Author: Average Jane

I know I said I was finished with spending money on remodeling projects for this year. We got our lovely TV room. I finally painted the half-bath adjoining that room just this Monday night. That should be enough, right? However, this one is different.

Thanks to current economic conditions, my husband's recording studio business has been sloowww this year. He had a great idea for a demo package he can offer bands that will allow them to record live for an hour – as many songs as they can fit in – and then he'll mix for the next hour and send them home with a demo CD for $100.

The problem with this idea is that it would mean moving away from the word-of-mouth marketing model which brought vouched-for friends of friends into the studio (and thus, our house), to marketing via advertising. That would be all well and good except that the studio does not have its own bathroom, which means that strangers would be trooping through our living area to use one of ours.

Now I (mostly) don't mind his friend-clients coming downstairs to use the facilities, even though they almost always catch me vegging in front of the TV or doing housework dressed like a rag-picker. However, I can definitely understand his security concerns with having random musicians off the street casting their gaze over our limited store of valuables.

This leads to our latest home project: building a half-bath in our basement.

The way our house is set up, there's a stairway that leads down from the studio, past the garage, and around to an outside entrance to our basement. It's not completely protected from the elements, but it's close enough.

So, we have guys building us a bathroom this week. They've already jack-hammered the concrete floor, installed the below-ground plumbing, and framed out the bathroom and foyer. By the time I get home tonight, I imagine it'll be sheetrocked.

Because we're the type of people who will tell a contractor, "Here's what we want, this is what we want to spend, and we don't care about the particulars," the wall that separates the bathroom area from the rest of the basement is not quite where we'd envisioned it, but I'm just going to plan to shuffle stored items around to different shelves until the stuff we use more frequently is accessible again.

No matter what, the end result will be very handy for the studio and for when we have parties out on our deck.

This is the last project this year, though. I swear it!

It's not as if I didn't know I'd been gaining weight over the past couple of years. All of the signs were there:

• Three-quarters of a closet full of clothes that don't fit,
• Avoidance of any garment that reveals my arms or legs,
• Failure to purchase a new full-length mirror after the old one broke,
• Tendency to gravitate toward over-sized t-shirts, and
• Grimacing at the sight of myself in our vacation photos.

Still, I don't think it completely sank in until this morning when I needed to find an outfit to wear to a business-oriented event tonight.

I was pretty sure I had a couple of suits that I'd worn the last time my weight trended upward. Even with my current jeans size providing strong evidence to the contrary, I assumed that those suits would be close enough to my current size that I could wear one of them tonight. Oh, how wrong I was.

It turns out that all of my suits from that era are a size 8. As soon as I saw that number, I knew I was completely out of luck, but I still had to torture myself by trying on the skirts. Uh, yeah. Forget zipping them – I couldn't even pull them up all the way.

Okay, so obviously I'm not a size 8. Still, I figured I could fall back on one of the skirts my sister gave me after she smallified herself by becoming a yoga instructor. I tried it on – and keep it mind that it's only been four or five months since I wore it last – and although I could get it on, the zipper didn't want to go all the way up and the front of the skirt clung in a most unattractive manner.

I had no choice but to wear a somewhat stretchy, long-sleeved black dress with a random suit jacket (that's actually too small as well, but works okay unbuttoned). It'll get me by, but it's not what I would have preferred. Plus, I'll need to concentrate on sucking in my gut all evening long. Dammit.

It all boils down to the fact that I'm getting older, I get almost no exercise, and I don't exactly go out of my way to eat the healthiest food every day. There's nothing I can do about my age, but I can certainly get off my lazy butt and drag myself away from the computer more often.

Starting this weekend, my husband and I are joining our local community center and putting our workouts ON THE CALENDAR, which is the only way we can manage to keep up any kind of schedule.

My goal is to get back into those size 8 suits by next spring. Wish me luck – I'm going to need it!

This was a very fruitful and positive weekend in many ways. I had a great time at Chicks Who Click, and on Sunday I played at a party on the huge stage at Liberty Hall in Lawrence, Kansas for my cousin Travis' graduation from K-State.

Sadly, that was my band's last gig in its current form. I'd had the graduation party booked since late last year and actually said to my band members on several occasions, "Nobody can quit before this gig!"

The band had been struggling for months, but every guy hung in there until we could play the party, for which I am exceedingly grateful.

Now my husband and I are trying to decide what to do next. We're both tempted to start another original band, even though that would mean low or no pay for playing. We've also tossed around the idea of revamping the set list to remove all of the really old classic rock and add songs from contemporary hard rock bands we enjoy, such as Shinedown, Breaking Benjamin, Saliva, etc.

At this point, I don't know which way we'll go.

Next month, my goal of streamlining my activities will reach another milestone when I finally retire from two not-for-profit boards. As I've mentioned before, the overscheduling of my life has been taking a toll. I'm out of shape but can't find time to exercise. I've been neglecting tasks around the house for far too long. I'm very much looking forward to reframing my lifestyle to be slower and healthier.

I have a four-day weekend for Memorial Day, so it'll be nice to get a glimpse of what that can be like. On Saturday, I'll have the opportunity to recharge my batteries with some old-fashioned manual labor when I work my first farm shift for my CSA. My niece is spending the night on Friday and coming out to the farm with me.

My sister's neighborhood is having their annual Memorial Weekend block party on Sunday, so I'll definitely be there to hang out with everyone.

I have nothing planned on Memorial Day itself, but it seems like a perfect day to sleep in, hang around the house and relax.

So how was your weekend? Do you have any fun plans for the coming weekend?