I hope all you mamas out there had a wonderful, relaxing Mother's Day. We took Tom's parents out to dinner, but other than that it was a pretty typical day around here. That is, we planned to go to the early Mass to give ourselves a good stretch of time to work, stayed up too late and went to the late service instead, spent several hours working on a solution to the problem at hand, found several other mistakes to add to the repair list,  realized we needed one small but crucial item from Lowe's to fix the first problem, and spent far too long in the Lowe's plumbing section trying to figure out why the pictures on the boxes never really seem to indicate what is actually inside the box. In other words, not a whole lot got done other than accumulating rage over such shoddy workmanship from the previous crew.

Today wasn't a whole lot better, but I did manage to get the back bedroom cleared out and vacuumed. I also assembled the bed that my aunt gave me (off-topic, but I was not "gifted" the bed; it was given to me. "Gift" should be used as a noun, not a verb, despite the dictionary's acknowledgment of its use as a verb in the 17th century. Seriously, I want to scream every time I see that.) We'll move our bed's mattress to that room and upgrade our mattress. We've got three weeks until six members of my family arrive, and I'm trying not to stress out about it. I'm trying to get an operational bathroom for them so we don't have 8 people sharing one bathroom without a door. I mean, really. A bathroom with a door? That's the kind of luxury I'm trying to afford my guests!

This picture has nothing to do with the text above. I love having a little bouquet of peonies by the door, especially since they were clipped from my own garden, and I thought this post could use a little bit of prettiness.