My little sister is in town (or rather, she is in our old town) this week because my mom was released from the hospital on Saturday after her knee replacement, but she still needs a lot of help doing things like, well, everything. So she’s staying with my parents, cooking, helping my dad, and so on. I picked her up at the airport on Saturday morning and we took a slight detour on the way to my parents’ house, first stopping by my house so she can see the construction zone that is our kitchen. I also wanted her to see our neighborhood, now that everything is green and flowering and full of life, since the only time she’s been down here since we moved was for Christmas. She oohed and aahed and may or may not have made some jealous whimpers when I showed her the plans for what the kitchen will eventually look like. Until we bought this house, my little sister took first place in our family for who had the most horrible kitchen. I stole that title from her over Christmas, since not only was our kitchen horrible, we also had no working dishwasher (well, except for the human variety), but thankfully for me (and sadly for her) we will soon have the nicest kitchen in the family, and she will go back to having the worst.

We met up with my dad at the hospital and the three of us all went out for lunch, and then I left my sister there to help my dad get my mom home and drove back to Sacramento, where Richard and I decided to spend the afternoon doing kitchen-related things; namely looking at faucets and sinks and flooring. We’d originally decided to try to match the existing wood laminate that’s in place throughout most of the rest of the upper floor, but realized pretty quickly that this was going to be next to impossible. So instead we found a gorgeous hardwood that we like much better anyway, and we have dutifully passed the sample along to our contractor so he knows what he’ll be working with (and can also go order however much we’ll need once it’s time to actually lay the flooring.

The rest of this weekend, however, has been spent holed up inside. We’re right smack in the middle of a rather unseasonable heat wave, and the fact that there is a decent breeze outside still does not make it bearable out there. I am just glad to see weather reports suggesting it’s going to be much cooler next week because even though I am a delicate flower that wilts in the heat, at least I have the option of getting to stay inside with the air conditioning on, and the poor guys who are working on our kitchen – which is now stripped pretty much to the studs, and also open to the outside due to having to replace that one exterior wall – don’t have that luxury.