My Nuttso Crazy Week!

Generally speaking you can just look at our kitchen and see how our week went......

THIS IS HOW OUR WEEK WENT AT THE BUIE'S ZOO.

I actually said the phrase to B today: "I don't think our kitchen is safe for our animals." So the cats went up while we cleaned. We were afraid they would eat moldy food or drink dirty water. Gross, right? Am I embarrassed to show you this pictures? Not really. Because everyone reading this blog has had a week like this. A week where you throw in the towel and just say "I'll do it later." It might not have shown up in your kitchen but believe me, it shows up somewhere.

So this is how my week went:

8 am to noon - Monday through Thursday I filled in out my old job which involves a 25 minute drive to Little Rock everyday.

noon to 1 - drive BACK to Benton, eat a quick lunch, perhaps run a quick errand

1 to 2 pm - drive to Bryant to take care of my pups I pet sit for on a daily basis. Meet Foxy & Gloria. :) Cute, huh?

2:30 to 4:30 pm- drive BACK to Little Rock (for the second time in one day) for a chiropractic appointment. I have pinched yet another nerve and have been going to the chiro and physical therapy everyday.

Every evening this week I had something different planned: a photo shoot, serving dinner under the Broadway Bridge at Eikon, and sorting items for a garage sale.

Friday I didn't work for my old job but I DID have to go to Little Rock for a chiro appt and to drop Hazel off at the vet. Found out that Hazel has a cold but the good news is my back is a little better after a week of therapy. Friday afternoon B & I loaded up BOTH of our vehicles and drove to Maumelle to my brother's house. We set up for our garage sale and priced everything piece by piece. We finished about midnight, went to sleep, woke up five hours later to begin our garage sale.

Landon at the garage sale.

Whew... Are you tired yet? Cuz I sure am. And I'm not even done yet.

We left Maumelle around noon, drove to Rison to celebrate my mother in law's birthday with B's family where I proceeded to fall asleep on the couch (and snore) through the last half of the game out of pure exhaustion.

Mrs. Carole (my wonderful mother in law) holding her new Vera Bradley bag.

But I made it through this week. Barely.

Hopefully next week will be a little more normal and I can catch up on some blogging. I still haven't told you about my 10 year high school reunion that I went to last weekend or given you an update on the Buie's newest addition: Charlie. Stay tuned for blogging in the near future! Hope y'all have a great week and are enjoying this Fall weather!

Win Big with your old trophies

If you're like me, you're taking advantage of this unseasonably nice July weather and doing some summer cleaning! Our garage has been a challenge ever since we moved in about three months ago. Everything that didn't have a certain place in our new home got shoved out to the garage. However, I would really like to use the garage for what it's for: storing our vehicles. So far, we have been parking our cars in the driveway and using our garage as a storage room, a very large and very hot storage room.

While cleaning our garage we have found some interesting things from my great grandmother's dishes to childhood furniture. I still have the dresser that was in my nursery and I plan to use it in our children's nursery one day. (NO, I'm not pregnant!)

When I came across these old trophies, I stopped, reminisced for a while, thinking back about when, where, and how I received each other of them. Most of them were from swim team. I think anyone who was on the swim team received one because I know I didn't win that many races. :)Another one was for "most improved student" that year. I remember struggling with classes, whether it was because of lack of discipline or just a pure hatred for homework I'm not sure, but apparently I figured out how to study enough to "improve"- of course, I'm really not sure how much studying is required in elementary school...maybe they just felt sorry for me because I didn't win any other academic awards and this was all they could come up with. Quite possible.

Anyway, I did a google search on "what to do with old trophies" and came across this article from Planet Green, "Where to donate old trophies." This article gives several options of where to send your trophies to be recycled and reused instead of sitting on a shelf or in a box collecting dust. This is definitely the path I will choose- donating.

I encourage you to clean out YOUR garage and when you DO, don't just toss what you don't want. Take the time to recycle, donate or reuse what you already have. Before I donate my childhood trophies, I might even take pictures of each of them and write a short memory about each one. That way the MEMORY is not lost but I will have more room in my garage. One day when my kids get a trophy and ask, "Mom, did YOU ever receive a trophy?"(I mean, like that SO hard to believe) I can pull out my pictures and my memories I wrote down.

So, let's recap: old memories are not lost, more room in garage, and trophy is being used for a good purpose. Everyone wins here!

Have you recycled anything cool lately? or perhaps you found something in your garage or attic that you found a new purpose for... this is also I popular form of recycling.

PURGE is the word of the weekend!

Buie and I are STILL going through our house sorting our "stuff." And if I've said it once I've said it a MILLION times! WE HAVE SO MUCH STUFF!!! There are boxes and bags and baskets and Rubbermaid bins FULL of just stuff stuff STUFF! I know it will only get worse before it gets better but I thought I was past that point already. I think there are things growing in our walls and reproducing while we sleep. I have given 6 bags of clothes to Goodwill and I still don't have enough hangers to hang all of my clothes on my side of the closet (NOT that my clothes are EVER all clean at the same time.) There are mounds of laundry, boxes of unwanted dishes and kitchen odds and ends, and practically a whole room full of "I don't know what to do with this." How do people do it? How do people combine two lives into one, sort through twenty to thirty years of memories and decide what to save and what to keep without going insane! And not to mention still keep up a house, two cats, a dog and a full-time job! LIFE IS FUN!

So....PURGE is the word of the weekend.

I have asked myself...waaaay too many times..."Do I need this? Do I use this? Have I EVER used this? Chances are the answer is NO. For some reason when my grandmother moved out of her house this year I brought it upon myself to keep all (and I do mean ALL) of her kitchen utensils, as if by keeping her kitchen utensils would somehow keep her house alive in my memory. Perhaps it would help but the greatest gift, my grandmother gave me was her hutch. I love it! I decided that the hutch was beautiful enough a piece to capture every memory of her house I ever needed...therefore, I purge. I never knew how many strainers I had...nor how many my grandmother had for that matter. I mean, who needs a white strainer and a red one and an orange one? I kept the orange one, by the way...and YES, I use it! :)

So....I continue to PURGE. Please pray for my sanity and I search for serenity in this condo. I know it's in here somewhere...

Cleaning Day

Well, not only have the Buies been working hard on our home, but we also established that Brent and I, are, in fact, Monica and Chandler. (although I will add that I am not NEAR as "anal" as Monica is.)

We got back from church, ate a bite to eat and started cleaning. The whole time Buie is cracking jokes, singing and dancing. Yes, he was dancing. I know it's hard to imagine. His mindset was to have fun with this so called "cleaning day." My mindset on the other hand was ... don't mess around. We only have so much time to get this all done.

You see with our different schedules it is very rare that Buie and I have an afternoon or evening off together. And if we do it's NEVER on the weekend together. He is always working on the weekend. So I wanted to seize this opportunity of togetherness and get it all done together. Needless to say, I was NOT singing and dancing. ha!

I think the moment it hit me that I was, in fact, Monica, was when I started to vacuum my vacuum cleaner. If you are a FRIENDS fan you know exactly what episode I am talking about. Monica finishes vacuuming, takes out a smaller hand held vacuum and vacuums her big vacuum with her smaller one.

In my case though I actually used the hose attachment. (much more efficient, I think.)

We laughed about it, and when we were finished cleaning we sat down and watched a few episodes of FRIENDS. When it's all said and done, next time I think I'll be a little more like Chandler and a little less like Monica on cleaning day.

If you'll recall what our place used to look like...

Here's what it looks like after many many hours of cleaning yesterday.