Around our house...

Here are some lighter moments from life at our house in the past few weeks...

Barb is babysitting our niece. Her name is Avery, she's 2 and we are so glad we can help Rona and Mat out and at the same time get to enjoy Avery. Avery loves to play with buttons. Yesterday, she got up on the chair by the computer and began to play with the mouse. (We just got a new computer that runs on VISTA which just makes the story that much more interesting...) In just a matter of a few unsupervised minutes, she managed to change the orientation of the screen so that everything was turned on it's side. (Some call it landscape, but my mom reads this blog and so for her everything is just 'sideways'.) Barb didn't want to call and break the news over the phone so she waited until I walked into the house and let me discover this little surprise all by myself.

Here's the amazing thing about VISTA. A 2 year old can change the orientation of the display with a few clicks of the mouse, but it takes an adult who spends most of his day on a computer the better part of an hour to undo it. Actually it took Zack holding the monitor on it's side while I did 3 google searches to find the fix. Not surprisingly, you don't actually change the orientation through the monitor icon in control panel. You access it through sounds and something. Ahhh yes.... VISTA. Makes me wonder why I didn't buy a Mac....

Anyway, back to Avery. This morning we were giving a friend a ride to work. We went to her house to pick her up and then drove back past our house on the way into town. Our car is parked on the street and we noticed that the headlights were flashing. This caught my attention so I called Barb to ask her if she could see what was going on. My call went to voice mail and so I waited, knowing Barb would call back. Apparently Avery found more buttons, this time on the key fob for the car and she had pushed the panic button. Barb was hearing a horn sounding and couldn't figure out why someone's alarm was going off, until she realized that it was our car! When I called, she was looking for the keys...

Enough about Avery.... we were finishing off the painting project in our stairwell earlier this week when we ran out of paint. I picked up an old bucket with the code on top and went to the paint store. When I came back, the guy asked me why there was brown paint and green paint in the can. This was a good question because I had only painted with one color, which was supposed to be the color code on the lid of the can. He then broke the news to me that I had just finished painting my house with a 'mis-tint'. The color was supposed to be brown, but the tint was green.

The can that I took in was one that came from a friend who helped us choose our color. We used it for a first coat on a small wall. After the can was empty, we simply poured paint out of our contractor size pail into the small pail to make life easier. Hence the green paint in the brown paint can. The funny thing in all of this is that our friend who helped choose the color kept saying 'I'm surprised at how green it is...' and my mom who visited for a few days kept asking if we 'liked the color'. Now it may be that they were just commenting on the color or it may be that they were making subtle suggestions.

Either way, I was too busy painting to notice...