and there was a line out the door of the funeral home of people waiting to go in.  It took us over an hour to wend our way through the two rooms where they had pictures and videos of Chris and the receiving line of his family - brothers and sisters, wife, son, stepdaughter, parents.  When we came out, the line was twice as long as when we went in.

Every fire department in our county and the surrounding counties sent a contingent of firefighters in full dress uniform (white gloves and all) to pay their respects, as did every single ambulance unit.  People that he's done work for came, and all of his friends (many, many, many of those).  They had to have policemen directing traffic and stopping traffic for pedestrians to cross, because they had to use the parking lots of all of the surrounding businesses - the funeral home didn't have enough room for everybody.

I have never, ever seen that many people turn out to pay their respects to someone who wasn't famous.  It was incredible, and yet not surprising.  Chris just had that effect on people.  Never a harsh word for anyone, an open-door policy at his home, ready to help anyone who needed it.  At the services yesterday his best friend was speaking, and mentioned that several of Chris's friends actually moved to be closer to him (himself among them).

Greg and I are moving into acceptance.  Greg said the hardest part for him was seeing the obituary in the paper, and he sort of turned a corner after that.  He's pretending that Chris just moved away and is working at a different job, so he doesn't feel so awful when Chris doesn't show up to work with him.  He still has moments, though, and probably will for a while.  Example: yesterday he was dismantling the deck because the people who built it didn't do what needed to be done to control water, and there is significant rot where it ties into the house, including the sill and ledger board of the house itself.  As Greg was surveying the situation, he looked up at the sky and said, "Chris, what do I do?", then looked at me with a shrug and an expression like "...and so it begins"...

A lot of how this was affecting me tied into how it was affecting my husband, so as he gets more philosophical and accepting of this, it makes it easier for me to move into that frame of mind, as well.  Tears still come at random times, and there will be repercussions work-wise for some time, but we can talk about him with laughter and fondness, and that helps the healing...

Hey, Thanks...

Just a quick little post...

It's amazing how the smallest of things can help:  I was worrying somewhat that I would lose the few subscribers that I have because of all the boo-hooing lately, and lack of creative sharing (I did have one person un-sub, as a matter of fact), but had many reassurances via comments and emails that you all are hanging in there with me - thank you!

Today I went to my Feedblitz email folder to see whose updates I'd missed, and I have a new subscriber!  I'm always pleased to see someone else join us, but to have someone like what they see well enough to subscribe in spite of the downer turn lately, is really heart-warming!

The calling hours for Chris are this afternoon, and the services are tomorrow morning, so I had to get a sympathy card to take along.  That has to be THE hardest card purchase ever!  The one that said exactly what I wanted to say was all flowery and purple, and had the name of the person who wrote the sentiment plastered all over it, so I put it back in the rack.  I think I read every single non-religious sympathy card there (I'm not sure what Donna's affiliations and/or beliefs are and don't want to assume).  Do you know how hard it is to keep your composure while going through this process?  I was in a very crowded store and had all I could do to maintain before I reached the privacy of my car.

I asked Greg yesterday why it was so much harder losing Chris than it was losing my parents, and all we could come up with is that I knew for quite a while before my parents passed (my mother from leukemia, my father from complications of Alzheimer's) that it was coming, and with Chris it was so sudden and he was so young.  I almost feel guilty that this is the case, but there it is...

I asked Greg if he wanted me to clip Chris's obituary to save, and he said no - it was hard enough for him to see it in the paper the first time.  I figured that would be the case, but I had to ask... 

I don't know if this is what happens when any firefighter dies, but the fire department in the town where Chris died escorted him to the town line where they met the next fire department, and they joined in, and when they reached the next town line, that fire department joined in, and they went on that way all the way back to where Chris lived.  Pretty darn cool...

Okay - just wanted to point out a couple of bright moments in the bleak landscape - thanks again!  Gotta try to get some work done before Greg gets home to clean up for the calling hours...

For Real...

Well, I guess there's no hope that it's a prank now - this was in today's paper:

Christopher A. Olson

September 18, 2009 Christopher A. Olson, 40, of Clay, passed away Friday from injuries sustained in an ATV accident. Chris worked for Tom Albanese Const. He was a captain and an EMT with the Clay Vol. Fire Dept. and was a member of the Onon. Co. Dive Team. He was a former member of NAVAC. Chris was an avid hunter who loved camping, four-wheeling and spending time with family and friends. He was a devoted husband, and father to his beloved son, Nick. He is survived by his loving wife of five years, Donna M. (Stebbins) Olson; son, Nicholas Olson; step-daughter, Felicia Otts; parents, Arlene and Richard Olson and Violet Draves; brothers, Tom (Patricia) Olson, Fred (Tammy) Stuter and Jamie Salvage; sisters, Sue (Matt) McDonald, Laurie (Randy) Soeder, Jeanne Olson, Sherry (Brian) DeForest and Sharon Paninski; 13 nephews; nine nieces; and many close friends whom he considered family. Services will be 10 a.m. Friday at New Comer Funeral Home, 705 N. Main St., N. Syracuse. Burial will follow in Pine Plains Cemetery, Clay. Calling hours will be Thursday from 4 to 8 p.m. at the funeral home. Contributions in lieu of flowers may be made to the Nicholas Olson scholarship fund, c/o M&T Bank. To leave a special message for the family online, visit NewcomerSyracuse.com NewComer Funeral Home.

