spring cleaning and the furminator

Dude, I can't seem to get my cruise pics uploaded in a timely manner! It's been over a month now! I need to get Day 5 up, St. Martin/Maarten, cause those are the most amazing pictures of all! Maybe I can work on that later today.

Well, here's what's been going on around here:

Our Memorial Day weekend was really exciting, let me tell ya! Guess what we did! We cleaned. LOL Brian shampooed the carpets - they look brand new, it's just amazing. And I cleaned out my file cabinets (I had stuff in there from like 1997 and before!), all of the bedroom closets, and the piano room. Brian cleaned out his computer junk. He had three iris carts (you know, those big stacks of plastic drawers on wheels) that he was able to condense down to one. I was amazed, proud, and thrilled! I love being organized!

I got the rest of the "larger" sized clothes out of my closet, made a huge trip to Goodwill, and hung some of the nice ones in the guest room to take to the consignment shop. I went through all those files, threw stuff away, shredded stuff, and just made a bunch of garbage. We have one of those huge trash cans that's about 4.5 feet tall, and we filled it up completely. When the garbage man came and emptied it, we filled it up again in one day! Whoa! That's a lot of cleaning!

There was a crappy file cabinet in the piano room that we put out on the curb for trash, and it was gone in an hour! LOL! Another's treasure and all that. I organized our closet in our bedroom and it looks amazing! We finally made use of our high ceilings and stored stuff all the way up to the top. We also put a bunch of winter stuff into huge Ziplock bags and took them to the attic. I put away a bunch of stuff that needed to be filed and organized some of my 4,000 piano books. Brian found an old broken computer and got it working. It was a crazy, busy, tiring weekend, but our house looks great. :-)

We also went and saw Pirates after church on Sunday. We had dinner at Logan's (my favorite) with Tim and Christi and then on to the movie. It was good, but a bit drawn out in parts. I dozed off a few times!

In other news, Sam the cat has been throwing up all over the house. It was getting so bad, I took him to the vet. She promptly told me we needed to brush him more, that the hairballs were causing the vomiting since it's that "shedding" time of year. Ugh. Sam HATES to be brushed. So I headed to Petsmart and bought The Furminator. Yeah. Go to that site and watch that video - that's EXACTLY what it looked like when we brushed Sam with it. The pile of hair was much bigger than Sam!! It was amazing, and there's been no vomit since, and also no hairballs lying around on our clean carpet! Yay! Of course, Sam scratched and bit us the whole time. But he's now half his previous size and he's all shiny and soft. We love it. (So does he, he just doesn't want to admit it.)

Last week I finished all my coursework for my Kindermusik license and faxed in my application. So I'll be a licensed KM educator any day now! Next week I'm meeting with a local dance studio to talk about teaching there. I'm hoping this will work out since they have lots of students there and we could draw from each others' client bases. It's an exciting time!

This past weekend, my friend Julie from Nashville came into town. We used to work together at Brentwood-Benson Music Publishing. It was so fun to hang out with her! We talked until my throat was sore! LOL Friday we went to Animal Kingdom and hung out in the rain. It was a fun time, even if we were soaked! The rest of the weekend, Brian and I literally did a whole lot of nothing. The band was off from church, so we didn't have to make the trek to Winter Haven, and we were able to rest and relax and spend some time together. I even did some scrapbooking! First time in months.

OK, well, that's all I can think of to say. The summer heat is rolling in, along with the horrid humidity, and I just dread it. Counting down to October!! :-P