Well, Thanksgiving’s done, so that’s good. It’s been a crazy month, as usual, culminating in me learning a bit of wisdom I thought I’d share with all of you:

DON’T HIRE PEOPLE BASED UPON FACEBOOK INFO.

Just don’t. It’s not great.

How do I know this? Well, I just did, and it turned out....well...okay. Not great, but not completely horrible.

We have these Saltillo-looking concrete tiles throughout the house, and they are stained and dirty as all heck. So we’ve been waiting to strip and re-seal them, but the chemicals are too caustic with my asthma for me to do it, it’s too much work for just my husband, and the quotes we got we astronomical when we first moved in here. So we thought it was just a project for the future.

I mean, I’ve scrubbed and scrubbed, but all the crap was sealed in by some idiot before, who didn’t bother to actually clean or strip the floor before putting the sealant on, so yeah. Nothing we can do.

Last week, this guy posted all these pretty pictures of his tile/stone/brick restoration work, so I thought I’d message him to get a quote. He came out and gave us one, and it was pretty reasonable, so I told him we’d get in touch in the spring, as it was still enough money that we needed to save up a bit. Well, he messaged us back and said he didn’t have a job this weekend, and he’d rather work, so he’d give us a substantial discount if we wanted to go ahead and do it now (it ended up being a 25% discount, which is huge). So we said okay.

He originally thought it would take three days, then said two, then said maybe even one.

Yeah, nope. It took all of three and would’ve taken longer had my husband not helped him.

Late. Every. Time. Also, tried to seal up the floor on the first day without waiting for the stripper to work so the entire floor looked like it had a sunburn and was peeling. Also, obviously didn’t understand how stripper works, so my husband had to explain that a grinder wasn’t going to do it; he needed to scrape off the junk. Also, didn’t have a scraper, so he used ours. And my husband had to go point out all the bubbling because the guy was just going to seal it in.

Also, kept needing money to buy more stripper and also pay his rent. Finally had to say no more until he was done.

Yesterday, we were finally finished and he just left after getting the money, leaving equipment in my garage and a sealed floor that does look better in some areas, but definitely looks worse in places. All in all, could’ve skipped it entirely and not spent the money.

Oh, well. I will publicly take the blame for this one.

And now you can all learn this lesson without having to pay for it, the way I just did. Just, don’t do it. Go by word of mouth or the Better Business Bureau, or a friend of your cousin’s or whatever. But not the Facebook. Ugh.

Oh, man. It is so morningy this morning.

I feel like Tuesday is way worse than Monday. There’s still no end in sight, and you’re not even halfway done,  but you’re already tired from the hell that was Monday.

At least there’s coffee. The sunrise is also quite nice this morning, but since my eyes are still blurry and runny (it takes a good three hours before I stop yawning and making them water profusely) I can’t really see it. Well, not as clearly as I’d like to.

Also, why are there always so many tasks? I swear I got a huge list of stuff done yesterday, and it’s already time to do some more? Crap. When does it end?

Well, alright, I know when it ends. It ends when I go back to bed. For approximately eight hours.

And then it starts again.

Blergh. I need a nap, already.

Is it just me, or is hair really complicated? I’m trying to grow mine out, just to see if I can do it, and I’ve reached that lovely stage where I either have a ginormous wad of hair in my eyes, or I need to learn how to use barrettes without crying/poking my head and bleeding everywhere.

Really. It’s those two options or hit the clippers and shave this bad boy off.

This morning, I was all ambitious. I was going to conquer the crap out of my bangs. I washed and conditioned, put in my product, and I was ready to go.

Except that it was 4:45 am and I had less than ten minutes unless I wanted to forego pants, which I might be okay with, but I think my coworkers might feel a smidge weird about.

So I pulled it to the side, vetoed that because of the strong resemblance to that weird kid in my third grade class who smelled like cheese and always ate tuna fish for lunch, tried pulling it back and then pushing it forward, which just made me look ridiculous, and then tried a couple of other things which I can’t even describe in words, so I’ll just put in a link to an equally bad picture here:

http://weirdrussia.com/2015/01/21/bangs-mens-choice-of-hairstyle-in-russia/

Only click if you feel brave. There’s some bangs on there you can’t unsee.

At any rate, yeah, it didn’t go well. Used a bobby pin, tucked my bangs to the side, looked like a manlier version of Jonathan from ‘Who’s the Boss?’ all day.

Maybe I’ll get it tomorrow. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ll give up. We’ll see.

Well, that was an uneventful Halloween. Thank goodness.

I always feel like I should put some effort into it, like handing out candy or dressing up, but the years I dress up, no one notices (like when I was Sheldon from Big Bang and pretty much just looked like myself with a severe hairstyle), or no one rings the doorbell (the year we bought a big bag of premium candy and then proceeded to eat it all ourselves...go us).

So, yeah, not really into it.

I did notice, however, that our new neighborhood is really quiet Halloween night, so that’s good. I wonder if it’s safe to put out pumpkins. I’m guessing it is but I didn’t want to take a chance what with those damn kids out joyriding and smashing things. Hooligans.

Stay off my lawn, youths.

Anyway, I hope everybody had fun, no matter what you did, and stayed safe and didn’t have to clean up pumpkin guts this morning. That’s the worst.

Also, make sure to tell your kids that you have to go through their candy before they eat it, and get you some of those “suspicious”candies. You know, the good ones. Better safe than sorry.