We're Finally

More list

2012-01-02T13:25:00.002-05:00

Welp, I am thrilled to report that we got all the major stuff from my Christmas Vaca to-do list done! Biggest exception is sewing, of which I did not do any, but I did get started cutting up the old t's to ready-to-sew diaper-sized squares. I have enough cut for about 10 prefolds so far.

Paul even got a pretty huge bonus project done - he removed the sliding doors on our tub/shower, cleaned it all up, and hung a shower curtain instead! So now in a few months when Baby Girl's ready to graduate from the infant tub to the big tub, it will be SO much easier for use to bathe her! I'm pretty thrilled how he pulled that one out of his hat! Our bathroom looks so nice now with a clean white shower curtain instead of dingy old metal and glass.

So now I need a more general list for the rest of our remaining pre-baby time:

1. Sewing - prefolds, soakers, and I need to hem a bunch of curtains including those for the nursery.

2. Knitting - Mainly I need to make the coming home outfit. I haven't even started yet. That needs to happen very soon!

3. Assembling nursery - duh! Gotta clean the floor, put the finishing touches on the dresser & finish painting a bookcase, assemble the crib, and then just start moving stuff in!!

4. Packing - it's getting to be that time where we need to be ready to go to the hospital!

5. Start cooking extra food to freeze for post-baby easy meals.

6. Triage after our baby shower (so excited!!) - Wash, sort, & put away all clothing, assess what we still need, and decide what we need to buy and when we need to get it by. Stack everything reasonably neatly in the nursery, assemble anything that needs to be assembled, etc.

7. Clean up the second bedroom so it's usable again - it would be nice for an enthusiastic visitor who stays too late to have somewhere to sleep, or for Paul or me to have a place to sleep if there's a way for one of us to get some extra sleep while the other is on baby duty!

8. Get the rest of the house to a reasonable level of tidiness - this shouldn't really be too hard, and it can happen last once everything else is done.

But right now, I need to eat lunch so I can head back into the basement to put one last coat of paint on the dresser! I hope tomorrow we can bring it upstairs & put it in the nursery!!

My Christmas List is a To-Do List

2011-12-19T15:55:00.005-05:00

Maybe I'll feel differently next year when I have a 10-month-old, but...I am totally not interested in getting a photo of my kid on Santa's lap. Unless one of my friends or relatives dresses up as Santa for a party, I just don't see myself getting that picture. At least not until she's old enough to request a visit to Santa, at which point I suppose if we were there anyway, I'd probably get a picture.

But speaking of Christmas pictures, for Christmas cards next year? I am so looking forward to setting up something fun and silly and snapping a bunch of pics to DIY our own photo cards (and for a much cooler keep-sake than the Santa picture). I'm thinking Baby Girl in nothing but a red diaper and santa hat, playing with a string of white Christmas lights, with some neutral fabric in the background and maybe a couple other non-breakable accessories. Or! Maybe a big pot fashioned to look like a mug, and stick her in there along with a few bags of big marshmallows like she's bathing in hot chocolate! Can a 10-month-old munch on marshmallows (with adult supervision)?

Anyhoo, that's all to come a year from now. This year, I have a huge to-do list of a different sort: this is the last time I'll have multiple days off of work in a row before D Day, so in addition to all the usual Christmas stuff, there's a TON of baby-related stuff I really want to get done between now and January 2nd! And I am SO GLAD I saved up my vacation days so I could have off for 13 days in a row, starting this Wednesday, December 21st! Here's what's on the ol' list:

Monday 12/19 Evening:

Coat of paint on the dresser

Lots of laundry, including all the old clothes I plan to make into cloth diapers & cover

Tuesday 12/20 Evening:

More laundry (see above)

Clean up & decorate Dining Room table

Finish decorating tree (just need to hang ornaments)

Vacuum/sweep/dust once all decorating is done

Wednesday 12/21:

Tidy/reorganize 2nd bedroom in prep for more storage needs

Clear out office except for small desk, computer, & printer

All extra non-baby stuff from 2nd bedroom & office goes to the basement

Finish up anything still pending from above (more laundry? fold laundry?)

Thursday 12/22:

Wrapping & other prep for Christmas gifts (this is 5 bullets on my personal list, but I don't want to give anything away!

Shop for any necessary supplies for baking Christmas cookies tomorrow

Friday 12/23:

Bake Christmas cookies with Hannah!

Two more Christmas gift prep items

Christmas Eve 12/24:

Askey Family Christmas!

Cooking in the morning?

Knitting

Christmas Day 12/25:

Killian Family Christmas!

More knitting

Monday 12/26:

Lebanon Christmas Brunch & Pregnant Cousins Pow-Wow!

More knitting!! (I really need to knit every day to get anywhere near all my knitting done, so just assume this bullet is included in all future days!)

PREP Christmas Dinner!

Tuesday 12/27:

Paint the ~~Office~~ Nursery!

Wednesday 12/28:

Sewing Day - hem curtains, make cloth diapers & diaper covers

Thursdasy 12/29:

Finish painting nursery (trim, wall stripes?)

Friday 12/30:

More of whatever still needs to be done (painting? sewing?)

Finish painting dresser & bookcases in basement

Saturday 12/31:

More finishing what still needs to be done from previous days

KNITTING

Sunday 1/1/2012:

Freak out because it's 2012 already, and because I'm going to have a BABY this year

Start un-decorating

More sewing? Start to assemble the nursery?

Monday 1/2/2012:

Finish un-decorating

Get house tidy & ready for organized storage of baby stuff

If I can come reasonably close to actually following this list, I will be feeling LOADS better about the prospect of bringing a baby home to our house in (less than?) 2 months. WAY, way better.

Brain Dump

2011-12-09T11:32:00.003-05:00

Growing a new human is still going well. I'm starting to have to work harder to roll over in bed, and some...um...gastronomic discomforts, but on the whole I really can't complain. Still feeling blessed to have an easy pregnancy.

At the doctor's on Wednesday morning, I was told to keep doing whatever I'm doing, because everything is great! I still have great blood pressure, my thyroid is still staying stable like a champ, my weight is good, and I even got confirmation that I was right about the orientation of Baby Girl: her butt is on the top right, her head is all the way at the bottom just above my pelvis, and she's facing slightly to my left and back.

But today I'm more in the mood for a brain dump of things that no one really wants to listen to me talk about:

Last night on WITF radio, the host introduced an NPR story by saying that the EPA had "implicated a connection" between fracking and contaminated drinking water. That is...not correct. You can't implicate a connection. He should have said either that the EPA had implicated fracking in connection with contaminated drinking water, or the EPA had found a connection between fracking and contaminated drinking water. I know it's a minor misuse, but it bugged me. I may have ranted aloud about it to myself as I drove to choir rehearsal.

Abrupt topic change:

If you work at a desk at a computer all day, let me tell you, it is the perfect place to paint your nails. The smell really isn't an issue because it dissipates quickly (especially since I have a big air vent right above my head), and as long as you plan a bit, it is a very low-risk environment for messing up your fresh paint. I make sure my water bottle is filled, my bladder is empty, and my cell phone is sitting on my desk and not in my pocket or purse, and then I go to town. I do one coat at a time while I'm working and waiting for a report to run or a page to load. Then I straight up work for a while while that coat dries. So far today I've done a base coat and one coat of color, which is now pretty much totally dry, but I'll wait to do color coat #2 and top coat until after lunch. Then by the time I'm ready to go home, everything will be dry and safe. I am telling you, it is great. Plus, with my actually strong, thick pregnancy nails, they'll keep looking great for up to 2 weeks, at which point I will take off all the polish before bed and then re-paint them the next day at work! I sit near 2 smokers who definitely spend more time on smoking breaks than I do on my nails, so I figure it's a parallel activity.

I started painting my nails again about a month ago, and I've decided I'll keep up with it through Baby Arrival Day, after which I will want to have clean, bare, short nails for a while. Probably a long while. So for now, I'm treating myself!

Speaking of treating myself, I think this is a symptom of another thing I love about being pregnant: I feel better and more comfortable with my body now than I probably ever have! I was hoping I'd get the "cute, round belly" type of pregnant body and not the "fat everywhere" type, and my wish came true! I love not having to worry about sucking in my belly, love handles, etc. and it makes me enjoy doing my hair and wearing eye makeup and painting my nails that much more.

Now my next hope is that breastfeeding and babywearing and baby playing are effective at getting my body into better shape than it was pre-pregnancy...a girl can dream!

Oh Baby

2011-11-04T14:10:00.002-04:00

So. Wow. It's been about 4.5 months since I last blogged. I have been meaning to remedy that, but...well, I guess I've just felt fulfilled by twitter and facebook. It sure is easier to post pictured on facebook, let me tell you!

But I've been feeling like I needed a longer format, and after last night, I knew it was time. Last night my wonderful choir family at Trinity Lutheran Church threw us our first baby shower. There isn't anyone reading this blog who wouldn't already know that I'm pregnant, but seeing as I haven't actually posted that on the blog yet, just in case: Yup! We've known since about a month before my previous post. I'm just a few days shy of 6 months. 3rd trimester! Ack! So crazy. I also just noted today that I'm officially under 100 days until my due date (although most likely still over 100 days until my actual delivery date, judging from family and friends' experiences with first pregnancies).

As it is for many couples, pregnancy has been pretty surreal. Finding out that IT'S A GIRL was a big milestone for me, along with seeing her squirming all around during the ultrasound, and beginning to feel movement shortly after that was another one. But last night, getting all these baby gear gifts, and especially holding up adorable outfit after adorable outfit? That really brought it home for me. Especially after we got home and stacked it all in the designated Baby Gear Area in the 2nd bedroom, and I revisited some of the outfits. I was holding them up and realizing that in a little over 3 months, I am going to have a little person to put into these outfits. To fill up these outfits. I will be holding these outfits with a warm, squirmy little body in them. And that will be my daughter! It's amazing to think about, and mind-boggling.

My choir family at Trinity has made pregnancy special from the beginning, not just by throwing a shower for us. This is not a replacement for thank-you cards (don't roll your eyes at me, Jane H, I WILL write you another thank-you card whether you like it or not!), but seeing as I can't write a whole exposition in every little card, I wanted to share it here. I have loved hearing everyone's stories about their experiences, their memories of being pregnant and having their children, their advice, and their weekly inquiries about how I'm feeling. I loved choir before, but this whole experience has just magnified everything! It's been such a blessing.

So anyway...I have a whole lot more to muse about my pregnancy experience, picking items for a registry, planning for the nursery, and expectations/hopes/wishes for starting life as a family once Baby Girl arrives, but my wonderful choir family was at the top of my mind. I've had an amazing support group of friends and family members as well, but I feel better about my ability to express my appreciation to each of them individually. Now to see if Facebook is still slurping up my blog posts so that I can tag all the choir people...

Hopefully more posts to come soon! I want to get back in the habit before February, when I'll want to start, you know, documenting my daughter's life.

Summer Fun

2011-06-20T08:12:00.003-04:00

It is upon us! Paul is starting his 3rd week at camp, my parents are on vacation in Peru, and I am feeling like I might not be able to handle taking care of our house all alone AND getting done some of the big crafty & DIY projects AND keeping up with the garden! But so far I've held it together, just haven't gotten much extra done.

Visiting Rachel was awesome...I had so much fun that I didn't even take any photos.

I have all the stuff for making the headboard, now I just have to DO it...that might get started this Thursday evening, we'll see.

Last night I finally harvested a Bok Choi, which had TWO little caterpillars nesteled in its leaves laying little green eggs that looked like fish roe. I washed them all off and threw away the worst bits, and everything ended up just peachy. I sauteed some sesame seeds and onion in a bit of canola oil, then added the chopped up bok choi and some sesame oil, and sauteed that until it was all soft. Then I added the quinoa I had cooked, a little bit more oil, and stir-fried it like rice. It was pretty delicious! I am definitely going to start buying more quinoa. Too bad it's quite a bit more expensive than rice...but...worth it, because it's a heck of a lot healthier. And we'll still use rice plenty often too, I'm sure.

Saturday, Paul's friend Nate was in town, so we took him with us to a gathering at the B's house, where we ate a lot of delicious food and played foursquare. No, not the social networking stalker app, but the elementary school playground game. No kidding. It was so much fun! Rachel got the idea somehow, and invited us all over, to great success. It was a perfect party game because it rotates players pretty quickly, so everyone could play without having to stand around watching for long, and it was easy to rotate between kid-watching and playing as well, because it didn't matter much who was in when. And there's the perfect amount of movement so that you are getting some excercise without feeling like you can't keep up, and best of all, it wasn't a game that anyone felt like they were at a disadvantage - everyone could play well enough to make it to the top spot now and then! It was really a ton of fun. I still need to upload the pics I took.

This Wednesday I'll finally spend visiting Nawakwa, so I am definitely looking forward to that!

Update: Garden fresh meals

2011-05-31T16:36:00.008-04:00

Dinner Saturday (while our power was out for going on 48 hours): Parmesan flatbread made from pizza dough thawed from the freezer-cum-plastic storage cupboard, paired with a huge salad of fresh lettuces from the garden topped with diced cucumber, chic peas, green olives, flax seeds, and gazebo room dressing. Delicious!

Yesterday's lunch: a wrap consisting of homemade hummus (Paul is such a pro at this now!), the rest of the diced cucumber from Saturday's dinner, more green olives, broccosprouts deli blend (I am so in love...haven't attempted growing my own sprouts yet though), and of course more baby greens from the garden!

Today's lunch: another wrap with the same hummus, half an avocado (they're way too expensive but I love them sooooooo much), sprouts, and another huge bunch of fresh lettuce picked this morning!

Witness the lettuce in all its glory:

I really love taking Juno out in the backyard in the morning and letting her run around for a bit while I pick lettuce. Although this morning she just came and sat near me (as long as I wasn't looking at her too much), so she must have still been tired from being out for a long time yesterday afternoon in the heat. But regardless, it's a great way to start the morning, and I hope I can keep it up all summer!

Juno enjoying the backyard while we garden:

I took a lot of garden pics yesterday, so now I'm all caught up with documentation of what's growing. All I still need to do (besides, you know, tend the garden on a daily basis) is get some more garden stakes to label the squash and tomato varieties. Soon!

Update: Food & more

2011-05-16T14:19:00.003-04:00

I have now harvested Tah Tsai from my garden three times, and every time I go back there's more than there was before the last time I harvested! I've also picked a little bit of baby spinach, and I know there will be more of that soon, because everything is growing like crazy lately.

