Morning.

I can't believe how productive we were yesterday for having a slow lazy Saturday. Somehow it kept that feeling to it all day long, even though we went shopping, planted a garden and spring-cleaned the kitchen. Incredible.

I guess I should mention that our "garden" consists of eleven pepper plants (yellow bell, cayenne and jalapeno) and two tomato plants (super fantastic and roma). Plus we moved our garlic outside, too.. it had kind of taken over the tiny pot I stuck it in to begin with. I really don't have the patience for root vegetables, though. Is garlic really a vegetable? Hmm.. Anyway, I've wanted to dig them up (even knowing that the garlic growing period is long) since they started sprouting to see how things are going. Magnus assures me that this is a Bad Thing to do to a plant. :) I wish I'd brought home a few onion sets when we had them at the store.. I sold the last of them Friday.

I'm extremely pleased about the kitchen. It's really needed cleaned for a very long time.. for some unknown reason, we don't have a range hood thingie, and the fan we have in the ceiling really just doesn't do well. So naturally, that means that our kitchen gets covered in a greasy paste (splattered oil covered in dust) after a very short time. It didn't do that when we first moved in.. I suppose I should stop cooking again. :) I also cleaned the windows, inside and out. I had an extremely unenthusiastic helper throughout this process. I mentioned the other night that my aunt had her cleaning lady and her sister help her do her spring cleaning. The two of them worked one morning, cleaned three bedrooms top to bottom in that major cleaning way, and charged $110. I told Magnus that I would pay $110 to get that sort of clean house.. really just five rooms that need done, and they're much smaller than my aunt's rooms. He looked at me like I was crazy and said that he wouldn't dream of paying that much money for someone to clean the house. I said "Excellent! Then you'll help me do it then!" Now whether or not that's why he helped me is questionable, but I suspect he'll stay out of the next conversation of that type as much as possible. :)

I bought a pack of plastic page protectors at WalMart yesterday and have now completed my contact pages project. It looks very good. Magnus and I had a very long conversation while standing at the rack choosing which to buy. There were three weights available.. economy, standard and extra-good. (Can't remember what the best one was called.) The economy one looked horrible, so I was leaning towards the slightly more expensive standard. (There was approximately a dollar's difference in price between the first two, and a little more to go with the extra-good.) Magnus looks at me like I'm crazy when I pick up the package. He was arguing that there was no point in buying anything less than the best for this, the price difference wasn't extreme, and why would I even consider buying the standard pages?! I was more than a little confused, and was pointing out that these pages aren't even printed at a high quality, I wasn't going for a super-polished look, although I didn't really want to go for the lowest quality, since they were somewhat opaque. He got very agitated when I mentioned buying the cheapest ones, and at this point, I felt like I had stepped into the twilight zone. From his expression, he thought I was a suitable candidate for the loony bin as well. We debated this hotly for several minutes, when suddenly we realized that we were talking about two very different things. I wanted contact sheet pages, he thought I was buying them for my scrapbooking project. *giggle* It was just so funny since we were carrying on for so long with no clue what it was we were arguing about. ;)

I'm reminding myself of the world's most boring blog here, so off I go to look for something to play with in Photoshop. :)

Sunday babblings.

My husband tricked me. He decided he would just build his own mandolins instead of buying them all the time. Except.. now he keeps spending money on this building project! He's about to place an order for $90 to finish up the first one. (These are from-scratch and not from-kits, if you know anything about homemade instruments, which I don't, really, but that sounded all in-the-know, didn't it?) Anyway. Actually, the pieces are coming together now, as he suggested out of the blue this afternoon that we buy a new printer. This is remarkably unlike him, as we're both rather stingy people. We even went out to WalMart to see if there was anything special out there. (Nope. Though we almost bought one out of sheer impulsiveness.) I guess he was feeling guilty in advance.

Oh! But M finally finally found my power cord for the scanner! No typo on the finallys, it's just been ages since I've had it. Well, since we got the new desks. It was troublesome, too, because I finished a tatted bookmark for paradisecowgirl and couldn't scan it before I sent it off to her, and I also couldn't whine about it because she couldn't read it. ;) I did take some pictures, though, so I can still add it to my tatty blog. When I get around to it. I'm such a procrastinator. Now that I'm into pictures again, I've thought of several things that should be scanned. I realized today that our scanner is the oldest functioning piece of equipment in this room that has three complete computer systems. Except for the keyboard that goes to the pretentiously-named server.. and the only reason for that is that Magnus took the Swedish natural keyboard that was on it to work, thus causing me to bring out the broken keyboard that came with my first computer. Not that this piece of information is worth anything to anyone. The scanner does reasonable quality for its age, and actually, the updated drivers for Win2000 makes it a better scanner than when I bought it in 98. It would freeze my computer during the entire scanning process, which sucked, as it's slow, and also, it would make this constant buzzing sound. But if we replace it, I'd rather like one that scans negatives as well as prints. I think that'd be neat.

We've been whiny all day. It's not like there's anything wrong.. actually, we've had a pretty good day and a very nice weekend. Magnus has been busy doing paperwork type things, which has made him bored and restless, and I've been.. well, myself. *grin* I did have a lot of fun finishing layout number six.. it was of the mudparty we had in Stockholm the summer I was there. The powers of the mud (except one) all got together and had a weekend worth of fun and drama. I was the only female, which made things a little odd now and then, but we did have two Brits and one Dutch guy, so at least they all stuck to English better than usual. :) Oh, and Adam screams like a girl. *laugh* I really am going to have to get some sort of theme or something going.. I'm still just doing pages based on whatever picture looks like fun at the time. It's very.. varied.

M's birthday is on Wednesday. He's already got his big present, but I need to think of something smallish to wrap up for the big day. He's already ruined one of his small surprises, though I can't write about it yet, cause I'm not going to tell him what he's ruined (and how) til Wednesday. I went looking for something last week and completely couldn't find it. Oh, crap. Our chiropractor visit (including a massage for me afterwards) is on Wednesday. Argh. I'm already wishing it was the weekend again.