Don't Forget to Take Care of Yourself

Don't forget to take care of yourself. If you get injured, or sick, then it's not going to be easy and may not be possible for you to take care of your home or others. So when you are getting stressed at work, go for a walk. Getting stressed at home, go spend some time in the garden; don't pull weeds unless they really start to bug you, just get lost in the beauty of the plants.

When we let things stress us out and don't deal with them, we may become psychologically sick. The brain just will not function anymore because it's on overdrive all the time. Or you could become anxious all the time, or the opposite, you could become depressed. All these things will effect not only you, but others around you and what you do. You could slow down in what you do because your thinking about what is stressing you. It may not be in the forefront of your mind but it's there.

Letting stress get to us can also open us to getting sick because our immune system is effected. If you get sick, you will feel like crap and just wish for the cold or whatever to go away.

The quality of what you do is also effected. If your head is worrying about something else, it's not focused on the task at hand which allows for mistakes. Depending on the task, the mistake may not be anything too major. But even if you're just preparing dinner, you could burn yourself or cut off a finger.

So, remember to take care of yourself, and take some time to unwind.

Finishing the Fireplace Hearth

So, when we were taking the grout off the hearth we liked how the water brought out the grains of the stone, but we didn't want the stone to be super dark. We tried several items on spare stone tiles and decided on Thompson's Watersealer. Some items we tried were butcher block oil, grout sealer, and polyurethane. We decided the butcher block oil and the polyurethane made the stones too dark, and the grout sealer wasn't doing anything; we gave that up after 12 layers and the stone still looked the same. I did test the watersealer, since we are applying this near the fireplace, to make sure it wouldn't catch fire. I held a lighter to the test stone for several minutes. It thankfully never caught, did go a little black but for the most part that wiped off. So now we have a nice looking hearth and just need to put the fireplace door back on.