The Tah Tsai (plus a bit of spinach) I used in a pasta salad on Saturday, and again for lunch today! My lunch today was awesome. It didn't make a pretty picture, so you'll have to settle for a description: I covered the bottom of my medium glass pyrex with tah tsai leaves, spread a few big spoonfulls of Paul's homemade hummus on top of that, spread half of the remaining broccosprouts on top of that, followed by a layer of half a sliced avocado, a sprinkle of salt and pepper, a tiny drizzle of EVOO and red wine vinegar (because the hummus is a few days old and getting a bit dry), and topped with a few more tah tsai leaves to keep my container lid from getting stuck to everything. When I opened it up for lunch, I took a knife to everything to make it easier to eat, which also mixed everything all up and made it look really ugly. But it was SO DELICIOUS. It was rich and filling, and I didn't even add any bread! Granted, it had plenty of fat, but it was all GOOD fat from plants! And protein, and lots of other plant-y goodness from dark green tah tsai leaves and sprouts! I feel really super about that meal, and I'm going to have it again tomorrow with the rest of the sprouts, other half of the avocado, and additionally freshly-harvested tah tsai.

The best part: I picked the tah tsai THIS MORNING while I had Juno out. Talk about fresh! Makes me happy.

It also makes me happy that I have now used my harvest to feed a houseguest, share a dish with a bunch of friends at a party, and feed myself lunch! All by mid-May, before the planting is even finished!

Speaking of planting: Tomorrow evening, Tuesday, we will be making our (probably final) trip to Noggle's to get tomatoes, peppers, cucumber, zucchini, butternut squash, herbs, and maybe one or two other veggies, all of which I will plant on Wednesday (my day off! I love saying that), at which point we will be finished with planting things for the season. Yay! Actually I will sprinkle some more lettuce seeds once the current batch is all harvested, but that hardly counts, since sprinkling them is really all there is to it. Tomatoes will go by the house under the bedroom window, all other veggies will go in the garden, and herbs will go in the window basket we got at Frey's in Lebanon with our Groupon. Then I will be able to harvest the herbs by opening up my dining room window! How awesome is that? And they will be totally safe from rabbits. So this year, my cilantro should survive the seedling stage.

One more progress update: I baked bread! Paul talked me through it, but I did all the work. I've made bread before, but never such a nice simple, basic recipe, and with the right materials, i.e. real bread flour. It makes such a difference. Bringing the dough together only takes a few minutes, and then kneading it by hand for about 10 minutes seems like a lot of work, but really? Spread over two days, the entire actual labor put into it is probably no more than 30-45 minutes. And there is a magical moment as you're kneading the dough when it changes from kind of lumpy to smooth and elastic, and you know it's ready to rise. It is really cool.

Next up in the bread department: add-ins, different flour, and having another go at maintaining a sourdough starter in the fridge.

I'll take some more garden pics tonight or tomorrow, and then again on Wednesday after all the remaining plants are in! Like I said, everything has been growing at really unbelievable rates, and I'll definitely have more tah tsai to harvest for lunch tomorrow, plus maybe even some baby lettuces and mustard greens (both of which probably need to be thinned out). The cabbages are all getting huge, except for one that for some reason is still kind of dinky by comparison, but hopefully that just means that the cabbage harvest will be nice and staggared. I don't know what I'd do with 4 heads all at once! Make a lot of asian slaw and fish tacos, I suppose. That's probably what I'll be doing regardless.

First Wednesday Off

2011-05-11T20:13:00.000-04:00

My first Wednesday off of work for my alternative work schedule was a total success. The weather was gorgeous, so after sleeping in until 8:30, I made two over easy fried egg sandwiches for me and Paul, and then I spent the rest of the morning outside.

I planted the mini daffodils Sarah sent home with me after Jeneane's baby shower, and then filled up the big white pots they had been sitting in and planted the bok choi and kale seedlings I started from seed, along with the last two cabbage plants, because I think it will look really pretty all together until I eat it all!! And I'm all about my veggies being ornamental and bringing beauty to my backyard until I eat them! My hands were way too grubby to take pictures of the newly potted veg, but here's one I took earlier of a kholrabi looking fine:

Then I had my hair cut and styled, and went straight to PENNDOT to renew my driver's license. As I hoped, this is my best DL photo ever. Totally the way to do it. Side note: how is the DMV that busy on a random Wednesday afternoon? I thought I'd beat the crowds by going in the middle of a weekday. It was still pretty quick and painless though.

Then I came home and went with Paul to finally move our safe deposit box from New Cumberland to a bank closer to our house, and on the way to open the new box we stopped at Starbucks for half-price Frappuccinos (3-5:30pm daily through May 15...Starbucks should probably be paying me). Of course that was delightful. I have been 100% disciplined and have not stopped at starbucks at all, even on my most crabby mornings when I am craving it, which is especially amazing since I drive right past it every day. Most days I have to sit and wait at the traffic light and stare at Starbucks, often with the entrance just an easy swoop to the left instead of continuing to wait at the light. I went for my free coffee on Earth Day, and haven't been back until today. Totally worth it, and I enjoyed my frap even more since I haven't had one in so long!

We came home and put bacon in the oven for BLTs, and I even picked a few leaves of baby spinach from the garden to augment the lettuce! Plus we were eating them on Paul's fabulous home baked bread. Then Paul went with me to training class with Juno, because next week he's going to take her on his own so I can go to bell choir rehearsal.

So now we're home for the evening and since we've already eaten dinner (quite early for us), we are looking forward to a calm, lazy evening catching up on some Big Bang Theory and finishing off a pint of Hans Vanilla Bean Frozen Custard! I am definitely going to enjoy this alternate work schedule all summer. It turns out getting up at 6am is easy when you go to bed before 10pm and it's already starting to get light at 6. Also? I think I could be happy running a small farm for a living...anyone want to help me with the start-up capital? If you do, you can have free veggies for life! Just look at my handiwork thus far:

Ambitions NOT for this Summer

2011-05-05T15:05:00.000-04:00

In addition to all the things I want to do this summer, there are some much bigger projects on my wish-list that are going to have to wait, probably for years or longer; and my ideal wish for these spaces will probably never happen:

Re-do the bathroom: At the very least, I'd like to remove the sliding door on the tub/shower, re-tile everything, and add storage above the toilet. But since the half-bath off the master bedroom is right behind the main bathroom, the main bathroom doesn't have a window; in fact, some of the other ranches in the neighborhood that are otherwise identically laid out to ours have only one bathroom that is the size of both of ours...so I think it might be awesome to totally demo both bathrooms and the adjoining wall, and make it into one bigger bathroom. It might even work to keep the door from the master bedroom as well as the door from the hallway, and furthermore might make room for a stall shower AND a bathtub/shower, plus 2 sink/vanities, so there would be plenty of room for a growing family. But that would require hiring a contractor, whereas re-tiling we could do ourselves, so it's probably not in the cards.

Update the kitchen: Our kitchen has plenty of floor space, and very high-quality hardwood, hand-made cabinets. I'd prefer a less-reddish wood tone, but my Dad says that God will strike me down if I paint over the gorgeous oak, so they're staying as-is for now. The countertop is pretty ugly laminant, so I really want to do something about that. But aside from those possible updates, there isn't much counter space; there's an entire blank wall that could easy have base and wall cabinets for added storage; the oven and dishwasher are both half-sized; and there's a totally supurfluous wall creating a smaller opening between the kitchen and dining room. So again, if I had the means, I'd love to update the cabinets, knock out the wall between the kitchen and dining room, and just kind of extend the kitchen to make it more seamless with the dining room, including adding more cabinets and counters.

Build a patio: Our carport has a door out to the backyard, and the shed off the back of the carport has a garage door facing the backyard. I would love to add a cobblestone patio that starts outside the shed's garage door and extends, with a gently curved edge, across about half the back of the house, with possibly some built-in benchs and a cuppola covered with vining plants for some light shade. We might actually do this eventually; we'd really love to have an outdoor seating and eating area other than our carport, which is nice but still feels too dark and inside-ish.

Add direct access to the backyard: I doubt this will ever happen, but if by some miracle we did update the kitchen as extensively as I'd love to with the knocking down of walls, I think it would be fabulous to add a sliding door to the backyard in place of the dining room windows. But for this reason, if we ever do build that patio, I want it to extend to just beyond these windows so that if we ever have the means, we could put in this sliding door.

Some days, I just hate our main bathroom so much that I feel the urge to take a sledge hammer to it the first week Paul is away at camp, so that I have no choice but to re-tile the bathtub and remove the sliding doors. A girl can dream...

Progress: Upholstery

2011-05-04T13:02:00.001-04:00

I felt a flash of extra-overwhelmed-ness this morning, like "how will I get even one or two things from my Summer to-do list finished," until I realized that by the middle of June, I'll have no more external evening commitments - Juno's training class will be over, and so will choir rehearsals for the summer. So the fact that I haven't had time or energy to even knit half a row of an unfinished project before turning off the light and going to sleep, or, say, do some more laundry, let alone make any small progress towards the many big things I want to do, is understandable. It will all get better once other commitments drop away, and once Paul leaves for camp and I am free to go to sleep in a quiet house at 9:30 or 10:00pm.

To keep track of everything, I've created a new page on the blog (see it up there, below the header? It's called Summer 2011 Projects) that has the same list as the previous post! Also, I am making a vow to do at least one thing every day that moves me closer to some item on the list. Even if it's a super-small thing, I will do something!

Today, I created a new Pinterest board to collect fabric samples and upholstry resources, since my list includes THREE (re)upholstry projects. Here's the first fabric candidate I found:

Source: fabric.com via Meredith on Pinterest

So that counts as a small step towards my goal of reupholstering the old wooden chair in the living room! What do you think?

Summer Ambitions

2011-05-03T17:02:00.002-04:00

I am getting REALLY excited for this summer! My excitement is bubbling up today because I have made it official at work that I am going to work 9 hour days so that I can take off every other Wednesday, and I am using vacation days to take off most other Wednesdays through the first weekend in September.

I will be using many of my Wednesdays off to spend time at Camp Nawakwa, where my hubby will be spending his entire summer, but I have A LOT of other ambitions for my summer as well! I decided that I'd be exponentially more likely to do certain things if I actually scheduled them on my calendar, especially the things that involve other people. I just wrote a bit about this in an e-mail to my mom (as I scheduled a Summer Ambition with her!) and thought to myself, this should be in a blog post!

So here is what I have officially scheduled as of today:

Training classes with Juno, which started last Wednesday and run every Wednesday evening through June 8th
A road trip to visit my dear friend Rachel in Raleigh, North Carolina the second weekend in June
My first sewing lesson & quality time with my awesome Mom the first Wednesday after she's done with school, which also happens to be only a few days before she and my Dad leave on their summer vacation to South America. Hopefully we will move on to a second and maybe even third sewing lesson. I feel like I'm ready to take on sewing! I have daydreams about handbags with perfectly placed pockets, linings and zippers for knitted items, and fresh pillow covers for my Ikea Tullsta chairs!
A trip to visit my dear friend Crystal in Alexandria, Virginia the second weekend in July

There are tons of other things I'm hoping to do this summer, including:

Gardening. Duh. This should probably go in the "already scheduled" list, since the garden is already planted and I will definitely need to care for it almost daily, but since it's something that I can't officially schedule and will require discipline to keep up with, I'm putting it in this list.
Eating meals & packing lunches that use whatever's growing in my garden to the fullest. This will mean planning ahead, making some creative salads to pack over several days, eating more veggies than I would choose to eat if I relied entirely on my carb cravings to make my decisions, and a lot more discipline.
Bake bread instead of buying it, and use it for copious sandwiches (see previous bullet). Paul was on a bread-making kick for a while, so hopefully sometime in May we can make bread together so he can pass on his knowledge to me. I'd love to get a sourdough starter going in my fridge, but I'm not going to hold myself to that, so let's just focus on making some plain ol' white bread for now.
Finish cleaning out and organizing the basement, and in tandem with that, reorganize the office/3rd bedroom, in pursuit of my goal to own less stuff
Paint the second bedroom and hallway, including trim, and finally paint the trim in our bedroom
Paint the nightstand and bookcase in the second bedroom, something that coordinates with the rest of the room, and possibly painting the vanity-turned-changing-table too? But that is up for debate.
Hang curtains in the second bedroom
Paint the fugly fugly vanity in the second bathroom
Paint, fill, and hang all picture frames, mainly on the entry wall in the living room and in the dining room
Mount the huge antique-style world map I got for Paul for his birthday last October on the wall above our low dresser in our bedroom (once I confirm that it will fit on that wall...I think it will).
Revamp the orange wood-framed armchair we got from Poppy - I LOVE this chair, but it needs new fabric that isn't cracked and plasticy, and I think once I have removed the current covering I will take the opportunity to sand down the frame and re-stain it too, like almost black to go with the couch but not painted so the wood grain can still show through. Then maybe I can find a fabric that has some brown tones like the Tullsta chairs and ottomans, and then it will help tie all the furniture together!
Reupholster the seats of the dining room chairs, and possibly the back as well (but I'm not at all sure about the backs yet). Doing the seats will be easy, though. Possibly using the same fabric as for the chair in the previous bullet.
I almost forgot to include a project close to the top of my list, even with the other mentions of reupholstering things! I am going to make an upholstered headboard for our bed. Hopefully with some button tufting and everything! And if it goes well, I might even make a second one for the second bedroom.

Wow. It is going to be a busy summer, and I can't wait to get started! Well, I can't wait to keep going, since I have already started a few things. Can I do it?? Probably not everything, but most of it?

Parsing some feelings

2011-04-27T17:12:00.000-04:00

This post turned out a lot more incoherent than I wanted it to, but I'm posting it anyway. Maybe I'll try again in a few months when I have some additional related news to share...in the mean time, don't take offense, just read it for what it is: a mind dump of feelings and thoughts that I'm still in the process of working out.

A year ago this week, Paul and I started officially trying to have a baby. It took us four months to get pregnant for the first time. Four weeks from now is when I would have been due.

A lot of people already know all this, but a lot of people don't. And that's exactly how it should be; I had all the support I needed, and any more would have been too much. I was only 7 weeks when it happened, so although it was very upsetting, we were not as devestated as people often wanted to assume we must be. That was, perhaps, even harder than dealing with the feelings we were having: it was unsettling to feel like I wasn't anywhere near as sad as some people thought I should be. I wasn't worried that I wasn't sad enough, I was just worried that it would give people a bad impression of me! I was exactly as sad as I needed to be.

I'm having some sad feelings this week again because of the timing. There have been a handful of negative pregnancy tests since November when my cycle came back, and each of those was a bummer, but not much more so than the first three negative tests before I was pregnant the first time. In addition to the timing of a year since we started trying and getting close to my original due date, this past month I was 2 days late, so that negative test was a bit sadder than usual, but still fine.