 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

We're still really struggling here...  Fine one minute, reeling the next...  I spent the day painting to help finish a job that Chris and Greg have been working on for several weeks - too weird,,,  Greg finds himself periodically reaching for his phone to call Chris to ask him where a tool is, or the best way to approach an aspect of the project, only to stop himself - "Who am I calling?" he asks himself.  It's reeeeaaally hard to stand by and watch my rock of a husband struggling to grasp this and to know how to move forward, especially since I'm struggling, too, and I only saw Chris several times a month, and not every day like Greg did... 

 

We're both trying to stay occupied so we get distracted, but this golf ball in my throat keeps showing up, and I have ZERO patience for the mundane details of my life - nothing really seems very important.  I'm washing clothes because we're out of clean ones, and I'm working because bills need to be paid, but underneath the going-though-the-motions, I'm pissed that the normal, daily stuff is still there requiring my attention.  I'm not returning phone calls or emails and I'm not caring that I'm not returning phone calls or emails and everything seems drearier and more boring than it did just four days ago.  All I can say is that Chris is/was one of those people that left footprints in your heart - he'll never, ever really be gone...

?!?!?!?!

I am shocked, stunned, appalled, devastated, and - surprisingly - pissed off!  This has to be the most whacked-out summer I've ever had.  The past two months were stressful in the extreme because of the whole house-buying/closing fiasco, but also because our friends keep dying...

First our friend Sam's wife passed, then Brenda was killed, then Wednesday we got the word that Greg's friend and former bandmate (Greg is a drummer, Tommy played bass) had succumbed to the cancer he's been battling for awhile.  All that was bad enough, but this morning Greg left fairly early to go to Home Depot to get some gutter for the roof, and called me:

"I have some bad news," he said.  "Chris is dead."  I thought it was a really bad prank that Chris put him up to, so I responded, "You lie!"  Greg said, "No, really - his brother Tom just called me..."  and then he went on to tell me that there was an ATV accident on Chris's annual camping trip with his buddies, and that Chris was killed.  WHAT???!!!  How is this possible?  He was just at our house a few days ago!  He works with Greg every day (or, at least, almost every day)!  We hang out with him and Donna...

I just can't get my head around this one - it's just too surreal and too raw.  It's been fascinating to watch myself be completely irrational - I'm pissed that he left us in the lurch - no friend, no co-worker, no cohort in crime.  I'm stunned that a 40 year-old scuba-diving, volunteer fire-fighting, fun-loving prankster is not invincible after all.  I selfishly wonder if Greg's boss will have to close his company because of the HUGE void left by Chris's passing, and even more selfishly wonder who is going to help us remodel parts of our new house.  I mean, we had PLANS, and they VERY MUCH included Chris!  I still keep thinking that it is, in fact, a really, really bad joke, and somebody will call us any minute to say "Gotcha!"  And yet...

Needless to say, I'm in another stall...so sorry...  Further bulletins as events warrant...

Hello...?

Just thought I'd check in and let you know that I'm closer to being able to get back to some semblance of normalcy...  All of my energies have been expended on less-than-exciting-but-still-necessary tasks like peeling wallpaper off of walls, painting and painting and painting and painting and cleaning and cleaning and cleaning and...

I'm reeeeeeallly hoping that by the end of the weekend I'll have "my" room put together enough to actually take my toys and things out of their boxes and put them where I can find - and use - them!  I've been keeping an eye on the Splitcoast challenges, and been MUCH dismayed that I can't play along - I've missed scraplings, and using red, and Soft Suede + Pretty in Pink, and other really fun things that are right up my alley!  PLUS - I needed two thank you cards and a sympathy card and had to BUY them - that's just wrong!!!

Work has been difficult, too, because I have no surfaces to work on.  I have a card table set up for the sewing machine, but I've had to use my cutting board on the floor to cut things out, and it's a lot harder and takes way more time than it should because it's so freakin' awkward!  Tomorrow I'm going to go get a big slab of laminate and a couple of shelving units or file cabinets or something for it to sit on so I can actually WORK!  (and play, of course...)

Greg's happy day was when we brought the dining table and chairs up into the dining room - he was REALLY tired of sitting at the counter (it's bar-height, and the stools the previous owner left behind are counter-height), with his chin in his plate and no room for his newspaper.  He said it made him feel like a little kid - and not in a good way!

My happy day is still in the future - when MY room is ready to roll!  There are still two layers of wallpaper on the walls, though...  Who papers over paper?  Do they know NOTHING?!  Oh well, all in time, right?  There are just too many things to do that are all priority - the kitchen HAD to get cleaned up and painted and stocked and all, and we can't bring the rest of the living room furniture up until I finish painting in there, and the bathroom was pretty darn skeevy, and the bedrooms - don't get me started!  Who lets their kids write all over the wallpaper and put stickers everywhere?  So trashy...

Anyway - that's the haps in my little corner of the world!  I have high hopes that next week I'll be able to do some creating - maybe even this weekend!  I've really missed it - and all of you...anyone still there?  If so, thanks for hangin' in there while I'm in flux!  Maybe I'll have to do some blog candy or something as a thank you of sorts!  Hmm... things to think about while I clean and paint...  Later, all!