Take Care of Yourself

Remember when I said ugly tile isn't even a blip on the radar of things that can happen in your life? I thought I had a blip in my life recently. Like a good little girl I went in for my yearly checkup (only 3 months late) which included going in for a mammogram on a Wednesday. The following Monday (last Monday) the nurse from the doctor's office called to tell me I needed to go back for another one. Apparently my girls make up for their small size by being made up of dense tissue and sometimes it makes it hard to read the x-ray. So...back I went the next day for a "left special view mammogram" and didn't really think much more about it until two days later when I brought in the mail after work and had a postal slip telling me I had a certified letter from outpatient radiology I'd need to pick up the next day from the post office. Dean said, "it's all the privacy stuff now. They just had to send the results that way." But I knew there was no way a certified letter from radiology could be good news. And I had to wait until the next day to even read it.

Even though the nurse had told me the first mammogram just needed to be repeated to get a better view (I had no lumps, no family history and no reason to suspect any problems) it was amazing to me how quickly just the remote possibility that there could be a problem scared the bejeezus out of me. My brain tried to tell me everything would be fine but I couldn't get my brain to override the fear I was feeling. I'm telling myself it's nothing, don't worry til I have something to worry about, but my hands are shaking, my stomach clenches and my arms and hands feel like ice. My thoughts were all over the place. Here's a small sample:

Dang! This'll give me some blog fodder.
Hey, what about that on-line health test I took? I'm supposed to live to be 102!
I need to see Emerson get married.
I'll have them cut it off. It's small. I won't miss it.
"Lost" is starting and has 3 years left. I need to see it all.
What about the last Diana Gabaldon book? How will I know what happens to Jamie & Claire?
Man, I better show Dean where everything in the filing cabinet is and tell him how to clean the cat litter box.
I'll be in the same group with Elizabeth Edwards, Sheryl Crow and Olivia Newton John.
This is ridiculous.
Not fair.
I'm healthy. I'm not overweight. I don't smoke. I exercise.
I'm being stupid.
Quit worrying.

You get the idea. Finally Friday morning Dean picked up the certified letter for me and I was so freaked out by then I couldn't read it closely. When I called the radiology dept. they explained to me that the letter said basically what the nurse had told me. I needed to come back for a special view mammogram which I'd already done and my doctor should have the results already. I then called the doctor to get my test results but nobody called me back. I called again Tuesday and nobody called me back. I finally heard this yesterday morning that everything is fine. Phew!

Yes, I am the queen of worry and maybe I over-reacted but all the worry convinced me I was being completely stupid by not doing my own monthly breast exam. So I've turned over a new leaf and will now make that part of my life as well as eating more fruits and vegetables. I found a good site with a diagram of breast self-exam and I'm adding the link here. To all my women friends and family----if you've been like me and figured once/year at the doctor was good enough please read the info. and make a monthly self breast exam part of your life. Any guys who may read this---ask your wives and girlfriends to do the same.

http://www.cancer.org/docroot/CRI/content/CRI_2_6x_How_to_perform_a_breast_self_exam_5.asp◦

Take Care of Yourself

Colder Than A Well Digger's Boots

I began my Martin Luther King holiday by having to set my alarm so I could be at the dentist by 8:00 a.m. this morning. Our dentist likes us to make our appts. one year in advance. I don't think in one-year-ahead terms and last year I just took my little reminder slip and left. It wasn't until last week I realized what I'd done and I can guarantee you I did not do it again this morning. When I made next year's appt. I made sure it was not on the third Monday in January.

It's bad enough to spend one hour of your day off in a dentist chair but it also happened to be the coldest day of the year--so far. It was minus 8 when I left the house and I could hear the snow crunching under the tires as I drove down the street. It's now 3:00 p.m. and it's still minus 2. I don't think we're going to reach our predicted high of four degrees.

The dental exam and cleaning went well and I even found out that the aching in my jaw, which began sometime in the late fall, is probably caused by me grinding my teeth or clenching my jaw while I sleep. I can't imagine what kind of stress would have caused me to do that... I asked Dean if he'd ever heard me grinding during the night because the dental assistant told me her husband tells her when she's been grinding her teeth, but he said no. I guess he couldn't hear me over his snoring.

I could have had some nifty kind of mouth thingy made to wear while I sleep. Apparently it would let my teeth slide right off each other while I grind them instead of catching on the molar bumps, but I'm kinda hopin' it'll just quit on its own now that all stress in my life has been alleviated by the completion of the kitchen. Until Dean decides to paint, glaze or etch the tiles anyway...

We used part of our 3-day weekend to complete one more step in the kitchen remodeling by finally oiling the soapstone. I loved it before it was oiled and I love it even more now. It's awesome. I highly recommend soapstone counters to anybody who intends to torture themselves with a kitchen remodeling. They are easy to care for, impervious to stains, you can put hot things on them and they are beautiful.

Otherwise I've spent the weekend baking scottish morning rolls, bran muffins and orange rolls and quilting my little heart out. Dean has spent this weekend plus dozens and dozens of other hours sorting through a huge box of thousands of stamps that he and Leslie found at a garage sale two years ago. They just know there is one stamp in that box that will make them both rich. All they have to do is find it. I find it interesting that if I spend an inordinately large amount of time on anything I am "obsessed", but Dean is "just trying to get this done."

Here's a look a the newly oiled counters. Click on the slide show title to bring up the larger slide show and pay attention to the tile as you view. Feel free to offer any additional thoughts, revise your opinion, or offer any new suggestions. Okay....maybe I am a little obsessive....

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Colder Than A Well Digger's Boots

Cast Your Vote

Two more votes to leave the tile as it is. Please cast your vote either on the blog or via e-mail to me. And be honest.

