We wanted to do a full main floor reno where we ripped down the two kitchen walls, redid the flooring, changed the paint colour, and installed a new ceiling with pot lights after some structural work we wanted done (even though a few contractors said wasn’t necessary).

In the end the quotes we got were too high, so we decided to do the flooring and painting ourselves. This is how it’s going.

So, the floors are ripped up in the foyer, around the basement stairs, the living room and the dining room. The last part of that puzzle is the kitchen since we’re redoing that floor space as well. There are a few things to address there: where to store the fridge and stove while we do the kitchen flooring and how do we move them without ruining any of the new flooring in the process.

I’m a bit nervous just thinking about that part. Eek.

I have all of the main painting done. I have to paint all the floor and window trim boards, and then we can put the paint and rollers back in the garage where they belong and start playing the tile puzzle game with our furniture and belongings from corner to corner until the new flooring is all installed. Someone other than me wants this project done by the end of this long weekend. Wish us luck!

We’ve decided to bite the bullet and find a contractor to rip up our main floor in the hopes of taking down two small walls that form our current tiny kitchen, scrape our popcorn ceilings, lay down some new flooring, and give us a kitchen island and some companion cupboards, a new electrical panel and a level floor. Tall order, I know.

Still waiting on the second quote. Let’s hope it’s not as shocking as the first one. We live in a townhouse, a garden home. The quote was missing stuff and was for, after taxes, just over $100K.

LOL. Hahaha — no.

The second contractor asked me what finishes I was thinking about, and honestly I had no clear vision at that point, but that was a week ago. A lot of inspiration (and Pinspiration) has been happening since. The husband and I have different tastes in a lot of things, but I think I lucked out and found something even he likes enough to pay for.

*fingers crossed*

Day off today. All I wanted was to make some jammy bars for the husband. That’s all. I swear! *sigh* But, what I got instead was a lot of grief. Grief from the new fridge, and from the oven. Have a look: First up, we have the fridge which decided to puke out the door shelves and their contents all over the floor, but more importantly on top of my two toes. See the big bottles? They hit straight down on my big toe and its sidekick, my Morton toe, on my left foot. I thought for sure they were broken from the amount of pain, but they aren’t even achy or bruised anymore. My toes are in tact.

So, that happened when I was reaching in for the blueberry jam I was going to lay down as the middle layer of my jammy bars. I cleaned up this mess after I put the bars in the oven.

And that brings me to my next kitchen mishap:

Never in my life have I ever burned food like this that I can recall. These bars are burned from the top all the way down to the bottom of the base layer. Wow.

The oven was so hot when I reached it, it had already turned itself off to prevent a fire from starting inside its cavity.

I assume I was so distracted by the shelves and their contents falling out of the fridge onto my foot that I hit the broiler button instead of the bake button on the stove when I reached over to preheat the oven right before I dumped and smoothed the jam layer out, and continued on with the crumble topping.

I didn’t even noticed the oven temp was too hot. I was upstairs organizing a load of laundry when I smelt a burning fumes smell (I thought my husband had burned some pizza cheese in my oven again the other night as I cursed him while running down the stairs as the smoke alarm screeched out my open patio screen door.)

It was bad. Really bad. Worse than I thought it would be. I couldn’t open the oven for an hour after turning it off and letting it cool down, all the while running the range hood vent at full blast. And the smell took hours more with the front door open, too, to create some kind of cross wind to air out the house.

This is what I was faced with after I was finally able to pull the jammy bars out.

I just left them on top of the stove and turned out the kitchen light. The kitchen officially closed in the middle of the day. There would be nothing else happening in there today. I was over the urge to do some baking and cooking today, my only day off this week.

Ugh. I should’ve stayed in bed.

(I’m not really sure how I feel about this cartoon.)

So… A lot’s happened. A lot. In just the last week, but more or less it’s been happening before our eyes while we day slept. COVID-19 is real, and it’s here. It’s not showing any signs of going away any time soon, or playing nice (much to the chagrin of many of certain gender, age and generation).

A lot has changed. Daily when I get into work, I’m like a captain of a Star Trek ship asking for the status update and damage report. New policies are being introduced every day. Things are fluid; subject to change mid shift as head office fires off another email to all the locations to implement.