See, the thing is, I know I am able to get pregnant. I wasn't in love with the pea-sized little tadpole in my uterus; I was in love with the concept of being pregnant, but that all happened last October, and now that it's almost 6 months later? I'm over it. Really. So I know it's going to happen again soon. And all the gardening and planting and planning and yard work we have been doing? I have been getting SO MUCH satisfaction out of that, out of watching our plans turn into reality, and knowing that all my hard work is going to produce lots of fresh veggies for me to enjoy this summer. What if I was in the middle of my first trimester right now, during the most critical preparation and planting period? Paul has been working himself ragged as it is, so without my work on weekends and evenings, I don't think we could have gotten to this point with the garden. I am going to have to do a lot of hard work by myself while Paul is away at camp this summer, and I'm hoping to be pregnant by then, but I wouldn't trade these past few weeks if I had the choice. Especially if I do get pregnant within the next month or three, I will consider the timing to be perfect.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the feelings surrounding pregnancy and childbirth. I haven't really experienced either yet, but my focus stems from the path I'm on, and from watching many of my closest friends go through both, seven times now just counting the people I'm closest to! I feel blessed to be surrounded by so many growing families. It makes me so happy to get to know my friends' children and watch them grow, and to hear all their mom stories and know what an amazing support system I'll have once I join them. Their births were all different: some fairly straightforward, some difficult and traumatizing, some c-sections, some with drugs, some without. I also feel blessed to have friends who were willing to talk about their experiences openly, and a mom who was willing to tell me about her experiences.

When I picture my own pregnancy and imagine giving birth, I still picture it as idyllic. Discomfort and pain, sure, but not too hard to deal with when you consider the reward you get at the end of it all. And I think, no matter how many stories I hear, it wouldn't change that daydream very much. I'm always going to imagine the best case scenario; it's just my nature. But I also know that when I do run into problems, complications, and all the other difficulties that I'm sure to experience in some measure, having heard all these stories will help me cope mentally and physically.

The thing that I struggle with most at this point isn't the actual feelings I'm having: I feel quite confident in my ability to feel and cope with any less-than-ideal situations I'm currently experiencing, and I'm comfortably, contemplatively moving through the slight melancholy from the anniversaries of trying and due date, mixed with the joyousness of Spring and producing beautiful and useful things with my hands in my garden. Maybe an outsider would say that I feel so driven to knit and crochet things for other people, and put so much work into our garden, as a result of our un-success so far at starting a family, but I don't think it's that deep; I know I just enjoy doing all this creating and producing, and I would enjoy it no matter what happened in the past year; it just so happens to exist in parallel with the other stuff. ~~Cum hoc ergo propter hoc~~ Correlation does not imply causation.

No, the thing I think I struggle with the most is my perception of how other people expect me to feel, and how my actual feelings, since they don't jive with their expectations, will cause weirdness that I'll have to deal with. And not expectations of me specifically, but in reading others' stories on blogs I follow, and hearing how people talk about pregnancy and birth, the prevailing attitude of society doesn't jive for me, and it worries me on behalf of my future self once I do get pregnant again and join that world.

I'm also not talking about the popular back-to-nature movement of home births, birth without drugs, anti-c-section sentiments, anti-formula-feeding, etc etc. I agree that birth has become over-medicalized and over-commercialized; I want to have as natural a birth as possible, at a hospital with a NICU, and then I want to breasfeed my baby exclusively for 6 months, and make all my own baby food. Sure I want to do all of those things, and I will try very hard to make it all happen, but if I'm not able to achieve some of those things, I will not feel horrible guilt about it. I will know that I've done my best and made the best decisions I can for the physical, mental, and emotional health of my baby AND myself. Because if I'm not mentally or physically well, then my baby won't be either. A friend of mine was unable to breastfeed after the first two weeks with her first child, and she struggled against attitudes that made her feel guilty because of it. That is ridiculous. But I also see red when I hear about women who were all but discouraged from breastfeeding by the lack of support and/or pushing of formula free samples. Basically, either extreme is bad, which is pretty much my feeling on a range of topics, from healthcare to politics to religion. I feel essentially the same way about c-sections too.

But what I'm trying to get at isn't the mechanics; it's the sentiment of "I loved my baby immediately and unconditionally, and I would do anything to save it." That's what, historically, we've learned to expect. But there's also abundant sources of stories and support groups surrounding traumatic birth experiences, and for women who do have very upsetting experiences during pregnancy and birth, and/or who don't experience quite the level of absolute imidiate love for their babies, it has become easy (at least in the online/blogging community) to find an outlet to share those feelings with others who had similar experiences. But I worry that now that opposite extreme is becoming too emphasized as well. When I read a birth story on a blog and the birth stories of a hundred women in the comments section, every one is either perfect or traumatic; filled with immediate unconditional love from the moment they knew they were pregnant, or struggling with difficult bonding. The traumatic ones sometimes have the unconditional love, but my point is that there's never any mention of middle ground for either feeling.

I'm hopeful that it's largely the filter of the internet giving me this impression, because the stories from a few of my friends have been much more middle-of-the-road: labor was long and tiring, and it was a tough call whether or not to get that epidural; it was surreal to hold that baby for the first time, and breastfeeding wasn't easy at first, but now things are getting better, and I am so happy to have my sweet baby in my arms and so in love. And in the ensuing months, even while they're still newborns, sometimes you want to scream and sometimes you're as happy as can be. But online and in some conversations, it makes me sad to realize that parenthood has become another issue where there are two sides to every issue and you have to be firmly on one side or the other; it's another casualty to extremism.

There's one other big area where I get apprehensive, and that's religion. I've heard this discussed in relation to other topics (major illnesses, natural disasters, etc), but just today in reading one mommy blogger's terrifying birth story with a happy ending, I saw many commenters say, in so many words, that they hoped this experience made the parents realize that God is working in their lives and loves them and has big plans for them. Here is my problem with that sentiment: What does it mean for the parents whose stories end tragically? The baby dies, the mom dies, they're never going to be able to have children, etc? Obviously those same commentors wouldn't say that God doesn't love those people. They'd probably say something like God has a different plan for them, but that rings false to me too. I want people to know that I believe God's plans for us are unknowable, and it mostly doesn't make sense to me to point out God's hand in any one specific event, whether it's joyous or tragic. I don't know how to reconcile it, but I do know that it's not like that. Athiests have the same kinds of tragic and joyous stories as Christians or any other religion; God isn't sitting up there deciding how your pregnancy turns out based on how your life is supposed to go; these things happen for the same reason you stepped in a puddle on your way into work this morning, or found a dime in the parking lot at the grocery store. I don't believe in predetermination or destiny, and statements about God's plan as they relate to specific outcomes of major events imply predetermination. You can't have free will and God deciding your daily life at the same time. I'll say it again: I have no idea how it actually works, I just know it doesn't work like that.

We're all just trying to make the best decisions we can based on what we know and what we're feeling and what our intuition is telling us. You can give advice until your face is blue, but don't pass judgement on other people.

Crafty garden

2011-04-20T13:42:00.001-04:00

I have two new posts up on my craft blog!
I also have a lot of gardening in my future, but for now our big reveal is a bit underwhelming, even though it represents hours of hard work (mostly Paul's) over days, culminating this past Sunday when we finally finished moving all the compost from the driveway to our garden:

That beautiful wooden border? is Paul's weeks of hard work and skill, and by turning our garden into a raised bed, we're hoping to take our veggie growing to the next level. And also overcome the problem of lots of grass creeping into our garden. And above when I said *we* finished moving all that dirt? I really meant Paul. I pushed a grand total of one wheelbarrow full of compost from the driveway to the garden, and Paul did the rest. But on Sunday, I raked it all out. And as soon as I can, I will be planting the lettuces and cabbage, asparagus, spinach, and kohlrabi that are ready and waiting to keep the lonely rhubarb company. Can you see him in the corner? Here he is:

This is his second year in our garden, so we should be able to harvest stalks for pie and other yumminess!

AFTER we had worked in the garden and the rest of the yard for hours on Sunday afternoon, I used the remaining daylight to finally repot all my houseplants, and they sorely needed it. I had moved the three biggest plants into big white pots from Ikea a couple of weeks ago, but the rest were waiting patiently, and now they're all happy in their new homes:

I really love all my houseplants! Can you believe the pointsettia still has so much red? It seems pretty happy in my north-facing picture window, so hopefully a real pot to call its own will make it even happier! The peace lily in the middle has yet to perk up, but I'm still hopeful. And my favorite are the succulents on the right: the giant aloe, and the trumpet jade from a clipping my mom gave me over two years ago.

Lots more gardening pics to come, hopefully this weekend if the weather cooperates at all! Are you planting anything this spring? Edible, decorative, or both? What's your favorite veggie, and if I grow it in my garden, will you help me eat it later this summer?

Online Organization

2011-04-06T23:55:00.001-04:00

It's really not as important as IRL organization, but I felt the urge to get my cyber-self all up to date, and now I pretty much have. Let me know what you think of the new blog look and content:

Tabs along the top include "Inspiration," which feeds in from my new Tumblr page that I plan to use to link to anything I run across on the internet that I want to keep for future inspiration! I also plan to gradually add a few typical bloggy tabs, like the 100 Things, a photo tour of our house, and one or two other things...
The list of my favorite blogs to read is still in the sidebar to the right, as usual sorted by newest content
I also added a list of links that encompasses every site where I have a presence on teh interwebs. Check it out! And if you need some circular bamboo knitting needles, or a computer programming book, or a few other things, check out my Amazon store, where I have already successfully divested myself of a bunch of unneeded house clutter (see previous post) and made a few bucks to boot!

I've also read a couple of books in quick succession, and am started on a third, which is A LOT more reading than I've done recently; also happy to say that 2 out of 3 have been on my Nook! Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese was amazingly wonderful, and you should definitely go obtain a copy immediately and read it. One of Our Thursdays Is Missingby Jasper Fforde is the newly-released 6th in his Thursday Next series, and I enjoyed it, but it wasn't my fav. And finally, I just started Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, which I have managed to protect myself from finding out anything about, because I know it's got some startling stuff in it that would have lessened my enjoyment of the book if I had known ahead of time. So far I'm loving it, and it's a page-turner just because you have to figure out what the heck is going on in the subtly different world of the novel. See the Goodreads link in the aforementioned sidebar.

So that's the news of late. Reading has usurped knitting, although I did also get a portion of my houseplant re-potting done last weekend. Since Never Let Me Go is my own (e)book and not a library book, perhaps I will intersperse it with some knitting...or crocheting, since I now have a baby shower to prepare for by April 30th!

Stuff... and having less of it

2011-03-12T00:48:00.001-05:00

It's been building up for years now, gradually, but recently more quickly: the desire to have less stuff. Of course, it's always competing with the desire to get more stuff: new cell phones, an e-reader, home decor items, kitchen gadgets, clothing, jewelry, craft supplies...the list of things I want to get is pretty much endless.

A bunch of things over the years, and a few things pretty recently, have kept the idea of living with less (and being happier as a result) in my mind, sometimes in the background, but more and more often coming to the forefront and presenting itself as quite possibly the best and first solution to being a happier, healthier, less stressed and more financially stable person.

A few years ago, I heard about my cousin's brother-in-law giving away a lot of his stuff. I also heard about Tiny Houses for the first time, and they've been popping up from various sources ever since, including just today when a blog post linked me to the Tiny House Blog and this recently hand-built trailer that just looks so, so cool to me. I wish I was the kind of person who had the desire and the discipline to simplify my life so much that I could live in a tiny house, but I know I am not that person, and I never will be; however, I think I am the kind of person who can learn to recognize what stuff I want to get that will actually improve my life and bring me joy, and what stuff will just take up space in my home and in my brain and add stress to my life, taking more than it is giving.

In addition to my recent reminder of tiny houses, a bunch of other things have me contemplating all my stuff and how much of it I don't need or want, including but not limited to:

My very good friend @kellypens is giving one thing to charity for every day of Lent this year. If this beautiful mom of 2 who is also in school full-time, in campus housing with her family of 4, living on one income (her hubby's) can give 40 things to charity, how much could I give away?
Paul started working on the "finished" half of the basement yesterday, ripping up (old, hideously orange) carpet and scraping up the bits of padding stuck to the cement. We need to drylock the walls, fix a crack in the cement floor, and paint the floor so that it can eventually be a cozy office/TV/playroom. This has me thinking about the boxes and boxes of stuff stacked in the unfinished half of the basement, full of things that haven't seen the light of day in years. Some of them have moved with me from college to Virginia, back to PA to our apartment in New Cumberland, and now to our house that we own and plan to live in for the next 5 to 10 years; some of it has lived in my parents' basement until we bought this house, at which point my dad dropped it off on our carport, and we dumped it unceremoniously in our basement. Yes, a lot of this stuff has years of nostalgia attached to it, stretching back to my childhood...but it's in a box. In my basement. Taking up space. If I don't do something now, its most likely future is to continue to take up space in a box until we move to another house, where it will then continue to take up space in a box until I grow old and die and my offspring are forced to pay some robot from the year 2075 to haul it to the landfill on the dark side of the moon. With a future like that, what good is nostalgia doing me?
On a related note, I have been thinking quite a lot lately about my future offspring, as you are almost certainly aware if you have ever met me. One thing that has occurred to me, and keeps occurring to me, is that the rate of growth of the amount of stuff we own is going to increase exponentially once we have a baby. I've seen it happen to my friends and cousin: when you have a baby, people give you stuff. LOTS of stuff. So if I figure I could get rid of half the stuff currently sitting in my basement, but I don't do it now, then it seems to me that a year from now (at which point I am really hoping to have a baby, or at least be anticipating the arrival of one) my job will be, like, twenty times more difficult, and by 5 years from now it will be so insurmountable that I'll never be able to do it. So basically, these last few months before I'm expecting are my last chance to learn the art of keeping my stuff in check.
My wonderful and talented sister got a job. She will be moving into her first solo apartment, and since she's the younger sister and I did the whole living-on-my-own-for-the-first-time thing back in 2005, guess what? I got a lot of the extra stuff my parents had to give me. Well, now she needs it, which means Paul and I need to dig through some of the aforementioned boxes in the basement and collect all the extra things that she now needs to eat off of and cook with and sit on in her new apartment. And if I'm going to be doing all that work anyway, and getting rid of some stuff in the bargain, I might as well keep going and get rid of more things than just the stuff Hannah will need!
I also have had a few semi-related experiences surrounding church, Camp Nawakwa, and my tenure on Trinity's senior pastor call committee that have really gotten me thinking about stewardship, not just in terms of me giving money to the church or camp, but in terms of how I manage my own possessions because of how that impacts my ability to give my time and money to the church over the course of the rest of my life. I need to get my stewardship of myself and my house in order so that I can be a better steward in the world.

