I just thought I would say hi.

Lately I've been involved with "Craft for a Cause for Christ," a group of women at church that meets twice a month to knit, crochet, sew or whatever, in order to make things for an orphanage in Russia, Crisis Pregnancy Center, Chemo-Caps for a hospital and whatever else we can think of. Most of these women are extremely productive. I just keep chugging along. I finally have a cute baby hat finished but booties are driving me nuts. Getting the right pattern, crochet hook size and yarn combination is part of it; getting my hands to do what I need is the other thing.

We’ve been in the muddle of bathroom things again, this time the downstairs bath, so this past Tuesday I didn’t even try to go (beyond getting my purse ready to leave.) Instead, I went to Home Depot to buy more stuff to wire new outlets and lights in the bathroom. The tub was to go in on Thursday; the Sheetrock was scheduled to be hung today, Friday. I didn't have a choice - unless I didn't care if the electrical was finished in the bathroom.

Thursday was a sleep-doc appointment and we ended up at the Tigard Lowe's. After much too long, we picked out the lights and the adjustable switches for the lights over the sink and bathtub. After a long ride home (why do they call sitting still on a freeway "rush" hour?

Today, (Friday), the Sheetrock was hung. It is interesting to have a bunch of Hispanic guys, who were excellent workers by the way, doing what has needed doing for a long time. After one of them hung it in the bathroom and another worked on our bedroom ceiling, they all came back to tape. They asked if it would be alright if they could eat lunch in our bedroom. I said ‘yes,’ so they sat on the floor lined up against the wall, chattering and eating things that smelled delicious. All but one were related and they had another brother who has a food trailer where they bought lunch.

In the meantime, Andrea came over with the boys to pick me up to assist her on errands. I was still putting plastic over the hung clothes in the closet, so I wasn’t ready to leave for a bit. After checking out the progress, she went downstairs to take care of Christian and Brandon stayed upstairs with me in the closet. Normally, he cannot be easily contained but the semi-empty closet entertained him for quite some time. He enjoyed opening and closing the bi-fold closet door to peek at the crew. They enjoyed him, too, They decided that Brandon’s jabbering and sputtering was Spanish, not English, because they ‘knew’ he was saying grandma and grandpa in Spanish.

They were impressed with Christian, too. He is a , sweet baby - almost four months old already and hasn't stopped growing.

We now have the ceiling in our bedroom sheetrocked. We remodeled in 1987 but when I said I really wanted to raise the 7’2” ceiling while everything else was torn apart but I couldn’t make the right person see the need. He only did what he wanted to do. He was several inches shorter than Bob and didn't comprehend the problem. Instead, part – the new part – got sheetrock, the rest was left with the original ceiling - those little square accoustic tiles that never were set quite straight that glared down at me when I was in bed.

Right now, it is all smooth – and blended together. Quarter-inch sheetrock over the top of everything is just right. We knew there was blown-in insulation that would drop all over if we removed the ceiling tile. Keeping the tiles mean that there is more insulation, too.

Now, to get to bed - almost on the floor. The room is empty, the bed taken apart so we're kind-of camping. We could have camped downstairs, but the 'working' bathroom is upstairs. The floor is covered with heavy paper and is quite noisy so I put down as many little rugs as I could. We'll see how the night goes. They will be back in the morning to work on it so it needed to be kept simple for the night.