I need to show you guys this awesome prop Paul built for the Halloween party we're sort of co-hosting. It's a guy in an electric chair - full size! My oldest daughter and I built the dummy together. She even made a heart out of play-doh and stuck it in his chest, just like Build A Bear. Hehe!

It turned out so cool!! We have an orange jumpsuit to dress it in - and Paul's going to stencil numbers on it - and I think the dummy's going to wear my old ratty Doc boots. And we have a white drawstring bag thing we're going to put over the dummy's head like a hood. The plan is to have the thing just sitting there at the party. Nobody will realize that it actually DOES anything - they'll just think it's a prop. Paul mixed a whole little track of spooky Halloween sounds with an electrocution and screaming and everything, and he's got the timing down just right so he knows when to hit the switch on the dummy. I think it's going to scare the CRAP out of people the first time he does it!!

Here's the dude:





You can sort of see the springs here that bounce his head around:



And I took this picture underneath the chair - it's an old drill! Pretty clever, huh?



Check it out in action:



Is that crazy cool or what? I need to come up with something that will hold fake blood under the hood - like a little cup or something - so that when it starts moving, the blood will ooze down the head a little. Any ideas?

And speaking of bath faucets and shower faucets...I hate the faucet in our shower!! I don't know what the deal is with it, but it's too high up on the wall, and the spray pattern is too wide or something. I feel like I have to do a lap around the shower to get my whole body wet, and I never feel like I'm rinsing all the shampoo out.

I've been sitting here drooling over all the faucets at Faucet.com and I found one I like a lot. It has a much larger showerhead and looks like it puts out a whole lot of water. Too bad it's *cough* almost NINE HUNDRED DOLLARS! As always, I've got champagne taste on a beer budget. They do have lots of other really nice styles that are a fraction of what that particular faucet would cost me, so I'll keep looking.

Paul's been working his tail off up at his rental unit, remodeling the bathroom. Tomorrow, he's got a helper: my dad! He's tiled many a bathroom, during all the years we owned the motel and all the years prior to that when he had his fire restoration business and nowadays, at his job as a maintenance man. I know he'll be able to slap that tile up, lickety split, and save Paul a whole lot of time and effort. Yay, dad.

Look what my honey's putting up for me RIGHT NOW! Whee!

It's going to be so pretty! It's going to hold every bottle of wine on my existing little wine rack, plus one more big bottle that didn't fit. I can't wait to get my counter space back! I'll take lots of pictures when it's all done and full of wine. By the way, I can't believe how many dead moths were up on top of the kitchen cabinet when we took it down! Thank God they were glued there with kitchen grease so they didn't fall down on me like a dead moth shower when we pulled it down.

I am so completely stoked about my Enginerd's latest find. He was checking out some salvage places, looking for parts for the bathroom he's remodeling, and he found THIS - it's a maple wine rack cabinet piece that matches my kitchen cabinets PERFECTLY. I can't wait until he puts it up! Isn't it purty?

So, Paul is planning to tile the shower in the master bath he's remodeling. Actually - if we're being completely honest here, he's planning to have my dad do it. Got to call in a favor once in awhile, right? I love tile. I wish we had more of it in our house. We have big 12" tiles in our bathroom inside the shower and up the wall near our big tub. Our second bath doesn't have any tile, though - we have one of those all-in-one fiberglass insert thingies. It's easy to keep clean, for sure, but it definitely lacks character.

I was just poking around online checking out various styles of tile and I came across Anchor Bay Tile - what an amazing selection of really unique styles they have! I love the look of the glass tile in the bathrooms. WAY more upscale than we need to have going on in our rental property, but beautiful nonetheless. I also REALLY like the metal tiles - I didn't even know metal tiles existed! Check out their photo gallery to see some of the creative ways they've used tiles that I wouldn't have thought about. Really neat site.

I wanted to mention that Paul is putting in dual showerheads in the master bath of the rental - just to up the resale value, not because we dig our renters or anything - and I started poking around Flickr to see if I could find a picture of how he is planning to do the installation. I didn't find any, because I got completely distracted by THIS! Eeeeek! Can you imagine showering in there??

Well, not that I'd know or anything. I'm still a spry young thing, you know. The enginerd husband, though, well - he's OLD! Okay, not really, but I think he's feeling his age tonight. He spent the entire day doing manual labor. He's remodeling the master bath at his rental unit, and he's been a busy little bee, let me tell ya. I have lots of pictures of the whole process to share, but...they're on his camera, not mine, and I have no idea where it is. So, I'll share those later. But I wanted to put this out there! Think happy thoughts for my old man. He's still got a lot of work ahead of him!