If I Never Hear the Theme Song to Zelda Again It Will Be Too Soon

You'll be glad to know that I sat down and had a long talk with myself. I was in a car taking the very, very scenic route back home from an overnight getaway to Atlantic City, but technically that is still sitting. "Self," I said, "What you need to do is not less things. It's to just make more of the blog posts that you mean to make." Being very sensitive about the topic of things, as I generally feel that I have to do all of them - ESPECIALLY in the summer - I replied, "Yes. I know. But I have to DO THE THINGS." Master of compromise that I am...

...let me just point out that even while trying to type out this thought my husband asked if I was "feeling egg-y" which is his way of implying that I should probably get my butt into the kitchen and make some breakfast. So yeah, THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE BLOG POSTS. And the washer just dinged telling me to put stuff in the dryer. And start another load in the washer. And if we're going to eat eggs we'll need toast which means I should start a batch of bread going. And and and...

ANYWAY. "Self," I offered, "Why don't you make a post about something you've done before you start doing something new?" And I've done LOTS of things, so that doesn't sound entirely unreasonable. If I do say so myself.

So what's up lately? It's summer which means the kids are home all day and they. are. BORED. Despite the house full of toys, books, science experiment sets, a trampoline, playground in the yard, bikes, metal detectors, weekly library trips they are BORED. When they say that they are bored what they actually mean is, "We want to play video games but you won't let us so we will get even by telling you every twenty seconds just how BORING life is until you give in and let us play video games." It's only in their heads that I will ever give in, though. We have video game time built in to our daily schedule and I have a saved (I really should laminate that) sheet from one of the kids' 9 to 11 year old check-ups at the Pediatrician which says that kids in that age range should have NO MORE THAN one hour of screen time a day. If the DOCTOR says that, it means that I am RIGHT and boredom is not, in fact, fatal.

One of the things that two of them have decided to fill the time with is piano practice. The mom in me thinks this is a fine idea. The person in me who doesn't want to hear Fur Elise 327498573984579387593875938 times a day disagrees. But mom wins out even when this happens to the piano bench:

One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just isn't the same...

I'm not sure how they even managed to do that to the leg, but they did it. Of course, it wasn't in the best shape to begin with. For one thing, this is the bench that came with the piano that my mom bought used when I was a kid, so it's pretty old. Like getting way too close to 40 for my comfort old.

So that was also a problem.

 It was pretty much just held together by a piece of twill tape and some rusty screws. When we moved to this house I decided to paint the piano itself (Why yes, yes I am THAT crazy), but the bench had already been through two makeovers as you can see from the bottom of the lid. I'd covered it with fabric that matched the upholstery on my old, old couch and did like a shabby-chic finish. Then, in a different house, with a different couch, I painted it brown and added fabric that matched a throw pillow (which I still have in this house with yet another couch).. Under all of that there is still the original brown vinyl covering.

Uh, yeah, it's SUPPOSED to look like that...

The only hope was to pull off everything, strip off the paint, and start over.

I didn't take any photos of the fun bubbly paint, or of my lovely then-10-year-old assistant sanding it down, but it looked pretty nice when it was cleaned off. Not nice enough to stain, mind you, but nice. I spray painted it with Krylon Dual Paint + Primer spray paint in glossy black and then covered the top in easy to clean black vinyl. I still like the old fabric, but I just wanted it to sort of disappear into the piano itself.

Look! The legs work!

 I also had to bend the bolt in the leg back into place so that they could, you know, sit on it. I filled the screw holes with wood filler so that the hinges would go in tight, and I used slightly longer screws.

Better, right?

And here it is, now camouflaged in its native environment...

Someday I will figure out how all those other ladies who blog take the pretty pictures where their houses looks nice and you don't just see every bit of dirt and chipped paint.

So now it's all set for kids to sit there and play the theme song to every video game ever over and over and over so as to remind me that even when I don't let them play video games all day, they're still thinking about them. Figuring out the notes to the songs. Writing them down in video game character illustrated song books so that their brothers can build upon their knowledge and play EVEN MORE video game theme songs. But, most importantly, they are, for a few minutes anyway, not BORED.