Our living room is finished!

With our painting for our living room being finished now and hung up, it's really motived me to finish painting the living room and the kitchen. I've been wanting to paint the big wall in the living room red and make that our "accent" wall (haven't I been watching my HGTV??!!). I never had the guts to do it (must be that conservative side of me), but my mom came over and said she had a surprise for me. She came over with a gallon of red paint that was given to her. It was a tomato red color and I thought, "Well, that's not going to work." The red that we needed was a deep, purplier red. Mom said all we have to do is pick out the color we want it and take it to Dunn Edwards and they would recolor it for us. Isn't that cool? I didn't even know they could, let alone would, do that! Mom just thought, we've got this Dunn Edwards paint, it's not the right color, there's no reason they couldn't change it for us. I would have never thought of it!


So mom and I got out my many different paint samples and picked out the perfect one: Ralph Lauren's Venetian Red. We took our paint, our color sample, and went to Dunn Edwards. When we got there, an older man help us. He explained that they could try to match our color, but because of the colors already in the tomato red, it wouldn't be exact. Mom just explained that we weren't asking for miracles, just a color close to the one we wanted. He came back and we were so thrilled with the color. He probably thought we were such lunatics since we were so excited about a paint color. But to us, it was taking a gallon of paint that was just on hand and probably wasn't going to be used and changing to a color to finish our living room-all for FREE!


My wonderful mother who hath no fear of paint nor color thought of this. I just can't believe how perfect it turned out. It really pulls the room together and makes the painting and furniture pop against the wall. We just love it. Thanks, Mom!!!!!

So...we have a bug problem.

About a month ago, I finally called the bugman out to the house. We'd been seeing more and more bugs since it's been getting warmer and when we got back from vacation, it was out of control. I would find spiders, crickets, silverfish and earwicks everyday! And by my standards, anything more than one is way too many! We were told that we needed to keep having it sprayed during the winter even though there were no bugs because it would help keep them down when it was bug season (and especially because we live right next to a wash), but who really wants to spend money to have bugs killed? Even more, who wants to spend the money when the bugs aren't even there?

Well, boy, did we learn our lesson! The bugman came and and sprayed, but it hardly made a dent. Every night, we would still hear crickets and our cats would sit staring at the dishwasher (the bugs would come in through the plumbing). And in the morning, our precious cats would leave us presents all over the house. For whatever reason, I thought that cats would eat crickets. But nooo, our precious kitties would just play with them and pull off their legs off, leaving dismembered cricket bodies and legs all over. If I would walk around the house without shoes on, I risked stepping on a cricket leg! Ugh...!

Well, I ended up having the bugman out again last week. The owner showed up and did a really great job and our problem seems to be under control. So learn from us, trust the bugman, he knows what he's talking about!

A dismembered cricket-notice the missing back, right leg...

The missing leg...found across the kitchen. Gross!

One up...one down!

Eric finished his OBGYN rotation last week. He's already done! It was definitely a tough one, though. Eric is glad, however, that he had his first rotation in a hospital setting. He will now be prepared for his surgical rotation next month. Just knowing what he's supposed to do in the hospital, how to work the computer systems and how to get through an on-call night will be a big help for this future rotations.
This month, Eric is doing his family practice rotation. It's so cool that Eric knows what he likes about each rotation and what he doesn't like. With OBGYN, he didn't like the on-call nights. He liked delivering babies, but knew that it wasn't for him. Now with family practice, he can tell already that it's too slow paced for him. Also, he can tell that he wants to specialize in an area. Instead of having to know about everything but not really be able to do much, he'd rather be the expert in a certain area.
This rotation is going to be much easier than the last as well. It's still about the same commute, but there is no on-call nights and if there are no patients, Eric gets to go home! Oh, and there is no shelf exam at the end (the standardized exam the students take after each rotation). So he should have one easy month!