Stripping

 I know that most of you were either a little concerned about this blogs title.  Well, I haven't stripped off my clothes or attended a strip club, so the other part of you who were excited about this post you can now calm down.  This is all about stripping my hutch/cabinet.  Caitlyn and I started this during her visit.  It still is not complete.  Cait and I applied stripper about four times and this is how it looked. I was surprised to see the glass under the paint.

There was some substance, which I believe is probably just oil-based paint.  I could not get the paint to sand off.  The paint just turns into balls, which stick to the sandpaper.  Above are some the the chunks of paint which were stripped off.  I have since applied stripper two more times and still have many to go.  I am going to have do a lot of work to get this painted again.

Needing some string?

Caitlyn and I made a last minute trip to the World's Biggest Ball of Twine.  This was another Minnesota Adventure to check of my list of things to do here.  We drove about one hour away from my house to get to this amazing ball.

Caitlyn was so excited that I would drive here two hours round trip for a 5 minute picture taking event.

Look at the roundness of this beauty.  The man who made this ball carefully wrapped the twine to make sure it kept its beautiful shape.

There were some beautiful flowers close by.

Damages

Now I admit I am a wimp, but it runs in the family.  My bathroom is small enough that two people using the caulk gun isn't really effective.  I there for assigned Cait a project to screw together.  Here is a photo of her hand because she kept mentioning how her hands we red from all of the screws she turned.  Now if you look "REALLY, REALLY HARD" you might be able to see it.  Yes, it was more visable 5 minutes after the work and not so much 2 hours later, but someone had to give her a hard time.

Now this might look familiar...there is one I put together in my room.  I just had to take a photo of this so that I could prove I did put my visitor to work.  Now I am trying to figure out the best home for it.  It turns out that most of my shoes end up by the front door, so there has to be a better place than my closet to store my shoes.

Spam and Eggs; Spam, Spam, Spam and Eggs

Many of you have already read Caitlyn's post about visiting me in grand ol' MN, but I had some different photos on my camera that I thought I would share.  On her first full day in Minneapolis it was very humid and raining, so we were not really able to work on my house.  I gave her some options of what to do and the next thing we knew we were headed out into the terrible weather and down to Ausin, MN where the Spam Museum is housed.  I was raining fairly hard, but nothing way out of the ordinary.  The Spam Museum was filled with all kinds of fund stuff.

Now Caitlyn gets to model the activities in the museum because I had the camera.  She was trying to compete with the Hormel factory in canning some Spam.  I can tell you see was annihilated.

Spam worker Caitlyn only packed on can of Spam in the time it took Hormel to pack 215 there in Austin, MN.

Instead of trains a little Spam-go-round.

Anyone for some Spam with cheese?  I think my stomach just churned...but don't worry Dad I almost bought a can for Caitlyn to bring home to you.

We watched the Spam movie while we tried to wait out a downpour of rain.  It was rained so hard that no one was leaving the building.  The museum closed at 5pm, but everyone was remaining there.  Cait and I braved the weather and ran out to my car.

This picture does not give the full story.  You can see my wet arm and drench hair.  It was as if we had showered out there.

The was a car next to us at a stop light.  There were several roads we could not take because cars were covered halfway with water.

I love the above blurred photo though.  I love the rain!  We went and got something to eat and then safely drove back to the Twin Cities.  My mom told me we were supposed to make memories, so MN was doing the best it could.