Waiting For Rick...

I told you that lately Rick has been getting off late. I hate it. So I have been cleaning, cooking, and doing anything I can to stay busy and not eat myself out of my wardrobe.

Last year we made this pallet Saguaro cactus for outside for Christmas. It has shotgun shell lights on it. We loved it, but over the summer in the Arizona heat it fell apart.

So this year Rick welded up a new one made of the scrap metal left over from the bookcase:

We used the same shotgun shell lights. It's ready to go for someday soon after Thanksgiving.

When I got the new light fixtures in the kitchen and dining room, the old fan looked pale and icky.

Dang gold crap left over from the old ladies who owned the house before us. I looked around for a new fan, but they were expensive and not much different than ours except for color. Our fans work great. They don't shimmy or wobble and never make weird clicking noises like some do.

So I decided to paint ours darker colors to match the lights.

It's actually harder than it looks. You have to wipe it all down, tape off the part next to the ceiling, take off the bowl shade and spray paint the gold nipple. Then the paint for the motor and light parts is oil base. That stuff makes you loopy and light headed and takes forever to dry. It gets all over your hands and has to be removed with mineral spirits. I found that using a foam brush works better than bristle because the paint is so thick the bristles get wonky and stick out and it is hard to be accurate.

The motor has to be painted top and bottom. Every thing needs two coats. Then the blades have to be painted top and bottom. I needed to kind of dry brush these so they looked like real wood instead of synthetic crap that they are. After three hours plus, I finally finished.

I opened the front door and windows and then the furnace came on, so I just closed it up and am getting high on the fumes. And getting a headache. But what the heck. It looks good.

Rick is supposed to be only an hour late. I'm going to make this yummy potato soup for dinner. I even copied a bunch of recipes from sheets I had run off from Pinterest onto recipe cards. My life is so organized I could cry.

Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy family time and eat til you waddle.