Dead Bodies and Beauties

Last week we had some friends over for an Office Marathon. Most of us love the show and a few others were there just so that we could convince them to love it too. We had a projector and a big screen all set up and ready to go. After about an hour, three laptops, and two DVD players, we finally got it working and I settled in with a plate of food to enjoy The Office: Season One. I think it had been playing for all of 5 minutes when the phone rang. It was my brother. He builds amazing houses and was getting two ready for the Parade of Homes. He needed some help and wanted me to come for an all-nighter. My brother never asks for anything and I'm pretty sure that he would be the first one in line to help me in a jam so I told him that I would come as soon as my guests left.

Fast forward a couple of hours and 6 episodes of The Office and I was grabbing some snacks and getting in my car. My sister had agreed to go too, so I headed out to pick her up. The houses are in the middle of nowhere and it took us a couple of hours to get there. It was after 1:00 a.m. when we finally arrived and we cleaned and worked through the night. If you really want details, check out my sister's blog. Anyway, the point of posting about this now is that I was just cleaning off my camera's memory card and found a few pics from that glorious night. The first one is my brother and my nephew. No - they aren't dead. They had been going for 48 hours straight and finally just collapsed in the most uncomfortable place in either house. I told them they could at least have found a rolled up piece of carpeting or gone out to the half-installed lawn. They preferred the tile floor with the bar foot-rest as a pillow. Silly boys.

This is my nephew Brock. Seriously - doesn't he look like a dead body?

My brother Mike. Good thing he has that cleaning rag to give him a soft place to rest his weary head.

Now contrast those pictures with this one of my sister-in-law and my niece. This was taken at around 4:00 a.m. after they had been up all night too, and working since about 3:00 in the afternoon the previous day. You should have seen me at this point - SCARY, and I had only been there for a few hours. It's just not fair that some people can not only look this good after doing what they had been doing for as long as they had been doing it, but they were all smiley even. My niece, Garyn, is 15. She worked her guts out and didn't utter one complaint the entire night. How do you get a kid like that? I ask Adam to pick up his dirty underwear off the floor and he acts like I want him to also cut off a limb and beat himself with it. Sometimes I really hate my skinny, smiley, pretty, blond sister-in-law. Okay, when I say hate I don't really mean HATE. I mean the hate that you feel for somebody who you really love that drives you crazy for one reason or another. I just have to look at her to be reminded that life is not always fair. And she even loves to exercise. Do you think that might account for the skinny, smiley, and pretty part? Maybe I should give that exercise thing a try.

With this master bath, I have to wonder how many people the owners plan to invite over for tubby time.