Part of succeeding in my goal of not owning anything that doesn't make my life better is thinking all these things and coming to these conclusions about what I want to do, but an even bigger part is holding on to the motivation all these thoughts have given me, and being able to re-motivate myself day after day over the many weeks and months it's going to take to actually get rid of all my extraneous stuff. It's hard work! I told Paul what I wanted to start this weekend, and that my two main areas of focus were going to be the basement and the office (our 3rd bedroom, the smallest, is currently an office, but has actually become more of a dumping ground for papers and random items that aren't suitable for basement storage but aren't in daily use that we want to keep out of the way. It's basically a disaster zone of mess in here.), and Paul suggested (and I agreed) that the basement was the best place to start. But then Paul made plans to go hang out with our friend Matt tonight, and while I didn't want to waste my current level of motivation, I also didn't fancy the idea of being alone in the cold, dimly-lit basement on a Friday night, so I decided to unleash my energy on the office instead, where I could at least play some The Daily Show reruns from the last week on the computer while I worked. Well, aside from writing this blog post, I spent the entire evening (about three and a half hours) going through boxes and shelves and desks in the office, and it's still pretty much a disaster zone. That might have de-motivated me a bit, except that I produced two small boxes of stuff to get rid of, a medium-sized bag of trash, and a medium-large bag of recycleables. I freed up space in multiple storage boxes, including three plastic boxes that I can now use to organize our messy linen closet (it is nearly impossible to keep all those pill bottles, band-aid boxes, cleaners, and hygiene products organized!!) I also found our missing safe deposit box key! We had one of the two, which is all you need to access your stuff, but we haven't been able to close out our box in New Cumberland and move it to the bank near our house because we only had one of the two keys. Now we can make the move!

Tomorrow evening and Sunday afternoon I plan to continue with my purge and re-organization, moving to the basement as soon as the office is slightly more tidy. I feel like the motivation is here to stay, for a while at least, and I am hoping that my friends and family will read this post and talk about it with me, which will help me stay motivated as well. And that brings me to the final and most important part of achieving this goal, to own only good things: YOU. If you are reading this, I need you to support me! That means telling me when you hear stories about other people who are doing similar things, stories about things you might be doing, tips of people who need the kind of stuff I am getting rid of, and just general encouragement. And it means one more really BIG thing: NOT giving us any more stuff. Ever, for any reason. At least, not until it's stuff related to our impending parenthood, since I doubt anything could prevent my mom, sister, aunts, or in-laws from buying stuff for their future grandbaby/niecephew. This means when I turn 28 at the end of May, I do not want any birthday presents. When our anniversary rolls around in September, nothing then either! If you are walking through a really awesome flea market and something totally unique and wonderful catches your eye and you think, wow, Paul and Mer would really love that, I am asking you to just share it with us in words, but not give it to us. If you are at some store's going out of business sale, and you see the most amazing deal on an item that you think we could use, remind yourself that a $10 item that we are currently living perfectly happily without, even if it originally cost $90, does not make it any less true that we do not need that item, and NOT buying it will cost even less--ZERO dollars! Plus it will take up zero space in our house! In this same spirit, I am planning to extend our Christmas gift-giving strategy to the rest of this year and beyond: we will be giving homemade food or other homemade items only when there is any occasion to give a gift. The only other thing I can think of that fits the bill is a charitable donation in honor of the giftee; my favorite charity pick at this time would be to Camp Nawakwa to help pay off the land they purchased in 2008, and I hope you all will share your favorite charity causes with me.

All of this doesn't mean we won't be buying any material goods for ourselves. I am planning to purchase a new purse soon, because my current one is falling apart after 18 months of continuous use; Paul and I are also considering purchasing an internet-capable bluray player in the fall so that we can cancel our Netflix subscription and get our streaming video via Amazon Prime. If Paul can sell his motorcycle for a high enough price this Spring, we might use that money to buy a new MacBook, since we haven't had a truly up-to-date computer in the house in years. The idea is to get rid of more things than we're purchasing, so that we have a net decrease in the amount of stuff we own; to purchase fewer things going forward; and to learn to only purchase items that we know will make our lives better, whether through practicality, functionality, or just plain enjoyment, but not things that we will relegate to a messy corner of the office or a box in the basement within a few weeks once the novelty wears off. And if we can learn to do this and keep doing it, eventually we will now own any things beyond what we need to be the happiest versions of ourselves. Can you imagine life without that nagging stress of knowing you really need to clean out the basement and re-organize the office and the kitchen?? Wouldn't that be awesome?

And that's the story of my latest, dearest ambition.

Plans

2010-11-16T12:31:00.001-05:00

Wow you guys. I have been a horrible blogger. Never even posted the second half of our big vacation! Well, that will have to wait a bit longer, because right now I am at work waiting for queries to run and reports to download, and need to do something that won't add additional strain to my CPU: blogging!
I have a LOT of things in progress and just itching to get started at home. Big and small, crafty and home-improvement-y, take a look:

Things I am currently actually in the middle of and plan to finish in the near future:
- Crocheted shoes (which I made into boots) at the request of Mindy for Norah - just need to add buttons! Think Paul will be willing to stop by JoAnn Fabrics on our way home this afternoon?
UPDATE: I finished Norah's boots! See for yourself:

- A gift for another soon-to-arrive baby, not saying what in case Kelly reads this :-)
- Hang already-framed pictures in the living room

Projects I have mostly prepped for and am hoping to actually do in the not-too-distant future, like maybe during a few of my days off around Christmas:
- Painting the vanity in the 2nd bathroom to cover up the hideous white-streaked-with-gold fake marble laimate
- Painting the ceiling (blue) and walls (green) of the 2nd bedroom/future nursery
- Painting the bookcase and side table that live in the 2nd bedroom
- Using leftover paint samples to paint the canvas for some cheap coordinating art for the 2nd bedroom
- Re-pot some houseplants that are in sore need of it and find a new spot for the peace lily, which is looking sad and hasn't bloomed in ages
- Make some cool canned things to give away as Christmas presents
- Bake various cookies (same purpose as previous bullet)
- Get started on that knit onesie pattern I bought on Etsy

Other things I want to do soon, like before the holidays:
- Decorate inside and out for the holidays
- Purchase a living tree to be our Christmas tree for this and the next few years, until it gets too big. This project also includes finding/creating an appropriately decorative pot for the tree to live in. Maybe something big and square that I could cover to look like a Christmas present, so my tree would look like it is sitting on top of the biggest present under it? That would be cool.

Other projects I have in mind but probably won't get to until next year (hopefully early next year!):
- Make a tufted upholstered headboard for the 2nd bedroom
- Re-upholster the diningroom chairs
- Attempt the more-complicated re-upholstering of the awesome retro chair we got from Poppy. It is currently covered with dark orange plasticy fake leather that is cracked and old-looking. The color is actually perfect, but I want to go with something new and maybe slightly more modern-looking.
- Finally sort through and get rid of a lot of the old junk in our basement to make way for inevitable future accumulation

What about you? What non-every-day things are on your actual and hopeful to-do lists?

So Far

2010-08-13T23:12:00.000-04:00

We're on vacation!

So far, our road trip has taken us from home, where we made salsa to use up veggies from the garden the day before we left:

to Harriman, NY, where we hiked to the top of a mountain:

to NYC, where we visited some museums, Central Park, and Times Square:

to Boston, where we hiked the Freedom Trail all day and topped off our best day yet by meeting for dinner and drinks with Wes, Stephen, and Shaina:

Next we headed to Fort Ticonderoga, where we slept in a decent hotel for the first time, even though we checked out less than 12 hours after we checked in! The Fort was great, but my favorite part was the King's Garden:

And today we arrived in Colchester, a suburb north of Burlington, near Lake Champlain. The trip hear was cool, from Defiance Mountain overlooking Fort Ticonderoga, to some amazing views of the Vermont countryside with distant mountains and picture-perfect clouds:

We'll be here by Lake Champlain for our longest stretch yet, 3 nights, before heading to Montreal for 4 nights. After that we'll spend one night somewhere along the way home. For now, we're planning to take it very easy tomorrow and give our feet a much-needed rest by renting a canoe for the day and just drifting lazily around the lake.

Garden is planted!

2010-06-06T17:28:00.004-04:00

Before we start in on the garden, observe my de-barked dog barking:

Isn't she cute? She still only does it in that part of the yard, when I'm not too close by. She was outside with me all day while I planted the rest of the garden, from about 10:00 AM until 3:00 or so, and she barked on and off for the first hour or so, then forgot about it for most of the day, then barked a few more times in the afternoon, then curled up in a ball and napped until I took her inside.

On to gardening! It took me all day Saturday, but the garden is now completely planted. Nothing left for me to do but water, weed, and wait...and maybe put up a fence if the bunnies get to be a nuisance. And hopefully harvest, you know, eventually.

Speaking of harvesting, one of the tomatoes has two flowers, one of the pepper plants has a few fruits starting to form, and we are going to need to use some basil every week if we want to keep it from flowering! In the slide show you can see the lemon basil I planted already had flowers, so I cut all those off, and we'll wait a bit to harvest from that one.

In other news, this was the week of the mail-order shopping deliveries: we got the slipcovers we ordered from Bemz for our Ikea Tullsta chairs; I got the sandals I ordered: Teva Women's Mandalyn Ola Wedge Flip Flop, but I'm sending them back because they're too small; I got a replacement for my Nook because the page-turn button cracked on mine (it's a common problem), and I'm shipping the other one back; and I sold my copy of The Lost Symbol on Amazon now that I and everyone who wanted to borrow it is done. That was my first time ever selling anything on Amazon, and it was pretty great! I priced it the cheapest of the "like new" used copies, and it sold in less than 24 hours! I have the shipping label printed and it's boxed up and ready to ship, so tomorrow after work I will be stopping at the post office to ship the book and return my sandals, and at UPS to ship back my cracked Nook. Then there will be no more major purchases for us for a while!

Hopefully by next weekend there will be one or two sprouts from the seeds I planted too - wildflowers, lavender, hyssop, sunflowers, leeks, spinach, and pole beans. The only thing with no edible properties are the wildflowers, but if those come up (the seed packet is 2 years old) I will cut them and have fresh flowers inside all the time.

So chapter 1 of our gardening adventure is over...hopefully some interesting and encouraging growth will be visible over the next few weeks!

Juno Speaks

2010-06-03T14:50:00.001-04:00

While I was gardening yesterday evening, I had Juno in her harness attached to our clothesline in the backyard so she could hang out outside with me. I've been using this setup frequently since last Saturday, and she's getting used to it and obviously enjoys it -- she even figures out how to unwind herself pretty quickly if she gets her leash wrapped around a pole. It's a good setup.

You should also know, if you don't already, that Juno is debarked. She already was when we got her - the puppy mill that raised her and bred her must have done it to all their dogs that they weren't planning to sell. It means they surgically cut her vocal cords, and many people consider it cruel. Most dogs can still bark afterwards, just much more softly -- it sounds like a hoarse or whispered bark. Juno has never made a peep, so we assumed she couldn't, and we've always wondered if her inability to bark was part of the reason for her extreme timidity.

Well, last night, Juno remembered how to bark. She was on the opposite side of the yard from me, with her nose pointed challengingly towards the side yard and the street, barking like it was something she did every day. I could hear her clearly from the garden, but it wasn't until I looked at her and saw her barking that I realized what it was. She stopped when I said "Juno! You're barking!" but she started up again a few minutes later, and again after Paul came out to hear for himself.

She was back to her usual silent self all evening, but this morning I clipped her to the clothesline again while I watered the tomatoes, and after a few minutes she went back to the same spot, pointed her nose in the same direction, and practiced barking some more! This time I noticed that, while she's barking, her tail actually wags from side to side like a normal dog's -- something else we really haven't ever seen her do. A few months ago when she met a friendly bulldog I thought I saw her tail wag one time, but since it stopped immediately I couldn't be sure. So now all at once, it seems our little Juno has figured out how to wag her tail and bark.

Now that she's maybe starting to come out of her shell a bit, we will see more of the Juno we saw on Easter Sunday and I can get some more pictures like this one, where she isn't curled up into a sad and pathetic little ball!

I'm hoping to get a picture or video of her barking tomorrow evening or Saturday while I'm out planting the rest of our garden, so stay tuned for that, and for the next garden update I hope to post on Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon!

Gardening!

2010-05-30T18:41:00.015-04:00

Yesterday and today, I planted our garden!

We plan to buy more plants this Tuesday to fill in the rest of the vast amount of space, but I bought what you see here on Friday evening with my mom and Han, and planted some Saturday morning and the rest Sunday afternoon.

Here's what we have so far:
4 tomatoes, all different varieties
1 Sweet golden bell pepper
1 Jalapeno pepper
2 chives: 1 plain, 1 garlic
1 Oriental cucumber that will have long, skinny fruit
1 yellow summer squash
1 zucchini, bush variety
6 basil: 3 sweet, 1 big-leaf, 1 Thai sweet, and 1 unknown from my indoor pot
2 cilantro, but the smaller one was eaten to the ground so maybe only 1 cilantro

We plan to get on Tuesday:
3 more basil to fill in that square
probably more cilantro
more herbs in general
4-6 more peppers including more bells in different colors and some chili peppers like the kind Paul uses in our green curry
4-8 more tomatoes to fill in that square and probably another square
1-2 pumpkin vines to take up space
a few varieties of beans

Paul's mom got us a rhubarb plant, so that will be cool next year (we will plant it now, but won't be able to harvest it until next year). If this year goes well, I also want to try asparagus next year, and maybe strawberries.

I also photographed the front of our house since the rosebushes are going crazy, the clematis has devoured our lamp post but isn't blooming yet, and you can see the Gladiolas Paul's mom gave me coming up around the base of the lamp post.

In the lower left are two Blue Rocket Lupin that my mom got as a gift and didn't have a place to plant - they look about identical to the day I planted them, but Mom tells me they will get big spikes of flowers eventually. I hope so!

I am so so excited about our garden, so hopefully that will motivate me to keep track of it on here so I can look back next year and have a record of what worked and what didn't! Any suggestions for what else to plant? Will you take some veggies from us if we have too much to handle in a few months?

Snow day update

2010-02-10T16:13:00.007-05:00

I totally fell off the blogging bandwagon. And the facebook bandwagon, even, since I mostly just update twitter and let that update facebook. But mainly it's just been so busy and only getting busier, and I don't even have enough time to do all the knitting and cooking and laundry and cleaning that I need/want to do, so blogging has fallen by the wayside.

Christmas was lovely, except fot the part where Juno escaped from my parents' house and Paul had to chase her through the snow along the Conodoguinet creek for an hour in the cold rain. But we got her back, and at the moment she is grugingly sleeping in her bed, which I have positioned at my feet by the couch in the living room in the ongoing attempt to make her like us and hopefully eventually work our way up to voluntary snuggling.

