Time for some general updates from the Gignacery!

We made it through Week 1 of Band Camp. Seriously, as I mentioned in my July wrap-up, band camp is insane here. It’s band camp with a capital BC. This week was just a bit over 40 hours of practice, including one day that involved three sessions between 8am and 8:30 pm, for a total of ten hours in a single day. Sheesh. And on top of all the hours, we had to go pay $350 in fees yesterday just for Morrigan to be in band. What happened to the concept of free public school? Not here. Here it’s all about Winning.

The other two boys finished up with summer school. So they at least get a few weeks off.

Construction went slow because our contractor was very sick for most of the week. He only got in one good work day. He still believes he’ll be able to finish by the 9th, but I have a feeling there’s going to be stuff left to do when he leaves. Since he’ll be gone for several weeks, we aren’t just going to wait until he can finish. We’ll just do the rest ourselves. There’s nothing else in this process that we can’t do. We have plenty of practice fixing up houses by now! Completed this week: drywall up; kitchen ceiling up; the rest of the kitchen demolition (pulling down the rest of the cabinets/countertops); upstairs bathroom demolition (toilet removal and the rest of the tile removal); bathroom floor sealed with waterproof sealant; kitchen cabinets about 75% installed; countertops ordered. [Note: a big chunk of this done by Jason and the boys.]

There was, of course, the incident yesterday when Jason was hanging cabinets and slipped off the stepladder. His knee went through the top of our glass-top stove. Thankfully he wasn’t hurt, not even a scratch! Unfortunately, the stove didn’t fare so well, and we had to scramble to figure out what to do next. Sigh.

In my personal world, I’ve been a bit up and down this week. There was the funeral on Monday of course, and then fretting about the state of our house and me not being able to leave/run errands/pretty much anything during the day since I had to be home for whenever our contractor could come over. Also, still adjusting medication, so I was prone to bouts of depression or panic. In the second half of the week, I did manage to start exercising again, which helped. We’ve had a few highly unusual cool mornings (70 degrees instead of 80) and I took advantage of that with some long walks. That didn’t help the overall chaos and emotion-explosion, but at least I wasn’t antsy on top of it all, right? Unfortunately, after a month of respite, insomnia has reared its ugly head in the worst way again. And still no word from the sleep center people about a possible APAP.

Yesterday was a big day for us, too. We had a large family party to celebrate two things. First, my grandfather is turning 90! Second, my grandparents are celebrating their 65th wedding anniversary. Despite everyone flying in for the funeral less than a week ago, we were all back for this grand celebration. A big giant family reunion to celebrate something lovely this time. It was really nice. There were some family members I hadn’t seen in almost a decade, and the decorations were lovely, and one guest (a professional photographer) set up an area to take group shots. It was a big whirlwind of a day, but lovely in every respect. A good note to end this week.