Friday night Jim and I celebrated our 14th Anniversary by going out to dinner at McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood and Steaks. We ordered the Bacon Wrapped Pepperjack Cheese Shrimp appetizer, and for my dinner I ordered the Filet Mignon with Stuffed Shrimp and Jim ordered the Seafood Trio with Grilled Shrimp, Stuffed Shrimp and Grilled Salmon. I have to say that my cut of meat was THE most tender piece of Filet I have EVER eaten. It was melt-in-your-mouth tender. The stuffing for the stuffed shrimp was less than desirable- very blah and mushy and I almost think they forgot to add the seasonings or something? Who knows. It was still a good dinner and a good ‘date’ out of the house.
We made it back home before 8:00, decided to stop at Redbox and rent a few movies for the kids for the weekend, and we also picked up a dozen donuts for breakfast the next day. Actually, Jim and I agreed to eat a donut for “dessert” since we were too full at McCormick’s to order anything there! Ha!
We all watched Pitch Perfect- a so-so movie, not nearly as funny as the previews looked and incredibly predictable.
The next morning we rolled out of bed around 7-something and ate our donuts and drank coffee and got ready to go to karate. My mom ended up joining us to watch the girls. Back at home we relaxed a bit (Trevor stayed home and was watching Diary of a Wimpy Kid and we all got caught up in one of the scenes and ended up watching the rest of it).
Oh wait, we did try helping the girls with their karate forms, having them do some of the skills drills at home, showing them how it’s supposed to be done. Well, holding your knee out to the side above “belt height” and doing leg kicks for 45 seconds ain’t easy. In fact, it kind of hurts. (And the day after- it hurts even more!). I think ALL of us doing karate might be a beneficial move!
I digress. It’s Saturday and 11am. Jim and I needed to finish the playroom floor. We got the transition piece in place which took a couple hours because we needed to trim back the carpet PERFECTLY and cut all the snap pieces and transition pieces and quarter round and wall trim (which involved going up into the attic to find the right style of trim, etc. etc.) But we can now say the playroom is DONE.
And that funny edge where the carpet meets the floor meets the transition piece and the wall trim was too high? I had to custom cut (sand) the quarter round to fit just right:
After that was done we decided to tackle our master closet. We had purchased some shelves over a year ago and never fully finished the installation. Our options were to A) hang them up in the closet as originally intended, B) store them up in the attic until some other time or C) get rid of them. So it was option A. Do something with them!
The extra slatted-shelf we hung above the door for some bonus storage space.
You can see that we still need to put in a door jamb for our closet door! ha! Here’s a better view of how this shelf looks in the room. I promise you it’s actually straight:
We also had some extra shelves for our closet organizer that we purchased on clearance (they were $9.99 each, reguarly around $40 each!) but they were the top pieces not the adjustable shelves so we had to modify them to make them work where we wanted.
The result? I now have a second set of shelves above my dresser! This means my dresses hang quite a bit lower, but that’s OK. It’s not like I wear a lot of dresses anyway, the one long dress that I have I just folded over and draped like a pair of pants. I could also move that shelf up higher if I really needed the dress hanging space.
Now I can showcase my boots better!
OK, here’s a before before (when we first installed this back in 2011):
And here’s my side of the closet today:
It took us about six hours to wrap up all those projects and get everything cleaned up and put away.
We ordered pizza for dinner (Papa John’s does a 50% off promotion code on Blazer game days “BLAZER50”). After dinner and clean-up we sat down to watch the movie “ParaNorman” (not recommended).
Sunday morning we slept in until almost 9:00! Holy cow! A kick back and relax day was in store. I painted the girls’ nails (teal green with pink sparkles- that would be toes and fingertips!), recolored Riley’s hair streak (now it’s royal blue instead of aqua green).
Laundry, house-cleaning, the usual. We had to run out to Tursi’s Soccer to get Riley’s new jersey (her first game is Saturday!). Made a pit stop at the Recycling Depot, a quick grocery trip to Albertsons. Dropped Trevor off at a friend’s house then came back home and the 4 of us watched a few episodes of Wicked Tuna and Pit Master and Riley has now decided that she wants to learn to BBQ and become a Pit Master herself, and maybe have her dad as her assistant…and maybe win a Pit Master championship as a teenager. (I haven’t looked to see if that’s even possible). She asked to look at our Treager recipe books so she can learn how to cook ribs, then asked Jim what recipe he follows and he told her there’s a couple that he uses, so she’s been busy copying those recipes onto notebook paper to keep for herself.
She asks questions, Jim explains the answer…. love it! We’ll see how this progresses……
Oh, I forgot to add the little things- like Jim fixing both toilets (they’ve been leaking from the tank into the bowl, causing the toilets to run every 5 or so minutes), and one of our toilets also wasn’t flushing properly consistently. He also fixed a slow drain in his bathroom sink, cleaned the garage, started filling his organizing containers with loose nuts and screws and such. I took a bunch of unused shelves out of the playroom to put up in the attic and cleared out a couple more baby toys.
That wraps up our weekend, more or less.
Elisa's Ramblings 
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