We've continued to incrementally spruce up our house, with the biggest improvement being the basement: a few days after Christmas, Paul spent the evening moving boxes into the back and stacking them neatly, and a few weeks later he installed a shelf, so now we have a clean, huge room down there with our big, comfy couch and a TV. We haven't used the TV yet, but this Saturday we are picking up an elliptical machine we are buying from our friends Kelly and Luke, and I am dropping my YMCA membership (having lost my gym buddy in favor of her neighborhood's free exercize room), so hopefully I will be using that room and that TV multiple times each week starting Saturday!

Today has been a lazy day of me working from home while Paul enjoys a rare day to relax - the snow is piled up to our windows, and we haven't ventured out to shovel the driveway and uncover Paul's car yet. I finally got a new HP laptop at work, so I've been enjoying working from the couch in my pj's. Paul did do a little more than just relax, though, and has a pork roast in the oven for our dinner, which is filling the house with tantalizing smells. Tonight we plan to enjoy a slow dinner in front of the TV, watching a show on PBS that sounds interesting.

I've been getting into my stride at my new job (that isn't so new any more - it's been over a year now), while Paul is starting to wind down at his job in anticipation of going back to school full time this fall. He's been taking classes, this semester is pre-calc, but it's time to speed things up! Since the store will be closing or possibly changing hands this Spring, and with my employment feeling secure, there isn't going to be a better time for him to do it. I like to daydream of that day a few years down the road when he's graduated and found his career calling, allowing me to transition into a stay-at-home-mom/wife role, but until then I'm really looking forward to having a house-husband (at least a part-time one) once he's in school and not working. The few months between jobs when he moved down to VA with me, and again when we moved back to PA, were stressful because he was looking for work, but also really cool to have him home waiting for me with dinner made most evenings when I got home. This time around, it's all planned, so I'm really looking forward to it! I feel really lucky to have a job I like that also earns us enough to let Paul go back to school and not worry about work for a few years.

In the day-to-day-life department, I've been continuing to get together with a bunch of girlfriends almost every Monday evening, something we all look forward to every week. We switch houses every week, and one of the bunch just bought a new townhome right across from another, so soon we'll have a new location to enjoy. The spouses of all the girls sometimes get together, mainly during Monday Night Football season, and then we all get together on the occasional Friday or Saturday for parties that are always a blast.

We also continue to make the trip down to Northern Virginia pretty frequently to see the friends we made when we lived down there, most recently for the Super Bowl, and we always have a great time with them. My friend Jeneane and I just got together a few weeks ago in DC to see an author we both love, and who she introduced me to, followed by dinner; a couple months before that, we were down for Sarah and Ginny's wedding, which was beautiful and sweet.

I am, of course, still singing in choir at church every Sunday, with rehearsals every Thursday evening, but I dropped Bell Choir in order to have one evening a week at home with Paul. My mom and I don't see each other as often now that we don't have Wednesday evenings at bells, so we need to work on fixing that! I've also added one more church activity: I am extremely excited to be a member of the call committee that will be spending the next 18-24 (or more!) months calling a new senior pastor for TLC. Since I grew up at this church and now plan to raise my kids there too, I am so excited to get to help with the process.

Along with all that excitement, the list of things I want us to do in and around the house only grows! This spring, I want to sell the small Japanese Maple in the sunniest corner of our back yard so that I can put in a vegetable & herb garden, and I'm hoping we can also install a patio ourselves using supplies from a local home surplus store. The same surplus store has cheap laminate flooring we're hoping to install in the basement to replace the awesomely 70's orange carpet currently down there, and we're still deciding what to do with the fake wood paneling down there - we might save some money by just painting over it, but I would love to replace it with drywall, because I have a vision of painting the far wall with chalkboard paint in anticipation of using it as a playroom for our kids, and I think being able to draw on the wall would be so much fun. But speaking of our basement, we still need to contract someone to install a radon mitigation system, since our radon readings are pretty far above the safe limit, and that's something we definitely want to deal with before we have little ones in the house!

We still haven't scraped the glue off the walls in the second bathroom, which is partly because I can't imagine spending time re-painting in there until we can also afford to replace the hideous vanity. But the vanity is installed from wall to wall, so if we take it out, we end up needing to either uninstall all the tile and re-drywall, or patch up the tile, both of which sound equally difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. And come to that, I hate the wallpaper in our main bathroom more every day; plus, we want to cut down the mirror to be just over the vanity so that we can install some more storage over the toilet, but the wallpaper doesn't extend to behind the mirror, so once we take it down we'll be exposing something like naked plaster (which I'm hoping is at least sealed or something).

We exposed the original wood floors in our dining and living rooms last year pretty soon after we moved in, and we haven't regretted that for a minute, but we're still deciding whether to do the same in the rest of the house. But that would entail purchasing more area rugs, so we're not doing it yet, plus there's the additional question of refinishing the floors: there are a lot of ugly spots that need to be sanded down anyway, and I would really love to just go the whole way and re-stain the entire house a much darker color on the floors - the original color is very yellow wood.

And of course on top of all that is the looming possibility of offspring in the not-too-distant future, so that will mean either speeding up or putting on indefinite hold all these other renovations, and hopefully converting the second bedroom into a nursery with at least some fun painting and decorating to make it unique. My cousin accidentally introduced me to a DIY home improvement blog just before we moved, and I've continued to be obsessed with it, even though I know I'll never have the time to do all the ideas I have in my head for our own house. But, for example, I have a bunch more panels of the white Ikea curtain panels I bought for the whole house but only used in a few rooms, so I hope I'll eventually hang them in the second bedroom once I'm turning it into a nursery, and maybe I'll dye them a different color to match whatever color scheme I decide on for the nursery. I tried to talk Paul into doing away with the folding doors on our closets in favor of fabric panels, but since he didn't go for it, maybe I'll do it in the second bedroom/nursery instead!

Another big project I need to do is organize my pictures - it's been months, since the last time I posted on this blog in fact, since I downloaded them from my camera, and even longer than that since I shared any with anyone. I'm really hoping we can get a amatuer-quality digital SLR once I'm expecting, but if I'm going to ask for that, I need to get a lot better about keeping up with organizing and sharing my photos! My cousin and friend Kelly do such a great job posting pics of their bambinos on their blogs; our extended family will be living a lot closer to us than theirs do to them, but even so, I want to be as diligent with the updates as they are, just to have the record for myself years down the road! One thing I need to do is get better about picking the small handful of good photos out of the boatload I always take with a digital camera.

I'm a few weeks away from finally finishing the cardigan I started knitting for Kelly's beautiful babe last June, just in time to start knitting something for my friend Mindy, who is expecting in early May. In the interim, I've made a little bit of jewelry for Christmas presents, and crocheted a cover for the e-reader Paul got me for Christmas. I never have enough time to knit as much as I'd like to! The cover for my e-reader came out so well that I'd love to post the pattern and the item itself for sale on Etsy, but if someone actually bought one, I don't know if I'd have time to finish it in a reasonable amount of time! But I'll never be motivated to finish another one unless I know someone's going to buy it. I really should just bit the bullet, make another one in a different color, use the opportunity to solidify the pattern, and then post it for sale on Etsy.

I've never posted anything for sale on there before, and I'd love to try it; I'd post jewelry, but I'd never stand out from the thousands and thousands of others with the same thing. I searched for other e-reader covers, and found a bunch, but not tons, and none of them crocheted, so if I could do this, I'd really have something unique that I think I could sell, especially as they continue to catch on. I could even post links to my Etsy posting on the e-reader message boards I casually follow, and drum up business that way! What would I do if I actually got multiple orders right away? I could never finish a bunch in time to satisfy more than one or two people. Well, I suppose I shouldn't worry about that problem before I've even posted anything!

I haven't completely given up my little dreamlet of an idea to run a craft business some day, and I feel like getting a modest Etsy store running would be a decent first step in that direction. If I could get a few sales of the e-reader covers, maybe I'd be motivated to add a few more items like craft kits. And if I crochet that second cover and no one buys it, the worst that happens is that I have two covers for my own e-reader. Right?

Well there's a huge update for a snow day after two months of blog neglect. More for my benefit than anything - a wish list for myself, perhaps, to check back in on when I need motivation.

November has also been awesome

2009-11-30T10:18:00.009-05:00

I didn't intend to wait so long that my next post would be another month wrap-up, but I guess that's what happens when it's been a busy and productive month: I spend very little time on the computer outside of work because I really am enjoying all the house upkeep and improvements, plus I'm finally getting back into knitting and crocheting almost every day, taking care of Juno, and actually using our Netflix subscription for a change, which means time most evenings spent curled up in front of the TV with Paul for a bit. We've finally gotten into the groove of 30 Rock Season 3 on Netflix Instant View streamed on the xBox, so that has helped. But it all adds up to a lot less time spent in the office on my computer doing things like blogging and uploading photos.

So let's see. I started out the month of November by washing my cell phone, which resulted in a dead cell phone. I went into the Verizon store all prepared to have to pay full price for a new phone, only to find out that I had again managed to kill my previous phone only days before my "New Every Two" discount kicked in, so I was able to get a discounted phone instead! Very fun. I got this phone and I like it a lot. It's very fun to have a full keyboard now that we have unlimited texting. Now if only Paul would take advantage of his discount to replace his phone, which is at least 4 years old at this point...

We also had lots of fun parties and gatherings this month, in no particular order: Dinner out for my mom's birthday
A surprise party (that wasn't too surprising, but still very fun) for Mindy's birthday
A football party at Shawn & Rachel's that Paul went to without me because I had to sing in
A choir concert (the choir concert was quite awesome, so I didn't mind too much)
What turned into quite the party at Isaac's in Lemoyne for the Nawakwa fundraiser (so many people showed up that they ran out of various foods)
A really fun night out with some of the usual suspects at Macaroni Grill followed by going to see New Moon, which we all thoroughly enjoyed. Especially "Face Punch" and Jake's abs (although Luke only enjoyed one of those, I'll let you guess which one) (btw, Luke was the only guy at the movie, and it was his choice to be there; in fact, he's the only one who re-read the books ahead of time, so he was actually the resident expert on how accurate the movie was. And if you make fun of him, you will get facepunched!).

Then, of course, Thanksgiving. Paul and I hosted for the first time, with five people total: us, and Paul's parents and sister. It was definitely a success: I made a cheese log, Paul dressed the turkey, I made my dad's stuffing, we used frozen CSA green beans and a bunch of colorful carrots (orange, white, and purple) to make some lovely side dishes, roasted garlic mashed potatoes, and topped it all off with Apple Kuchen and homemade vanilla icecream, all served on my Gommy's nice china that she gave me when she moved into assisted living. I also got to use other wedding gifts, which always makes me happy: the hand-thrown stoneware casserole for mashed potatoes, and the terra cotta roasting dish for the carrots.

We watched the Macy's parade followed by the dog show, and I tried to show Juno the Italian Greyhound in the toy category (who made it into the second consideration but then didn't place in the class), but she was only interested in getting back to her bed and curling up. Here are some pics of our preparations the day before, and of course the day of; I only forgot to take a picture of the table when it was all layed out with food.

The beaujolais nouveau finally did get drunk when Hannah brought over two of her friends to see the house, and the four of us polished it off in ten minutes flat. I only got about 1.5 glasses, and it's particularly good this year so I bought another bottle yesterday.

Paul had to work Friday and Saturday, so I took lunch to him both days, and because I did on Saturday I got to see this crazy accident in front of the apartment complex next to the store. In addition to the two totally effed up sedans in the foreground, note the Escalade on its side behind the Honda.

Then on Saturday I went down to Lebanon with my mom and Han to see some of those family members, and it was fun to show Gommy the pictures from Thanksgiving with her china. Saturday evening we met up with Sarah and Matt in York, and it was very fun to see them, as usual.

Sunday afternoon was spent in much the usual way, with minor housework and some lounging around. I finished making a little wreath by crocheting around a cardboard ring from some packaging, and it turned out really cute, so I'm working on another one now. Then in the later afternoon I had the urge to do some yard work, so I ended up cutting down all the dead flowers in the front garden and raking them out, and now you can see our lamp post. I will hopefully find something Christmasy to decorate it, but for now it's completely visible for the first time since May.

I also trimmed one out of the three evergreen shrubs under our front windows, and used the longer pieces to decorate the dining room for Christams. I bought two pine bundles from the local garden shop earlier, and added some holly from our holly tree (which, btw, is really huge) to those as well, but of course I'm most proud of the decorations that cost me nothing but some effort with the hedge trimmer followed by some string.

I might just use the trimmings from the other two bushes to decorate the lamppost too. Nothing beats free, especially when it comes to Christmas decorations! Plus then I can justify spending money on some new placemats, since the only set I have is decidedly fall-colored, as you can see in the Thanksgiving pics above.

I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving, and continue to have a relaxing and happy holiday season!

October was pretty awesome

2009-11-03T15:04:00.002-05:00

Wow, it's been almost a month.

Juno's doing slightly better; I just finished knitting her a wool sweater last night, and she looks quite cute in it. She seems to be slightly less petrified of us, but still pretty scared of the world. I took some pics last weekend, look for those soon-ish.

A few Saturdays ago we had a big Wii party at our house, and it was a big hit - in a lucky fluke, everyone we invited was able to come, so there was a total of 13 adults and 2 babies at our house, and no one was shy about participating in various embarasing Wii games, including Rock Band, hula-hooping, seagull-flying, and of course plenty of MarioKart. I have some videos to share of plenty of people shaking their hips in an attempt to secure the highest number of hula-hoop spins. Pretty darn hilarious.

Last weekend was spent in Northern Virginia for the wedding ceremony of our good friends Sarah and Ginny, who officially tied the knot in Connecticut months ago but wanted to make it official with their friends and family too. We had a lot of fun, and even brought Juno along and managed to fit in two visits to the C&O Canal/Great Falls state park, which was a great way to spend a sunny October morning, and a meal at my favorite Tex-Mex restaurant, the Cactus Cantina in DC near the National Cathedral.

The random lunch we had on Saturday afternoon before the ceremony inspired Paul to look up a recipe for green curry, which he made this past Sunday, and which is now quite possibly our new favorite thing we've ever cooked for ourselves. Even without a couple of obscure ingredients we couldn't find, it was amazing, and we're looking for a good time to invite people over for dinner just so we can show off. There's still a bunch of the green curry paste left, so I think we might be making it again tonight, maybe this time with chicken and cous cous instead of tilapia and rice.

