Summer Ambitions

I am getting REALLY excited for this summer!  My excitement is bubbling up today because I have made it official at work that I am going to work 9 hour days so that I can take off every other Wednesday, and I am using vacation days to take off most other Wednesdays through the first weekend in September.

I will be using many of my Wednesdays off to spend time at Camp Nawakwa, where my hubby will be spending his entire summer, but I have A LOT of other ambitions for my summer as well!  I decided that I'd be exponentially more likely to do certain things if I actually scheduled them on my calendar, especially the things that involve other people.  I just wrote a bit about this in an e-mail to my mom (as I scheduled a Summer Ambition with her!) and thought to myself, this should be in a blog post!

So here is what I have officially scheduled as of today:

• Training classes with Juno, which started last Wednesday and run every Wednesday evening through June 8th
• A road trip to visit my dear friend Rachel in Raleigh, North Carolina the second weekend in June
• My first sewing lesson & quality time with my awesome Mom the first Wednesday after she's done with school, which also happens to be only a few days before she and my Dad leave on their summer vacation to South America.  Hopefully we will move on to a second and maybe even third sewing lesson.  I feel like I'm ready to take on sewing!  I have daydreams about handbags with perfectly placed pockets, linings and zippers for knitted items, and fresh pillow covers for my Ikea Tullsta chairs!
• A trip to visit my dear friend Crystal in Alexandria, Virginia the second weekend in July

There are tons of other things I'm hoping to do this summer, including:

• Gardening.  Duh.  This should probably go in the "already scheduled" list, since the garden is already planted and I will definitely need to care for it almost daily, but since it's something that I can't officially schedule and will require discipline to keep up with, I'm putting it in this list.
• Eating meals & packing lunches that use whatever's growing in my garden to the fullest.  This will mean planning ahead, making some creative salads to pack over several days, eating more veggies than I would choose to eat if I relied entirely on my carb cravings to make my decisions, and a lot more discipline.
• Bake bread instead of buying it, and use it for copious sandwiches (see previous bullet).  Paul was on a bread-making kick for a while, so hopefully sometime in May we can make bread together so he can pass on his knowledge to me.  I'd love to get a sourdough starter going in my fridge, but I'm not going to hold myself to that, so let's just focus on making some plain ol' white bread for now.
• Finish cleaning out and organizing the basement, and in tandem with that, reorganize the office/3rd bedroom, in pursuit of my goal to own less stuff
• Paint the second bedroom and hallway, including trim, and finally paint the trim in our bedroom
• Paint the nightstand and bookcase in the second bedroom, something that coordinates with the rest of the room, and possibly painting the vanity-turned-changing-table too?  But that is up for debate.
• Hang curtains in the second bedroom
• Paint the fugly fugly vanity in the second bathroom
• Paint, fill, and hang all picture frames, mainly on the entry wall in the living room and in the dining room
• Mount the huge antique-style world map I got for Paul for his birthday last October on the wall above our low dresser in our bedroom (once I confirm that it will fit on that wall...I think it will).
• Revamp the orange wood-framed armchair we got from Poppy - I LOVE this chair, but it needs new fabric that isn't cracked and plasticy, and I think once I have removed the current covering I will take the opportunity to sand down the frame and re-stain it too, like almost black to go with the couch but not painted so the wood grain can still show through.  Then maybe I can find a fabric that has some brown tones like the Tullsta chairs and ottomans, and then it will help tie all the furniture together!
• Reupholster the seats of the dining room chairs, and possibly the back as well (but I'm not at all sure about the backs yet).  Doing the seats will be easy, though.  Possibly using the same fabric as for the chair in the previous bullet.
• I almost forgot to include a project close to the top of my list, even with the other mentions of reupholstering things!  I am going to make an upholstered headboard for our bed.  Hopefully with some button tufting and everything!  And if it goes well, I might even make a second one for the second bedroom.

Wow.  It is going to be a busy summer, and I can't wait to get started!  Well, I can't wait to keep going, since I have already started a few things.  Can I do it??  Probably not everything, but most of it?