The last few weeks have been rather sucky and stressful for various reasons, but I have managed to get some enjoyable things done (as well as some things that weren’t exactly fun, but have been bugging me for ages and now they’re done and I’m all happy about it).

Take, for example, these two end tables. Nothing wrong with them, just your basic solid wood tables from the unfinished wood furniture store. Except that they were never actually, you know, finished. They had been in this state for years, the wood was getting banged up and discolored from spills and water rings, and I declared that they would not be entering the new house in their current state.

Enter an unexpected day off, and we now have two finished end tables! I’ve never done this before, and it definitely falls into the “time consuming and a lot of work, but not hard” category. I used water-based stain. While it’s lower odor, it is a bit challenging to worth with because it dries so fast, and you have to quickly clean it out of the various joints and crevices in the wood so you don’t get obvious dark areas. I used two coats of stain (a mix of oak and walnut) and two coats of polyurethane, letting the poly dry for 24 hours between applications and sanding between coats.

The tables even found time for a round of golf in the yard this afternoon.

Let’s see. I got in my last round of dyeing before the move, and tie-dyed Griff 5 shirts for the summer. I’m pretty happy with the results, but when I do this again I need to use some thickening agent in the dyes to help stop the bleeding between colors.

All the craft bloggers are doing this, so I jumped on the decoupaged wooden letters bandwagon (I used scrapbook paper). These will go in Griff’s new room after we move.

Speaking of the little man, here he is, sweeping the floor in his wizard hat. I have no explanation.

I’m very slowly knitting myself a pair of socks. I haven’t knitted socks in a couple years, and I just grabbed an old ball of Opal from the bottom of my stash, cast on 80 stitches on size 1s (I’m a tight knitter), and I’m cranking out a basic top-down sock.

One of the great things about Durham is the parks. Just when you think you’ve already been to all the great playgrounds, you find another one. We stopped at Burch Avenue Park on a whim this weekend, and Griff totally loved it. Some kids are obsessed with trains; Griff is obsessed with school buses.

Daddy got in on the action for a minute or so before being summarily kicked out.

The other play equipment was pretty impressive, but Griff was not interested.

Griff was totally content to spend nearly the entire time climbing around the bus (until we realized that he had a giant poop in his diaper, and also it was time to leave to go grocery shopping, and there was some crying and wailing). But here’s a happy picture to end with.

The End.