Most Monday nights can find me with the Kellys and a few other girlfriends, depending who's available, hanging out at one of our houses while our husbands watch football elsewhere. We mostly spend the evening doing various crafts and just chatting, and it's been the best thing ever; we all love it and look forward to it all week. Sometimes it makes for a hard time waking up on Tuesday morning, but it's so worth it.

We did absolutely nothing in particular on actual Halloween last Saturday, but on trick-or-treat night Thursday, I enjoyed handing out candy and watching "The Nightmare Before Christmas" for the first time since it was new and I was too young and hated it. My favorite trick-or-treater was one little toddler who very politely took one piece of candy from my bowl, and when his mom prompted him with "What do you say?" thought for a moment and exclaimed, "More!" and took another piece of candy. Which was totally OK, since I had plenty left over, and was also extremely funny and adorable. Paul and I capped off the evening by going out for sushi for the first time months, so I feel like I really made the most of skipping choir practice for one Thursday evening.

Hopefully I'll get some of those pictures and videos posted soon, but I just wanted to get something up on the old blog before all the fun memories from October got swallowed up by the excitement heading into the holiday season now that it's November. I hope everyone is having as nice an Autumn as we are! Lots to look forward to in November, starting with more green curry sauce for dinner tonight, and some more of the pinot grigio bottle I opened last night at Kelly's. Cheers!

Juno at the Dog Park

2009-10-06T13:18:00.003-04:00

Juno had a few too many chicken livers on Thursday, which resulted in a lot of unpleasantness on Friday afternoon and even more when we woke up on Saturday morning. But that's behind us, and we've learned our lesson. She seemed to be even worse with the extreme shyness after all that, and even a trip to the dog park for her first off-leash experience on Sunday afternoon didn't seem to help.

Last night, we went on a good walk, and she spent the rest of the evening trotting around the house. Then while I was watching Lie to Me with Kelly M, I put a blanket on the couch beside me and put Juno on it, and she curled up there and let me pet her for about an hour. I got up at the end of the show, and was surprised to see that she stayed in her spot, but as soon as I came to sit back down she hopped off and ran away. But I definitely feel like we bonded, and even noticed that she curled up in the FRONT of her crate right inside the open door instead of her usual cowering in the back of the crate. And this morning when I hooked the leash to her collar, she got right up and walked out of her crate without me having to drag her! So I think we're definitely making some process. Yay.

I got some pictures of her trotting around at the dog park, sporting her red sweater. Since I can't post them to facebook from work, here they are instead. Enjoy!

Still Breathing Deeply

2009-09-25T09:35:00.000-04:00

We were briefly successful at cooking dinners a few times a week and using all the leftovers for lunches and lazy-evening dinners, and I really want to get that back and finally nail down a semi-regular weekly grocery trip that will keep our kitchen well-stocked but never over-stocked, so that we don't have food going to waste. We've had no more than one not-even-full bag of trash per week, with recycling and a compost heap accepting the rest of our waste, so I'm happy about that. But I want to know that we're living as responsibly as we can afford to, not letting leftovers sit in our fridge and veggies rot on our counter because we're so busy and have more than enough. I want to have just the right amount. I want to fill up the freezer with our own prepared meals so we can easily make a great home-cooked meal for anyone at any time, and for ourselves when we need a night to just relax. And I want to be comfortable enough with running the house and kitchen that it will be natural to incorporate our own vegetable garden into it next spring, so that the awesome rain barrels Paul built will be put to good use, and we'll be even more self-sufficient!

We've spent so much money on ourselves since we bought this house, and we feel so lucky and happy to have so many nice things. And still, I want more things that I know I don't need: an iPhone, a Kindle, more shelves for the living room, new shoes, new fall clothes; I think of more STUFF every day. But starting now, I am going to make a huge effort to STOP. I am going to focus on enjoying everything we have, and getting it all organized into the flow and routine I crave. That's the really important thing right now, and once I can do that, it will be clear exactly where we stand and what should come next. Paul might be going back to school full time by next Fall or even sooner, but if everything else is running smoothly, that should fit right in with the routine and actually make things even easier.

I can feel my impatience kicking in already for all this to just happen, so I'm going to need to come back and re-read this post often to remind myself that I have to MAKE it happen, and that I CAN make it happen. And when I need a break, I already have a cozy house to relax in, an awesome husband to relax with, a ton of amazing friends nearby to hang out with, and a family nearby who's always happy to feed me dinner and DVR TV shows for me and welcome me into my old comfort zone while I work on solidifying our new comfort zone. Life is good, and it's only getting better.

More Deep Breaths

2009-09-24T09:25:00.001-04:00

I am still hoping we can get Juno this weekend. Whether or not she’s with us, I’m planning to spend the entire weekend cleaning, organizing, and hopefully clearing out the den in the basement so that can become another comfortable living space. Either the expectation of getting her, or actually having her there, will be a nice added motivator to get all this stuff done this weekend. If I can get significantly caught up, it will do an immeasurable amount of good for my stress level and feeling like we’re on the right track towards all these impossible visions I have for a smoothly-running household.
[UPDATE: Provided her biopsy results are negative, we will be getting Juno this weekend!]

I keep looking ahead a few weeks and expecting things to calm down and start being "normal," but they never do! I still think it might actually happen soon - once we get the dog, and clean up the den in the basement, there really isn't anything else big and exciting on the horizon. I really hope I'm right. I really, really, REALLY want to have a routine, keep the house reasonably clean & organized on a regular basis, and spend time doing a bunch of little things instead of a few big things. I want to knit, and read, and cook, and play with the dog, and spend 15-30 minutes a day cleaning; not stress about painting that needs to be finished and the huge mess in the basement and baskets overflowing with laundry and sink overflowing with dishes.

All these friends having babies have made me want to have a baby more, not less, even when I hear their first-hand stories about the bad stuff; but I feel like I don't even have my own life under control right now, so how could I possibly do it with a baby? This is part of the reason that I am excited to have a dog - it will be a lot of additional responsibility, but I always worked harder and did better in school during the most busy and difficult times, so I think this will be similar. I always get my house the cleanest when I'm expecting company or planning a party, and I think having a dog will help me keep my eye on the ball, step up to the plate, and really finally get into a viable routine that will allow us to keep the house at a reasonable level of organization all the time, instead of in big waves of super-messy to clean to messy again. And if we can do that, then stress will go way down, and we'll be able to focus on the important things.

I'm sure this will not happen as neatly and easily as it sounds when I write it like that, but I need to have this hopeful plan in place, so please don't leave comments telling me it's all a pipe dream. I need to believe that I can have my house 95% clean, organized, finished, and running like a well-oiled machine by mid-November so that we can enjoy it for the holidays. I want my plan to start sending more snail-mail from my very own desk in our little home office to be realized in time to send out nice holiday cards to everyone. I want to have the traditional Wednesday-night-before-Thanksgiving party at our house, and flow right into Thanksgiving Day with Paul's family, hosted at our house, our first official family holiday event in our own home. I want to send out change-of-address post cards to invite everyone to an open house, so that our home can be that place where everyone feels welcome to stop by just to say hello, ask for a cup of flour, borrow a rake, join us for dinner.

Still way long, so I'll finish venting tomorrow...

Deep Breaths

2009-09-23T10:54:00.005-04:00

I've been feeling thoughtful lately, but with no time to indulge in quiet contemplation. With Paul in class on Monday and Wednesday nights, and choir practice for me on Thursdays, we only have Tuesday evenings to ourselves at home. To avoid being lonely on Wednesdays I joined bell choir for the fall, and on Mondays the wives have been getting together while the husbands watch football (Paul joins them after class), so the upshot is a very busy schedule every single week. I love every activity, but it means that I don't do laundry, dishes, cleaning, or organizing that really needs to be done.

This weekend is the first in a long time with no big plans, so whether or not we get our new furry family member, I'm looking forward to spending it at home getting caught up. There's loads of cleaning, tidying, and organizing to do just upstairs, and even more to get the finished room in the basement cleared out. I feel stressed out just thinking about it, but luckily it's the kind of stressed out that makes me want to FIX IT. Unfortunately, that means I'm having a hard time thinking about anything else this week, wishing I could just go home and get started.

Last Saturday was a pretty huge stress-fest going to get the piano. Nothing went as planned, with traffic being the main stressor, but I'm happy that the piano is now living in its official spot in our living room. It's not very play-able right now, with two keys broken and the lower half of the keyboard not damping, but it still felt wonderful to re-introduce myself to Chopin's Raindrop Prelude, still my favorite piece. I was so happy when it came right back to me, and I felt like I could have sat there playing it over and over all night and not gotten tired of it. That made the stressful Saturday all worth it. I got the name of the guy who tunes and maintains Trinity's pianos, and he's coming to tune and fix my new pride & joy on October 13. I will be so happy that I will probably spend the rest of that evening playing the piano. Even not working properly, it feels SO WONDERFUL to own a piano again!

This week feels even more crazy, with not a single night at home, but it's all been fun so I can't complain. Monday night ALL the wives were free (usually only about half of us get together), and we were all at our house, which felt wonderful. Our living room feels lovely now that it has all the furniture we bought, floor lights, a colorful area rug, TV, curtains and blinds hung, everything painted, the piano, and even a painting propped up; but it felt like home with four friends, two babies, and a dog all hanging out and enjoying themselves. My mom even got to meet Ella and Andrew (the babies) for the first time! I had a great evening.

This post is getting extremely long, so I'll save the rest for tomorrow...

Home update

2009-09-14T23:58:00.005-04:00

We got the carpet! It's brighter than in the pic in the previous post; in-our-living-room pic coming soon.

The TV stand is scheduled to be delivered on Wednesday, no word yet on the painting, but that's OK because I can't hang it until we also have...

this piano that we're getting on Saturday from friends near Philly!

In other exciting house-related news, today we officially applied for a
specific Italian Greyhound (as opposed to just applying to an agency for one in the future):

She's 5 years old and has lived in a kennel at a breeder thus far, having puppies. She sounds great for us because 5 years is about when IGs mellow out, she's used to sleeping in her kennel, she's healthy (which is why they used her to breed) so no expensive health problems, and she's already micro-chipped which means we don't have to worry about re-licensing her every year. In addition, of course, to all the other reasons we want an IG in the first place. Oh, also, I love the grey and white coloring. So, yay!!

Pictures soon, I swear.

UPDATE: We're officially approved to adopt the Italian Greyhound from Petfinder! She's getting spayed today (or maybe next Tuesday), and we will go pick her up as soon as she's recovered from the surgery! SO EXCITING!! I have to finish Ella's sweater before I can start knitting one for the new dog, but that's definitely next. Also, possible name (since we're re-naming her): Juno. As the Roman goddess of marriage and pregnancy, it fits with her first 5 years spent breeding. Also, it fits my criteria of not being a common human name (despite the recent movie). Thoughts?

Home! It's almost here.

2009-09-09T20:55:00.008-04:00

On Monday, Paul and I finished the hardest parts of finishing the living room. The painting is done, the blinds are hung, and the curtain rod is still empty but ready to receive the curtains. The furniture is arranged. In a few days, I'm going to buy this 5'x8' rug to ground the sitting area:

and this TV stand:

so that our new TV can stop living on our coffee table:

(Side note: doesn't President Obama look great on our new TV? I thought so.)

and we can start LIVING in our living room!

Paul needs to hang our clock above the fireplace, and I need to hang photos (LOTS of photos) to warm up those white walls, but that will be a fun process. I have a great idea for a big, asymmetric photo collage on the wall inside the front door. Also might get this 23"x35" Klimt stretched canvas, "The Tree of Life," which also ties right in with the whole color scheme:

On Saturday, we're heading down to Virginia for our friends Sarah and Ginny's wedding shower, and on the way we're going to stop at the Woodbridge Ikea to get another floor lamp to match the one in the picture above. If we see a pair of end tables we like, we might get those too, if the price is right! The shower is at 3:00, somewhere down Rt. 95 below Woodbridge, but we're leaving in the morning so we have time to stop at Lebanese Taverna for lunch before heading to Ikea. Should be a really fun Saturday!

Also, I posted pics of my various favorite babies:

Babies!

Babies

2009-08-24T10:27:00.004-04:00

You may have gathered from Facebook and Twitter, but I know a lot of people who just had babies. My cousin had a baby about 6 weeks ago, and then this past week the deluge: Kelly and Luke had a girl early Tuesday morning, Rachel and Shawn had a boy on Thursday night, and other Kelly's brother and sister-in-law had a son on Friday morning. What a week! I have never been so glued to my cell phone. And these people all know each other! Luke works for Kelly's brother Jim, so they both became daddy's (Jim for the second time) within 5 days of each other. I am definitely envisioning triple birthday parties in coming years.

On Saturday, Kelly, Reed, and I headed down to Gettysburg to meet the first PREP baby, Ella Jo. She was born at 4:35 AM Tuesday morning August 18th, so she was 4 days old on Saturday. She weighed 6'5" when she was born, but on Saturday was a little below 6', making her the most amazingly tiny person I have ever met. She slept for almost the entire two hours we were there, and barely even stirred when we'd pick her up and pass her around. She was so comfy and cozy in anyone's arms, why should she wake up? It was amazing.

The last time I held an infant was at my high school graduation party. That was awesome, but this was transcendant. I could have stared at Ella all day. This is the first baby that I will watch grow up, and I'll be there and know her for her entire life. I'm so overwhelmed by this, so I can hardly imagine what her mommy and daddy, my good friends, must be feeling! I'm tearing up again, as usual, just from writing this down.

I haven't seen any pictures of Rachel and Shawn's son yet, so I'm excitedly waiting for that! Next Saturday I'll finally get to meet Miles, my cousin's son, and the following Saturday we'll have our first all-PREP gathering with Ella. I am positive that I haven't experienced anything this amazing before in my life, and nothing will top it until I'm holding my own baby in my arms. What an amazing week. I am so happy and thankful.

Miles at 5 weeks old:

Ella Jo on Saturday, with her mom plus 2 out of 3 PREP aunties:

Dining Room Before & After

2009-08-12T20:05:00.006-04:00

I can't believe it's taken me four days to post this, since I'm so excited about it!

Dining room in March before we moved in:

Dining room during wallpaper peeling, shortly after moving in at the end of May:

Dining room during painting in early and mid June:

Taking up the carpet after painting all trim but the baseboard, early August:

All finished!

Still to do in the dining room: Install the new white switch plate and outlet covers; put stuff into the curio cabinet (starting with the nice china I got from my Gommy); get a new chandelier; and hang some art on those walls! Today I got stuff at Michael's to help me do two out of four: the outlet covers are Paul's job, but I got some stands for the plates (instead of just stacking them all - I want to see them they're very simple and pretty!) and some poster mounting glue to fix the big Van Gogh that's all wrinkly in its cheapo frame--I think this will let me use the same cheapo frame but get the picture to stay all flat and nice permanently. Still haven't decided where to hang it, but I'm hoping once I can hold it up to a few places, there will be something obvious. Best guess right now is the wall between the kitchen entry and the pantry door, so I'll still need ideas for the wall to the left of the curio! Maybe some of my many unused landscape and nature photos. And no budget right now for a chandelier, but I think I know about what I want.

