Look who's back!

This guy.

Leading to a standoff:

The Return of Sassypants

Apparently hibernation is over and large rodents have a hankering for our chicken feed:

Thomas's Library

Here we are nearing the final stages of revamping Thomas's room.  Finally we have painted enough blue to cover that old lime green and that other color we uncovered, a color that has no name and has surely never appeared anywhere else on this planet ever before.

Much better.  What you can't see in this photo is that pulling those shelves away from around the door left raw plaster where baseboards and wood trim should be.  So I had to make yet ANOTHER trip to Home Depot and rig something together.

And now the shelves get assembled.  Enough jokes about how impossible assembling IKEA furniture is so I will set those aside and simply join the chorus and say, "IVAR ain't fun."

I took pictures of Thomas's shelves before I took them apart so I could put them together exactly the same.  Then, somehow, an extra shelf load of Wii games magically appeared while I was putting together the shelves and shot that plan to shit.  Isn't that always the way.

Nearly done now.  And I left Thomas with two empty shelves for some of the stuff he is bringing home from Chicago next month.

Here is a new shelf to hold the books that used to be on two of the purple shelves that go taken down.  (And where are those shelves?  Who put them up into what bedroom in this town?  I hope the room is lime green so they fit in.)  Note, too, how I made sure that there are three empty shelves for all of Thomas's millions of cds, which go everywhere with him--back and forth to Chicago, on a 9500 mile trek around the country.  He will be buried with those cds!

And now the second new shelf set (and which completes Thomas's current library), which now holds books that were in the built-in green shelf thing (which also go snapped up by someone!).

Now I just have to finish a few more coats of paint on the doors with windows (painting around the 15 little glass panes is 15 big pains) and hang up some curtains over the balcony door to keep out the elements.  (As the weather warmed I wondered if that was really necessary but the recent ice storm blew right into Thomas's room so, yeah, the door needs some serious sealing/insulation attention.

Not the Easter Bunny

Yesterday I discovered the hens' secret stash of eggs.  I THOUGHT they hadn't been delivering as many recently...

...or maybe not funny...

Yesterday it HAILED

...and today we woke up to this:

It's funny because it's true

Dam busting

Exciting times on the Flint River:

Repainting Thomas's Green Room pt. 2

Now all the holes are patched and there is a lot of plastic hung up to cover the doors and ceiling fan blades.

Simon gets to do the fun part, painting the walls with the new color.  I bought the most expensive paint at Home Depot (living still in 1990, I assumed the paint would cost about $9 a gallon--try $45 a gallon!) and was cheered by the idea that this particular brand/type is guaranteed to come with primer in it, as well as mildewcide AND maximum "hide" which I now know means that it will cover up dark paint in one coat!  Then I picked out my color and the woman working there said, "This is guaranteed to cover in one coat--except this color."  So, thinking of that puke brown/green, I got two gallons.  Then, while I was waiting for the paint to mix the guy behind me bought the same paint--in light dove gray--and then she said, "Oh, it's not guaranteed to be one coat for that color, either."  Are ANY of the colors truly one coat?

Sylvester puts on his work pants and sets to helping.

So far so good...

All the stuff on Thomas's shelves got moved to his blue room.  He can't come home for a few days, at least as there is not one spare inch for him in either of his rooms.

See?  No room for Thomases.