We’re eleven days into June and I’ve been working steadily on finishing the piles of unfinished projects I have stashed all over my house and garage.  Here’s a quick photo update on what I’ve been doing:

After removing all hardware to paint the hall, we've had no place to hang our coats.

We've just been throwing them in a pile on the floor. {I just realized this photo is unedited. Please forgive the blue tint and lack of focus, but I'm just too lazy...I mean busy...to go back and fix it.}

So I found some random hardware...

...spent some time with my good friends...

...and threw a little something together. This is for the kids' coats and bags.

The grown up hooks are going to look more like this. But not that color.

I also needed to add some inspiration to my craft/work area.

So I made a graphic to remind me what I want my blog to be about.

And one to encourage me to take risks.

And another to get me pushing beyond the obvious.

And one to remind me to finish things.

I also redid my living room lamps and found some new shades for them. Me gusta mucho.

I used to have a herringbone shade on this lamp. The square one looks so much better. I absolutely love the red.

But not everything works out. Like the kale chips I tried to make for a healthy snack. No one liked them. You know why? Because kale chips are gross.

I’m in the middle of making two more coat racks for the grown up coats/scarves/purses.  I’m also making a filing system for the kids school papers to hang by their coat rack.  Just in time for school to get out for the summer, I know.  Also, I’m trying to put together a Family Binder to organize my life.  We’ll see how that goes.  It takes forever to create the pages, but I think I’ll be glad I did.

The rest of my time I’ve been spending trying to figure out what to cook and how to plan for this whole vegan adventure. I’ve been looking online and in cookbooks like crazy, trying to be totally prepared, find great meals and basically know what I’m doing.  Here’s our meal plan for the week:

Monday: Smashed Potatoes a la Pioneer Woman, Grilled Veggies including fresh asparagus and garlic spears from Pike Place Market {Thanks to Bonnie for our new veggie rack for our barbecue!  Anniversary #11 is steel.  A stainless steel grill…what a great idea!!}

Tuesday: Taco Soup…finally have all the ingredients!

Wednesday: Veggie Pizza

Thursday: Sweet & Sour Tempeh with Veggies & Noodles

Friday: Neighborhood BBQ – Black Bean Burgers, Grilled Asparagus & Fruit Salad

I’m also going to try Refrigerator Oatmeal this week.  You can eat pretty good vegetarian.

We’ve decided to change our experiment up a bit.  We’ve been in the process of getting rid of processed sugars anyway, so we have decided to take the sugar month out and extend both the vegetarian and vegan time periods to 6 weeks each.  Because what we really want to know is how cutting those things out will affect us.  We already know how cutting sugars out will affect us.  So we’ll be vegetarian until July 19th and vegan until August 30th.  Then we’ll take the Labor Day weekend to evaluate what we want to do next.

That was a long and random update.  And now I have to go paint some more things.  Maybe our coat pile will be off the floor by the end of the week.  Maybe.