Also, thankfully you can't tell in the picture how badly the curtains need to be ironed. I'll do that soon...

We're planning to take up the carpet in the living room this Sunday!! Once that's done and I paint the trim in there, we'll officially be finished with the really big, necessary stuff. OMG.

I didn't continue cleaning the fridge tonight, and I'm OK with that.

More Progress! Plus gushing.

2009-08-03T12:14:00.005-04:00

While I was jet-setting down to Raleigh, NC to visit Rachel & Kelly, leaving Paul at home by himself, look at everything he did:

- Sold the little tree in our back yard that we want to replace with a veggie and herb garden for next year; the guy is supposed to come dig it up on Wednesday morning.

- 100% finished re-installing everything to do with the fridge: My dad came over and re-installed the cabinet above the fridge, Paul re-applied the laminate front of the counter, and attached some quarter-round to clean up the edge of the cabinet beside the fridge. It looks so awesome! Now I have to fulfill my promise to clean the fridge, which was filthy inside when we got it and has not yet been cleaned.

- Purchased and installed heavy curtains across one end of the front unfinished half of the basement where he now has his table saw, so that the dust is contained and doesn't interfere with the laundry area

- Discovered that our attic fan has been disabled because it's a bit broken and therefore very loud, and so our attic has been getting extremely hot every day (well over 100 degrees) thus making our air conditioning much less efficient. I don't even know why he was thinking about this or going up into the attic to begin with, but it's a good thing he found out, because running the fan during the day while we're not home to be bothered by the noise will save us a lot of energy cost.

- Installed a brand-new digital programmable thermostat to better regulate the air conditioning (i.e. program it to raise the temp during the day while we're at work and lower it in time to be comfortable when we get home.)

- Bought me a sweater drying rack because he saw one for uber-cheap at Ollie's, even though we haven't discussed my wanting one for ages

- Bought a wireless digital indoor/outdoor thermometer, the outdoor portion of which is being used to monitor the attic temperature for the time being (what a good idea!)

- Brought upstairs and shelved a few boxes of books from the basement

- Did all the dishes so that I arrived home to a clear, clean kitchen counter

He told me about most of this stuff while I was sitting at the Raleigh airport waiting to board, and I exclaimed, "Wow, I'm going to go on vacation with my girlfriends more often!" And he said, "OK, you can." But really, I definitely need to thoroughly clean the fridge and paint the baseboard trim in the dining room this week, and hang the blinds in the dining room, and maybe get the curtains hung in the bedrooms and office, if I'm going to live up to all the work Paul did this weekend.

Speaking of going on vacation with my girlfriends, I flew in to Raleigh, NC late Friday night, where Rachel picked me up and we headed home to bed (but not before she fed me the peach-and-berry crostada she made while waiting to pick me up - so delicious!!) so we'd be ready to get up bright and early to meet Kelly on her way home from the beach and kidnap her from Reed (not really - this was all planned). It was too overcast to go to the beach for the afternoon, so instead we went back to Rachel's beautiful apartment and spent the day making and eating The Dip and chatting. It was wonderful.

Saturday evening we got a little dolled up and went out for sushi, and then decided to come home and do more talking, since it was obvious that's all we wanted to do and it would be better if we weren't in a loud bar. We changed into our jammies and talked into the night.

Sunday we rolled out of bed at 10:00, made blueberry pancakes and fruit salad, and added peach slices to glasses of sparkling wine for a refreshing morning drink. While we ate, we watched Mamma Mia, which must have been made with us in mind, because it was so awesome and fun to watch. Then in the early afternoon we braved the still-cloudy-but-not-too-rainy skies to sit by the pool for a while.

Around 3:00 on Sunday afternoon we headed in from the pool to get ready for dinner, where we met two of Rachel's friends at a Czech restaurant for a delicious experience(I had pork goulash with dumplings, and fried brie with cranberry sauce). Then they dropped me off at the airport before heading to the theater to see The Sound of Music live. I wish I could have stayed until Tuesday with Kelly, but alas, I couldn't afford to take the time off work.

I'm glad Kel and Rach finally got some sun today, so they're out by the pool again. I have to finish an FPA for an investigator's RFI, then start on two write-ups of providers I want to refer to investigations at the next INDC meeting. Oh, and finish the Extract Spike model results for June data, and look up some stuff for Wednesday's Infusion Code meeting. And go home and clean the fridge. It will be nice to stay around the house next weekend for once!

Progress!

2009-07-28T10:02:00.005-04:00

Saturday evening I cleaned up the second bedroom to ready it for its second-ever overnight guest, and Paul vacuumed the entire house. The second bedroom now looks rather austere, with one empty bookshelf, one little chest at the foot of the bed, one bedside table with one lamp, the bed, and no other furniture or decorations.

I did stick the narrow CD shelf in there (my Dad made it years ago) and stuck a bunch of old framed photos on it, so that was a slight improvement. It definitely needs a plant or two, a dresser, and some pictures on the walls, though. And a mirror.

Oh, and while I was cleaning? I put an old wash basket full of currently-dormant back packs, bags, and purses, and our aero bed and drying rack, IN THE CLOSET. Neatly. And now you can't see them when you walk into the room, but they're still there, in easy reach, beneath a shelf full of neatly-folded blankets, comforters, and sheets. I HAVE CLOSETS IN MY HOUSE.

Sunday afternoon and evening I cleaned up the carport: I tidied up all the gardening paraphernalia (and put it in our shed! I heart storage space SO MUCH), re-potted and/or cleaned off all the plants and brought most of them inside, and FINALLY did something with the 8 little herb seedlings that have been struggling along in their teensy little containers that should have been re-planted six weeks ago. I finally pitched the dead pepper plant from last year, and used its rather huge pot to hold all of the surviving baby herbs. They've all perked up a bit already, so I'm hoping now they'll finally start growing in earnest, and maybe by the end of Summer I'll at least have a handful of parsley and cilantro to supplement all my basil, chives, and rosemary. I also finally stopped by Highland Gardens and got some liquid plant food that's SO much easier to use than fertilizer sticks or pellets. Hopefully that will get everything looking perky and healthy, especially the aloe plants, which still look pretty pathetic almost a year after being separated from the monster mother plant.

Sunday night we also went to see the movie Up, and if you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it. It was so fun and whimsical, and totally sad and thoughtful and deep in some very adult ways, but still very happy and uplifting, especially the ending. The little vignette you hear about is the first 5 minutes of the movie, so you're crying 5 minutes in, but then only one other time might make you tear up.

Monday Paul finished converting the little coat closet in our dining room into a rather large, deep pantry closet complete with five adjustable shelves. I stopped at JoAnn Fabrics on the way home and got some thin, clear vinyl to use as over-sized shelf liner (cheaper than official shelf liner, which wouldn't even have been big enough to cover the two-foot-deep shelves), and then spent all evening stocking the shelves! There is room to spare with all of our food put away, and we now have only one remaining box full of spices, as they're the only thing we haven't decided where to put yet.

Tonight (Tuesday), we are going to move the dining room table into the living room and RIP UP THE CARPET in the dining room. It is going to be glorious. We will see the entire expanse of wood floor for the first time, and I can't wait! Hopefully that will go very smoothly and thus motivate us to get the living room carpet removed soon too! Maybe on Wednesday or Thursday I will be able to finish painting the baseboard & door trim in the dining room!! And/or I might haul some boxes up from the basement and fill the bookshelves in the office and bedroom with appropriate books. Actually, painting will probably wait until next week at this point, since I also have a bunch of clothing to re-organize and put away in the master bedroom.

Then Friday after work I hop on a plane and land in Raleigh, NC to meet Kelly M and visit Rachel! Maybe knowing I'm spending another unexpected weekend having fun with friends instead of working on our house is what's motivating me to get so much done this week so far. I hope it continues!

Yummiest CSA food thus far

2009-07-07T10:32:00.008-04:00

Yesterday we got a HUGE head of incredibly beautiful red leaf lettuce from Shared Earth Farm. It was delicious, just by itself.

I chopped up two entire cucumbers and two tiny onions, also from the CSA, sauteed two frozen tilapia filets with Gazebo Room Balsamic dressing, and plopped a filet each on top of the huge mountain of salad on our two plates. Add some crumbles of the raw-milk sharp cheddar we lucked out and got for free because someone didn't pick up their cheese share, and you have one incredibly delicious meal.

And just for fun, here's the not-really-a-tart I made for the 4th of July. I just slapped down some graham crackers, covered it with creamcheese mixed with sugar and vanilla extract, and topped it with blueberries, pitted and halved sweet cherries, and a few raspberries. I got tons of compliments, even though the graham crackers got all soggy - I guess you can't go wrong with creamcheese, sugar, and fresh fruit!

Can't help posting one more house pic, of the blinds I installed all by myself. Five windows total thus far, in all three bedrooms (i.e. two bedrooms and the office). Hopefully we'll get enough trim painted in the dining room tonight that I'll be able to hang blinds on that window next, and then I just need to decide what to do with the huge window in the living room...hmm...

I still haven't put up the curtains, as you can see. Soon.....

200th post! And Sangria.

2009-07-02T14:51:00.003-04:00

I posted the recipe for the Sangria I made at our party! Enjoy!

I have off tomorrow, but Paul does not. This means I will be home alone, which will be nice for the day. I hope to clean out the boxes of homeless pantry food from the kitchen, although I don't know where I'll be able to put it all...and we're still down by one cabinet until Paul has time to finish installing the fridge. Then I'll be baking a couple of things for July 4 festivities. In the evening it's over to Hannah's birthday party, yay!

In other news, this is my 200th post. Crazy! This is a big deal for bloggers who have myriads of followers, but for me with my immediate family and friends it's more just a fun little thing to point out. I posted my first blogger post on October 5, 2006. For a while I also kept up with Xanga, but that didn't last too long. Anyway, just an interesting thing to think about. I'm glad I have a blog, it's pretty fun to go back and read the old stuff. And I'm sure one day, 15 years from now, my future offspring will be able to get a few good laughs, and maybe some blackmail fodder. Maybe I should look in my parents' basement for an old journal of my mom's...does such a thing exist?

Pictures! Of the house!

2009-07-01T12:17:00.005-04:00

I found my card reader, yay! It was hiding in my purse all along.

From New House!

I also have a few before-and-after pics, but since the trim isn't painted yet and the carpet isn't lifted in the living and dining rooms, they're still technically before-and-during pics. The closest thing to an "after" pic is the bedroom, since I have painted the window trim, so in these views it looks like it's all finished!

Before:

During:

After:

I love the furniture! It was my grandparents' so it's all super solid and heavy. It will probably last forever. All we need now is to install the blinds and curtains I bought...might happen this weekend! Also, now that too-bright ugly floor lamp is gone and I have my old Ikea bedroom table lamp, which matches the room and the furniture so perfectly. I thought I had taken a picture of that, but I guess not.

And here's the living room before:

During:

and After, but with the trim not yet painted and the carpet still down, and no decorations or pictures on the walls yet:

The dining room is more obviously not finished until that chair rail (and window trim) is painted white so it really pops out and emphasizes the light grey and light greyish-brown, but even with just the wallpaper down it's a HUGE and drastic improvement:

Before:

During:

So there you have it. I have a few other pictures, but these are the main before-and-after-ish pics so far. What do you think?

In other news, we had our final apartment inspection yesterday, and we got our full security deposit back. The landlord had been weird about some things, so we were worried he was going to keep some of it, but he didn't, so yay! We are REALLY feeling like homeowners now. Our first bi-weekly mortgage payment was automatically debited from our account on Monday! Only 26 years to go... (actually we're hoping to up the bi-weekly amount and get it down to 20ish years...ZOMG)

Cooking in the kitchen

2009-06-22T10:37:00.003-04:00

It's not 100% there yet (Paul still has to hook up water to the fridge, re-install the dishwasher, and make everything pretty again), but we have the bookcase out of the kitchen, the extra cabinets hung, and everything is put away enough that I am looking forward to cooking dinner at home every night this week!!

We've had a few meals at the new house, but with the kitchen overrun with moving paraphenalia, tools, and painting supplies, it hasn't been easy to maneuver for actual food preparation. But no more! This week, we will use 100% of the CSA food, and it will be yummy and healthy and money-saving.

It's a good thing, too, because next week starts Whip It Up 2009, and with all the new stuff we'll be cooking to utilize our CSA veggies, it would be a shame to not participate! The latest recipe posted on Shared Earth Farm's recipe site is Kohlrabi Cakes, so I'm wondering if we'll be getting some kohlrabi tonight. If so, I hope we also get enough spring onions for the recipe! Hannah's home alone this week, so maybe if there's not enough spring onions once we divide them, she'll come over for dinner so we can combine forces, because those Kohlrabi Cakes sound pretty yummy!!

In other news, we slept in our new (to us) queen-sized bed in our master bedroom for the first time last night!! It was pretty sweet. Slightly marred by the fact that Paul had to stay up late to finish his extra credit, so all we could do after that was fall into bed and curse the alarm clock at 7:00 this morning for not letting us have a full night's sleep. BUT it's all OK, because I think the graphing and everything really clicked for Paul, and I always enjoy seeing that lightbulb go on, even when I haven't been the one to flip the switch. I think I provided some much-needed moral support. And BONUS: I got to re-learn the Unit Circle. Math is fun!!

Still taking lots of pictures, and still don't have the stuff to actually get any off of my camera and onto here. But next weekend is IT for the apartment, we want to finish moving out the last of the little junk, clean, and then I will have no excuse to avoid posting all the pictures. Soon! In the mean time, why don't you just stop by and visit? Seeing things in person is always better anyway. And I can feed you strawberries!

Slugs & Marshmallows

2009-06-18T14:41:00.006-04:00

I have decided that slugs are the cutest bug.

In the various types of leafy greens we've been getting from our CSA Shared Earth Farm, there are always a few stowaways. I've found them hanging out in my fridge after storing the unwashed lettuce for days; swimming (just floating, actually) in the bowl of water after washing my greens, crawling up the side of the same bowl, and just hanging out on the leaves.

I always take them outside, because they're just too cute to kill. I love their little eye stalks that poke out at different angles, and retract if they touch anything! It's so adorable. Sometimes I let them crawl around on my hand for a while before I toss them out into the grass.

