For the first time in a long time...

For the first time in a long time I had guests over to my home.  A former co-worker, along with her husband and her son, stopped by to visit for a little while before going out to dinner with my kids and me.  As I think back over the last several years, I'd have to say that outside of a few close friends and family, this is the first time in quite a while that I've had anyone come to visit in my home.  Thanks to a lot of work cleaning up around the home the house is tidy enough (outside of my kids rooms) to have visitors over.  There's still plenty of things to get done, and plenty of clean-up to get done still, but for the most part I wouldn't feel bad about having almost anyone come to visit now.

Later I'll try to put up some before and after pictures.  I say that, but unfortunately I don't have actual "before" pictures, I only have a set of after pictures since I didn't take pictures before the clean-up started.  The pictures that I do have (which might serve as the "before" pictures) don't impress that the clean-up had really started, at least not until after you look closely and see the boxes that were sitting on the sofa as we (my mother, myself, and my kids to a lesser extent) were staging the clean-up moving things from the piles that my wife had to boxes that helped categorize and organize what needed to be kept and what could go.

I've said before that I still need to work with my daughter on getting her room clean, but thus far she's holding out a bit hoping to do the clean-up herself.  As her school year wraps up I'll be pushing a bit harder on her to clean-up to an acceptable level.  I've "threatened" that if she doesn't make progress in her room that others (my mother, myself, or others) will clean the room whether she likes it or not.  I don't want to do that to her, and I really do want her to do the clean-up herself and further want her to recognize when there's a mess that needs cleaning up.  For that I still need to find her an therapist/counselor to talk to who can help her in that area.

Enough about all of that stuff... dinner was good.  (Yeah, somewhere back up there I mentioned that we were going out for dinner.)  Meat on a stick.  All I could eat.  Good stuff.  I don't get to do it that often as it's just too decadent, too expensive, and too bad for me.  Too much red meat.  Good red meat, but too much of it.

On the way back from the restaurant I stopped off to add more decadence to the party.  Donuts.  Hot and fresh.  (Well, not quite, the kind I ordered were made before we got there, but you probably understand the place that I'm talking about...)  Breakfast for tomorrow for my daughter and I, along with a few of my son's favorites.  I'm glad that I don't live that close to the place that sells them or I'd be in a lot of trouble.

Oh well, enough for now.  I still have some filing to get done.  Papers that I was sorting through earlier today that need to get put into the proper folders in my fileboxes.  Stuff from the last year or so as opposed to things from the last decade.  Yup, I'm making progress.