Almost glad

As I sit here and look at the thermometer reading -22 I am somewhat glad that I am not working today. I miss my job, it's true and the thought that I am not going to work for a month is quite literally a maddening. Luckily I have found some projects to help keep my time occupied over the next four weeks. Right now I am waiting for the sun to rise over the hills and cast its rays into our valley so the room I am working in will be filled with natural light. While I am sitting here waiting I figured I would let you in on my doings for the foreseeable future.

1. I am doing an extreme home make over on my wife's craft room. This includes:
- Painting it, starting with a yellow basecoat and blue, green and purple stripes.
- Building a 5'x6' storage unit for all her yarn, fibers and what nots
- Building a proper desk for her sewing machine. For the last few years she has been using the top of my grandmothers 75 year old singer free-standing sewing machine
- Build her a proper chair. She has been using one that I built for myself and is quite literally 2 sizes to big for her
- Put up a new light fixture. The one that is in there now is from the 70's and really isn't all that stylish plus it doesn't give off very much light.

2. Clean the Basement. Our basement is ridiculous. We have 4 families worth of crap stuffed in our house and our basement is completely unusable because of the clutter. So I have to:
- Clear the steps
- Organize all totes and boxes
- Sort through 3 huge boxes of dishes, pots and pans that were left over from my mother's diner
- Go through all the wiring and make sure everything is safe as well as remove any that is unused. Our house has been rewired several times with additions being made for phone lines, cable, etc. Half aren't being used any more and has resulted in a spider web of cable and wiring hanging from the ceiling.

3. Clean the Garage. God help me.
- Repack all our camping gear
- Build a lumber rack (Wood working is my hobby and I have about 3 dozen hard wood boards scattered around the garage)
- Fix my air compressor and build a cabinet for it
- Fix my wife's gardening table (I kind of destroyed it by putting 2 dozen of said hard wood boards on top of it)
- Build a miter saw stand and work bench to properly take care of my tools

4. Fix the upstairs bathroom
- I need to support the toilet. a few years ago we took the flooring out of the bathroom and what is in there now is not as thick as the previous flooring so the toilet has a little bit of rocking movement in it. Always a joy when you try to use it in the middle of the night, half asleep.
- Replace drain pipe in the sink

5. Paint the stairs and banister

6. Paint our spare bedroom. We were going to wait til this spring but what the hell, I have a little time.

7. Try to get as much of our music in our cd catalog and two computers onto our new 16 gb flash drive.

8. Go with my wife (and hopefully Deidre and TJ) to see Underworld: Rise of the Lycans.

9. Hopefully and this is a hope but may very well not happen, go to Cabela's in Scarborough to return some Christmas presents. I don't know if I can afford the gas but I would like to try and make the trip, it would be an easy and fun way to eat up a day.

So as you can see I have a fairly busy few weeks ahead of me. The first few projects will eat up 2-4 days each so I'm hoping I won't have too much time just so sit and go numb.
The time is some what welcomed though. I have been blessed with many injuries resulting in broken bones and screwed up joints over the years. In my job I use my whole body which frequently riles up the old sores so hopefully I can relax a bit and recoop.

I know a lot of people besides myself have some slow time this time of year, do you have any projects to get yourself through this long cold winter months?