We’re confused, the customers are confused, and generally it’s just all around confusing. For about a day. Humans are, thankfully, adaptable. Some people are willful and refuse change, and others need a lot of time to get used to changes. We get it.

But, we all need to work together in this little corner of our world in order to survive. We need to pull together, now more than ever, to survive this pandemic with as many as we can save.

I dislike the term Social Distancing. I much prefer Personal Safety Space. It’s more accurate in terms for what we’re trying to do – save persons, or rather ensure everyone’s personal safety is respected and maintained for the time they are in our store getting their food supplies.

All we ask is customers do their bit like we do ours when we show up for work every day. Those who continue to push back won’t like being forced to walk away from their groceries and leave the store when they only think about themselves. We haven’t done that yet… But, I feel it wouldn’t be out of the question in the very near future.

Customers, by and large, have been great about helping us to help them in light of the pandemic announcement over a week ago, but I can already see the honeymoon phase has worn off of people who hate being inconvenienced. Hence the push back I have gotten in the last day.

Like I said, welcome to the new normal. Yours, ours, and mine. (Note the order. I’m always going to put others’ needs ahead of mine at work.)

This time last year (give or take six weeks), I turned the big 5-0. So far it’s been great. I feel better and better each year I grow into my skin, but one thing that changed that I really want to find a way to change back is the ability to wear earrings.

In a former life, I made jewellery. I still own a lot of the custom pieces I couldn’t bear to sell in my personal collection, but in the last few years, I have noticed I can’t wear earrings anymore. It’s too painful – no matter what metal the hook or stud is made with. I can get the earrings in, but immediately the searing pain starts. The longest I have been able to keep earrings in has been an hour, and that’s after a week of working my ear lobes up to that amount of time.

*whimpering*

I really want to wear earrings again. I’m not sure if I need to pay someone to pierce my ear lobes in the same place the holes are located now, or give up forever. In the end, I have a feeling I might have to bite the bullet and convert all of my earrings over to clip-ons like a blue hair granny.

*more whimpering*

The best part of Fall, for me, is PSLs (Pumpkin Spice Lattes). I really love them. Call me a basic bish all you want; it’s a badge I wear with care. I don’t go crazy and burn PSL candles or anything, but you will find me constantly thinking about a lovely PSL, pumpkin spice infused teas, pumpkin glazed scones, and even baking pumpkin pie tortes around this time of the year.

It’s a huge distraction for me. 😀

For most of those things, I make my own syrup. This PSL syrup.

Enjoy!

PUBLIC SERVICE POST

This is an extreme topic that needs to be discussed because every year we hear about at least one, if not up to a few dozen cases, where a parent who doesn’t normally have their baby in the car as they go to work and needed to be dropped out at a daycare ends up forgetting that child in the backseat as, typically, the temperatures soar. You can imagine what the outcome is. It’s all so sad.

Here is a fantastic thread discussion from Coffee With Julie with some some suggestions for parents tasked with driving with their babies in their car. BTW, if you think this only happens to parents on sweltering hot days, you’re sadly mistaken. It happens all the time – we just don’t hear about it unless the cops and blistering heat is involved, or the child dies.

Read this post, and I ask that you all pass it along to other parents. This is so very important. As a non-mom, I take this seriously enough to talk to all of you about this situation. And if we’re all discussing it enough, we’re bound to find a way to help prevent it from continuing to happen as commutes to work to get more and more distracting, and we try to multitask on the ride in to get a jump on the day’s workload using our smart phones, or as we drift away in a daydream as we drive in autopilot mode and the child is sound asleep. Out of sight, out of mind.

I hate to stat it that way, but I have forgotten valuable stuff in cars and on city buses as I tune the world out, deep in thought, and barely realise I’m about to miss my stop so I jump up and take off, never giving much thought to what I had in my hands, or didn’t, until it was way too late. I once left my full coffee travel mug on the counter at the convenience store beside my old apartment building on the way to work one morning, and hilariously and fortunately, it was sitting exactly where I left it when I ran into the store at 10:30 pm in a panic when that realisation hit me after a long and busy day. The clerk didn’t bother to move it for other customers. He knew I’d come back, but not when. (He was such a kind soul. I really miss not seeing him every day since we moved away.)