It�s Friday and let me tell you how happy that makes me.

Happy Happy Joy Joy�

The bummer of this weekend is that My Darling must work all weekend, 12 hour shifts, beginning before the sun comes up and ending just before dinner. This means he will be tired and slightly grumpy at the end of the day. I will try and plan nice dinners and select an action movie so that he can stay awake and enjoy the evening.

The upside is a gluttonous amount of me time. I will need to accomplish a certain amount of chores and of course I will take my weekend naps which will diminish the time a little but still I will have a ridiculous amount of time to myself. My darling was kind enough to finish reading the last Potter book before this weekend so I can promise you that there will be serious reading being done during part of the weekend.

One of the local towns near me is having a Street Festival which isn�t the type I normally attend (I prefer the Juried Art type) but it�s a shop/farmers market/crafty thing so I�m sure I�ll enjoy it for a little while. I will be joining one of my work friends for the morning. If I get bored I can always beg off using the pregnancy excuse. I will miss that. Then again once I am no longer pregnant I will have the baby excuse (I�m sorry but I have to go he�s getting fussy). I have never been one to stick around at a function once I�m tired of it. One of the reasons I rarely agree to �carpool� to an event is because I learned pretty young that people are not always considerate of you when they have control over the means of your escape. Also consideration requires you to be indulgent of the driver�s desires to a further extent than you might want. I will arrange to meet her there I think.

My thank you cards are on their way (Yay!) I forced myself to sit down and write them out last night; stayed up past my bedtime just to get it done.

This weekend�s chores include packing up the baby gifts (except for the few duplicates that will be returned and the few newborn outfits I am certain my ogre of a baby won�t fit into. This will be followed by tidying up the living room and cleaning my bathroom. I already cleaned the patio and gave the grill a good scrubbing last weekend. I can�t tell you how much I am looking forward to having a house to work on. The yard is so big and the portion fenced in for the garden is big enough to grow most of the vegetables I like. I think there is a tree that needs trimming nearby the better to allow the sun into the space but I will want to leave some of the garden shaded for the more delicate vegetables. The back deck is pretty sizable; although it needs work I think it will last for at least a few more years if we can get it cleaned up and re-stained. The secret to longevity in the northeast is protective coatings (polyurethane is my friend).

The winters bring the wet and the cold and if you don�t keep out the wet then the cold will freeze the water which will then tear apart anything that the water has seeped into, wood, concrete, whatever. That�s one of the reasons why the roads are so torn up in the Snow Belt. Actually dirt roads are pretty durable in that type of weather since the dirt simply moves back into the holes created by ice and snow after it melts. The mud isn�t great but the roads are graded with enough gravel to drain the worst of the wet away, even in the rainy season.

I will also sit in the sun for a while this weekend. I have that on the chore list so I don�t forget, not because I view it as a chore. I simply miss the sun so much and although I will be careful and wear sun screen I think I would benefit a great deal from a little sun therapy. Yes, Me, Potter and the sun, it just doesn�t get much better than that.

Have a lovely weekend duckies.

I wish you Peace

~alison~

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