My bathroom ceiling is still peeling and nasty looking. I haven't gone out and bought any paint remover or even scraped that much more. I thought about getting a ventilation fan for the room, but thinking is as far as that went. It's looking more and more disgusting as the days, weeks, months, years pass, and it nags me to no end. It's not like a person can avoid her own bathroom. That's not the biggest priority on my list, believe it or not.

Right now, I think my main focus really needs to be the dining room table. I don't mean to get all the junk off of it either, although that needs to be done too. That's needs to be done every single day though, so I don't qualify that as a project. The project is the tile. I broke the tile out of one side of the table nine months ago, and I still haven't re-tiled it. I decided what I wanted to do, but it was more involved than I should have made it. Ironically, this is what I said about this project when I started thinking about it:

Knowing myself, I also need to make sure I don't take on a project that's too involved, or we'll be eating off a particle board inset table until I give up and buy a new one.

I know myself all too well. I haven't given up to buy a new table, and I don't plan to do that either. I'm going to finish this project if I'm 84 when it's done. It's not killing anyone to be eating off the particle board insert. I cover it with a table cloth.

Next, there's the mirror in my living room. I never got the hardware to hang it. It still sits on top the entertainment center, threatening my treasured dove and everything else that sits up there. Actually, it doesn't do so much threatening. I tested it to see what I would have to do to make it slip. So far, the only thing that makes that thing move is for me to grab both sides of it and pull. Jumping around, banging into the entertainment center, dusting, big trucks driving by, nothing makes that thing budge. I think I'm pretty safe, so I don't know that I'll ever be buying hardware to hang it. That's just a hassle.

Unlike the mirror, the basement will never resolve itself. It will be a forever project, I think. I make progress, then slide back. I get rid of things only to end up with a pinball machine in my basement, and then another. I have probably thrown out a truckload of stuff. No lie. But there is still way too much stuff down there. When the VA inspector came to evaluate the house, he told us we could be millionaires if we sold all that junk. He said he'd never seen so much stuff. Now, I do find that hard to believe, but when a total stranger makes a comment like that, it means something to me. I really must renew my commitment to dig out of there. December 26th, I'll start my declutter list again, and we'll see if I can't make some real, lasting progress down there.

I'm not even going to talk about my garden. I mostly let it go this year. I planted a few annuals and bulbs. I thought about a vegetable garden. I planted the hydrangeas. I took a few pictures, but I didn't do any real work. I barely weeded. Maybe next year.

There are a couple projects I barely, if at all, mentioned here as well. The painting of my living room is one, and the scraping of paint off the front porch and steps is another. I intended to address those, even took pictures of them, but I never got around to it. I don't think I'll be doing it now either. I might need a subject for tomorrow.

I could start on the list of things I want to do, projects stewing in my head. That would take forever though, and I need to think about those things as little as possible, so I don't go starting something else to leave incomplete. I vowed not to start anything new until the table is tiled. The living room is next, then the bathroom. I'll work the basement in between those, since it's one of those long-term things. Maybe in another year, I can actually talk about some of the things I finished.