These Days, You'll Find Me in the Garage

We no longer can park either vehicle in our garage.  The entrance to one stall is blocked by a truckload of rocks that were delivered from a local home and garden center and now await their slow removal, wheelbarrow-full by wheelbarrow-full, as they get placed in our garden landscaping.

The other stall is slowly getting taken over by piles for the garage sale we'll hold at the end of the month.  As I carry boxes of outgrown clothes, books we'll never read again, and unneeded household items, I already hope for the elusive garage sale impossibility: that every single item will sell.

Between the boxes, I've set up drop cloths and a station where I'm working to refinish a cabinet, a bookshelf, and our kitchen table.  I finished the kitchen table once before and was so pleased with the results -- dents had been filled, Sharpie marker and other stains from the kids had been sanded off, and the new driftwood gray finish was a vast improvement from the old blonde wood.  My good work was short lived, though: months later, the kids spilled a bottle of nail polish remover on top of old work papers, which caused the print to transfer onto the table, decoupage-style.  So now I'm sanding it down and trying once more, hopeful that this could be the time that actually sticks.

This lifestyle of putzing and painting, working with my hands and cleaning up the messes from the rest of the year, fits the month of July, the one month where I'm most distant from academia.  In July, if you need me, you'll find me in the garage.