Maybe Dean and I are just too dang picky. At this point we are taking a step back to think long and hard about it. I think we should paint the walls, stain the woodwork and then look again. All opinions expressed are appreciated.◦

Cast Your Vote

Rethinking

We just had four fiends over for an after-ski dinner and every one of them thought the tile looked fine. They thought we had intentionally created some texture underneath to go with the ceramic tiles. So...........now we're rethinking painting it. Well, I am anyway. I think we'll sit on it for a few weeks and get more opinions before we jump into anything. It IS nice to know others think it looks good. It's just that we know how it was supposed to look (or at least how we thought it would) so I suppose it makes it seem much worse to us.◦

Rethinking

A lesson learned

In the interest of complete honesty and my lack of pride I now am here to reveal our big mistake. If you are going to tile with glass tiles, do your research and don't trust the people you purchase the tile from (albeit friendly, seemingly helpful women) to tell you what you need to know. If you are going to tile with glass tile....................use the correct mastik. Do not use the regular adhesive used with ceramic tiles. You must use a special white mastik. Otherwise, your seemingly beautiful tiles will deteriorate as the week wears on and the mastik dries and seven days later they will look like this.



Yes, tilechick, you were awesome, I, however, screwed up. I didn't do enough research and now I'm paying the price. If I could figure out how to get the light to shine on the tiles in just the right way so they always looked irridescent there would be no problem, but since I can't, each day has made it harder and harder to even look at them.

So...............now we have ANOTHER plan. My thought was first to somehow pull the tiles off, wash them, put the correct mastik on and re-tile. However, after doing some more research (duh) on the internet, I discovered that's pretty much impossible unless I want to also replace the drywall--which I definitely don't. And anyway, how would I chip out the tiles mixed in with the ceramic tiles above the sink? Dean told me he also had a plan, and this morning I finally asked him for it. I figured his first thought would be to paint some kind of decorative design on the tiles. Imagine my surprise when HIS plan was MY plan. However, by then I had done my research and I knew that wasn't feasible. It just seemed like a disaster waiting to happen. Dean's research told him we'd have a "fair" chance of getting the tiles off without damaging the drywall. "Fair" isn't good enough for me.

By the time I heard Dean's plan, I had a new plan. We'll paint the tiles. Yup, spend $4.49 per tile for glass tiles and then paint them. But it's either that or feel your heart sink to your stomach every time you walk into the kitchen. I knew it could be done because I'd seen it once on a home improvement show.

So we made a trip to Home Depot this morning to read their books. Dean immediately noticed there are no longer benches by the books. I figured maybe it's because they want us to buy them, not read them. We managed to make ourselves comfortable anyway and it didn't take long to discover there's really nothing in the books that tells you how. One book said you could do it but not how to do it. So, then it was a trip to Sherwin Williams where another helpful guy told us the primer is what makes the difference and showed us which primer would work on glass tiles. He even told us to buff the tiles with sandpaper or steel wool first. Once that's finished it's just a matter of painting 95 tiles with the paint of our choice without getting a drop on the grout. Easy, right? Paintguy recommended enamel paint because it would clean the easiest. So now we have paint chips and will, at some point, try and match the paint to the color of the glass tile and instead of having glass, irridescent tiles, we will have smooth, shiny, enamel-painted tiles. Hell, that's life. It could be worse. Abby could have been eaten by some carnivorous bug in Costa Rica but I had an e-mail from her this morning and all's well. Of all the things that can happen in a lifetime to cause a person grief or pain, this really isn't even a blip on the radar.

If any of you who happen to read this have any tips for us before we begin this next new adventure, please don't hesitate to pass them on.

Oh, and Dean will be doing the painting. Just a few tiles at a time. He is much more meticulous than me and he is definitely more patient. I know he's really thrilled to have another project but at least it involves paint so maybe he can pretend like it's "art." :-)◦

A lesson learned

We have tile!

"Tilechick", aka my sister, Trinity, drove from Omaha to the great city of Casper on Thursday to help us tile the backsplash. I can only surmise that she couldn't think of a way to renege on her earlier promise to help us and the poor thing felt obligated to follow through. Or maybe she just wanted to experience the gale-force winds which were howling through Casper. Whatever the reason, we are grateful because we have a tiled backsplash now!! I think she sensed my fear and trepidation to begin because she didn't hesitate to get the show on the road Friday morning as she slapped that first tile on the wall. Once we got going and I got the routine down, it actually progressed very smoothly. We tiled from 8:17 a.m. Friday morning until about 6 p.m. Friday night with a short lunch break.

Believe it or not, we did not break one single tile. And even though we made some plan changes during the middle of the tiling, we ended up with 4 whole glass tiles left. Course there's a box an a half of the ceramic tile and an extra container of grout but better too much than too little is my motto.

I thought Dean would be spending the day tapping his foot, hovering over us and getting bored waiting for us to call upon him to cut a tile. As it turned out, the poor guy was constantly running back and forth from the kitchen to the garage, from the garage to the kitchen, back to the garage, then the kitchen....cutting tile after tile. And he was literally running sometimes. I could tell he was getting tired as the day wore on because every now and then I'd hear him trip on the stair as he was running in from the garage with the latest tile in his hand. He survived the project with all his fingers in tact and only one small cut on his thumb from a shard of glass. By the time he even realized he'd cut it, he'd left a trail of blood from the kichen, down the hall, to the garage.

Saturday was grout day and as you will see from the photos it's messy. I discovered I'm just as big a pig with grout as I am with paint although I somehow managed not to cover the bottom of my feet with it. Sunday all we had to do was give the tile one more wash, put all the switch plates back on, put everything away and admire our handiwork. Woo hoo! Now there is "only" painting the walls and staining the woodwork left.

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We have tile!