For some reason it doesn't even gross me out to realize that, in all likelyhood, I've eaten a little extra protein over the last couple of weeks. I wash the lettuce thoroughly, but still find one or two additional little guys after I'm done using it for the evening, so probably one made it onto my sandwich last night, for example, or into my stirfry last week. Oh well. As long as I don't taste it or feel it go down, no harm done!

Last night, Paul and I learned about slugs from Wikipedia. I especially liked the info on how slugs procreate. Enjoy!

If you do not feel quite like I do about the slugs in my fresh greens, and if I have you over to dinner this summer, don't hesitate to let me know. We can work it out. And then I'll know to not enthusiastically show you my findings while I'm washing the lettuce before dinner.

In other news, despite being a curious person (couldn't you tell with the slugs?), I have managed to go my entire life thus far without ever having witnessed what happens to a marshmallow in a microwave. I've heard about it, but never tried it for myself. Well, last night, I decided I wanted a s'more, and the only easily available method of warming my marshmallows was the microwave, so I've finally remedied this huge deficit in my life experience. It was quite fun! My only complaint is that the marshmallows inflated and melted without actually getting very warm, so they didn't melt the chocolate a whole lot. It was enough, though, so Paul and I had an enjoyable dessert.

Paint

2009-06-08T11:44:00.003-04:00

Still no pictures, sorry folks. I do have a lot to post. Soon...now that we have passed the big painting weekend, Paul and I are going to still be working really hard (there's still a lot to finish), but we won't be pulling the same late nights and feeling stressed.

Friday night we stayed up way to late to finish scraping, washing, and masking everything we wanted to have ready for Saturday. Kelly & Reed got there at 9:00 as promised, followed by the Virginia crew around noon, and they were all amazing - everyone worked together to mask off and paint the master bedroom, living room, and prime the bare plaster in the dining room.

Oh, and I successfully rid us of the big, heavy, green bird bath in our side yard - another freecycle success story! Someone picked it up on Saturday morning.

What I just summed up in one sentence actually took us the entire day, but we rewarded ourselves with a lovely picnic all evening and into the night - it was so much fun. There was lots of yummy food, thanks to my mom making a couple of salads, and Kelly helping me throw together some sloppy joe for the crock pot, and one huge trip to the grocery store on Friday for various chips, dips, and veggies. We all started out in the back yard on the camp chairs everyone brought along, and later moved into the car port where it was less buggy. Paul and Chris stocked the old fridge in the shed with lots of beer, and I tried my hand at sangria for the first time - it turned out really well! As a bonus, I was able to use a bottle of wine that I had never opened because I knew it wasn't going to be very good. Well, when you add brandy, cointreau, orange juice, lemon juice, and gingerale, it doesn't matter if your bottle of red wine isn't super delish on its own. Yum! I'm going to make that again very soon.

Sunday we took the remaining two Virginians to breakfast, then stopped by Lowe's for some additional supplies. With the expert paint sprayers having already headed back to VA, we decided we weren't talented enough to try spraying on our own, and opted to roll instead. Paul and I had seen a friend of ours using a paint roller with a tube that sucks the paint out of the can and feeds the roller automatically, and we were surprised and delighted to find it at Lowe's for only $25!! So we grabbed that and a few of the special roller covers (same thing as usual but with holes in the tube so the paint can come out from inside), and headed home to keep painting.

Hannah came over, we put the first coat on the dining room, and painted the one wall in the living room. Then we went for smoothies. After that we put a second coat on the dining room and one living room walls, and our friends headed home. Paul and I put a second coat on most of the bedroom, but ran out of paint, so we plan to finish that tonight and touch up a few places in the living room. Then we'll peel lots of masking tape, paint the bottom half of the dining room, and I'll get started on the trim later this week. I'll save the baseboard trim, though, until Paul gets the carpets ripped up to expose that lovely wood floor! Otherwise the paint won't cover all of the trim - even now you can see a previous layer of paint if you look closely by the carpet line.

*whew* what a weekend. But it feels good to know that our house is really on the road to becoming our home! We have to be out of our apartment by the end of June, and I think my goal of actually getting our house mostly set up by the end of June is do-able. I can already tell that we are going to be SO happy here! The little party we had on Saturday night was so wonderful and comfortable and happy. Knowing that I OWN the place where we were able to gather comfortably, and so I'll be able to have lots more parties like that in the near future! I love the little community of friends we have in this area. I'm so happy right now. Aaaaaah...

House Tidbits

2009-06-02T17:28:00.002-04:00

Sorry all, I have lots of picture on my camera but no way to get them onto the computer at the moment. Priority for now is washing walls and painting trim so we're ready for this weekend's big paintfest!

The living room boarder is now 100% removed, as of about 9:30 last night. Paul and I started on the dining room walls, removing big glops of glue using vinegar water and plastic scrapers, but there's still quite a way to go - two passes of vineger water + scraping followed up with a sponge still leaves some definite rough glue patches on the otherwise smooth plaster, so we're not sure what our next step should be.

In other painting plans, I've decided to spend this evening cleaning the trim in the master bedroom and living room so that I can mask and paint the trim tomorrow, starting in the master bedroom. That way, I won't have to mask anything but around the windows, because if I get paint on the walls it will just get covered up with the wall paint on Saturday. I think this is going to save a lot of time and masking tape. So tonight before going home to clean, a trip to Lowe's is in order.

I also plan to make potato kale soup for dinner, since we got a pound of kale in our first CSA share yesterday, and it's already looking wilty in the fridge. We brought over most of the kitchen utensils on Sunday, and I put them all away, so all I need to grab from the apartment is a few spices and some olive oil, potatoes, and chicken broth. Should be a relatively easy meal for the first cooked in our new kitchen! Then carrot cake for dessert, and maybe a mojito to use up the mint, also from the CSA. Add Rum, sugar, and limes to the get-from-apartment list!

We've decided to put away our Linens N' Things dishes that chip when you look at them wrong, and recruit the Farberware sets that Paul's Aunt Nancy got for us, but that we hadn't opened yet. I tested out our little apartment-sized dishwasher by loading it with all those dishes, plus some Cascade powder, and discovered that the dishwasher doesn't do a good job of rinsing anything in the very back. I could use liquid detergent instead, but then I worry that it still wouldn't be rinsed, but I wouldn't be able to tell they way I can when I see the white remains of the Cascade powder. I guess for now I'll just try to not load the back, and give a quick rinse in the sink to anything that needs it. Anyone else have experience with inefficient apartment dishwashers?

Yesterday I brought over all my plants from the apartment, and tonight I will get to use some of my basil, which is good because it needs to be pinched off so it can keep getting more bushy. Even more exciting, Paul mowed the lawn yesterday evening! It was great. We have a lawnmower! While he did that, I pulled out the old, dead growth left hiding the new growth in a mystery plant in front of our lamp post, and it looks much nicer now. There's a spot that needs a plant right at the corner between the lamp post and the driveway, where I plan to put one of the plants from the random garden patch that we're going to remove from the side yard.

Then I went to dead-head the spent roses from my three awesome rosebushes, and discovered that they have a pretty hard-core infestation of aphids. I read online today that the aphids don't really hurt the roses, they just look unattractive, so we'll see. I could mostly cure that problem by hosing the roses down, but that's not good for them in the spring when they're blooming profusely, PLUS I think they also have black spot, which means I should keep the roses as dry as possible, and hosing them down would spread the black spot problem and make it worse. So I'm not sure what to do! One site mentioned baking soda and water, so I might try that, and also just thinning out the roses so there's better airflow and they can stay drier so the black spot can't keep spreading. Boo for fungus. It's making the blooms die more quickly, and just look sickly in general. But luckily they still look great from a distance!

I feel dead tired at the end of each day, and washing walls etc. is still not any fun, but so far I'm enthusiastic enough about OUR HOUSE that it's all been happy work. And I think after this coming weekend, we'll feel really satisfied and richly rewarded for our work. Then the only major job before really moving in and settling down will be lifting the carpet and tack strips to expose the wood floors! And, of course, getting some polyurethane down on the wood, but we might wait a while before doing that.

I will eventually post pictures...I'm taking lots of them!

It's the economy, stupid

2009-05-27T10:39:00.004-04:00

Since I started my new job with EDS, which is now owned by HP (you probably own a printer or something made by HP), a few things have happened of the trying-to-ride-out-the-recession variety. For me, up to and including today's addition, these crappy little concessions haven't had an adverse impact on my life or finances, but there are people I work with who are definitely feeling the pinch more than I am.

First, HP mandated a 5% cut in all employee salaries. This happened a few days after the offer we put in on our house had been accepted. Luckily, we're buying a house well within our means, and even with the 5% pay cut my salary is still a nice margin above what I was making at my previous job.

Then HP mandated an additional 10% pay cut for the month of April. That put a big, scary feeling in my stomach, but pretty quickly we found out that because of the type of contract we were on, we were exempt from this pay cut. *whew*

Around the same time as the pay cuts, HP decided that instead of keeping up the regular employer mathing program for our 401k contributions, they would STOP matching in each paycheck and start doing an analysis of their ability to match at the close of each quarter, and only then would they match, but only up to their ability. Read: in all likelyhood, no more matching of 401k contributions for the forseeable future.

This morning we received a fourth harmelss-looking e-mail that hid some bad news. HP is mandating two weeks of vacation time from December 20 through January 2. There are two regular holidays during this time, but for the rest of the days we would normally work, we are now required to use our own vacation time or take leave without pay. Suck. We can borrow from our 2010 vacation, but who wants to do that? It will be lovely, of course, to be home for two weeks, but I'm not sure yet exactly what this means. Will I have to cancel some of the days off I already have planned and move them to the end of the year? I guess we won't be taking a mini-break over our second anniversary.

In comparison to the hardships I know a lot of people are going through, these measures being taken by HP are really not bad. I have not lost my job, as have a few people I know, and my pay isn't being cut any more. My hours aren't being cut on a regular basis. But news like this still gives me a really bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I think it's the helplessness - if they can do this, what else might happen next week or next month? And what can I do to stop it? Nothing, that's what.

I'll tell you what I'm not going to do: I'm not going to roll my SAIC 401k into HP's 401k program. I'm going to go private with it. And hopefully I can do the same thing with my HP 401k, with whatever I've built up over the past six months. Because if they're not matching my contributions anyway, what's the point of using theirs? I might as well stick with Vanguard.

I also understand that companies including mine absolutely need to take steps like these to remain competitive and avoid more drastic measures down the road. As in, of course I'd rather take a pay cut and manditory vacation now, if it means that I'll still have this job years down the road; even more so if it means we'll come out of the recession in a strong position, and then maybe I'll get a nice pay raise or a bonus or something.

I think this most recent installment feels different because of the way we were told. It just seems very inconsiderate. From the looks of the FAQ's on HP's employee site, this is something HP has done in past years, maybe every year. So my question is: if you are doing this every year, why do you wait to tell us until the start of Summer when everyone's planning their vacations and looking forward to that week at the beach? I'd much rather have it mandated from the beginning, and plan my vacation around it to begin with instead of the big disappointment and forced change of plans. Maybe former HP employees know to plan for this possibility, but we at EDS sure didn't see it coming.

When did this get so complicated? Sheesh. It's a damn good thing that I like this job a lot better than my old one. I'm beginning to see why big corporations get such a bad rap - the bigger they are, the easier it is for stuff like this to feel like you just fell through the cracks, instead of feeling like you're suffering for the good of the company. But in the end, I'm mainly thankful to have my job, and thankful for all the great benefits I do still have. Feeling upset about it now won't stop me from thoroughly enjoying my two weeks off for the holidays!!

Recurring dream

2009-05-26T09:43:00.003-04:00

Reading Katy's post on her strange dream reminded me what I first remembered when I got in the car to go to work this morning - that I had a pretty odd dream last night too.

I've never had the same dream twice, or really even a similar one, but I do have one major element - plot device? - that has been showing up in my dreams since at least High School. When I dream, I frequently find myself driving a car in which the breaks don't work properly. The breaks always mostly work, but typically even when I have the breaks pressed the whole way to the floor, and I am pressing as hard as I can, the car will still be moving slowly, and I am unable to get it to stop. Nothing bad has ever actually happened as a result, but in these dreams I'm always very nervous or scared.

Last night the car was a minivan, and I was taking care of someone else's baby, but this baby could talk and reason like a regular person. So as I'm putting the baby in the car seat in the back of the car, I realize that the car is drifting forward slowly. I close the door and get in the car myself, but someone else is driving, and since neither of us can get the car to stop despite braking hard and even turning off the car, I direct her to pull into another parking space that's on a steep incline. It works, and the car stops, but when I go back to make sure the baby's all strapped in correctly, I find that it has moved itself to the other seat in the car, and it is laughing at me because it tricked me! This whole time the baby has also been talking to me, but I have no idea what it was saying, just that it felt a little weird and I was exasperated that an otherwise cute baby was ruining my afternoon by acting like a sarcastic adult. The car eventually started drifting backwards out of the new parking spot, but I must have woken up before I figured out how to fix that problem.

I feel like Katy's dream fits pretty well with some of the stresses she talks about on her blog, Bonnie Hunt aside; but I really haven't ever thought of a compelling explanation for this car-that-won't-quite-stop-even-though-I'm-breaking-as-hard-as-I-can theme. I don't think dreams are ever predictive, unless it's of something we already know subconsciously, and generally I think my dreams are completely random amalgamations of my subconscious's mental diarrhea during REM sleep - often including elements of my recent experiences or stresses, but just a meaningless garble that has no potential to tell me anything about myself in my waking life. However, this one recurring element is hard to ignore after almost ten years, so I'd be interested to hear anyone's ideas.

I know I'm having this dream on the brink of probably the biggest stress-inducing event of my life so far, purchasing a house. But I've been stressed about that for weeks now, and there's still a few days to go, so why last night? Plus, I'm pretty sure I've had this dream plenty of times when I wasn't stressed about anything...but now that I think about it, that would be a good thing to start keeping track of - what else has been going on in my life when I get these dreams? I'll start writing it down, starting with this one.

www.craft-day.com

2009-05-22T16:34:00.003-04:00

Back again with more domain purchasing mania:

Try out www.craft-day.com!

In other news, tonight is my bowling birthday party at The Coliseum. It will be just like the ones you used to go to when you were eight, minus bumpers and plus alcohol. But we're still having pizza and cake, so really, just about the same.

Tomorrow morning you can find me from 9:30-11:30 with my lovely sister Hannah volunteering on the VanGo Bus at Artsfest on Front Street in Harrisburg. Should be a good time, come out and see us! Hannah has even promised to buy me a Birthday Gyro, my fav.

After Artsfest, Paul and I are headed down to York to help out his mom and sister (and others from their Relay for Life team perhaps?) at their booth for the Chili Cookoff at the baseball statium where the York Revolution plays. I will be bringing a water bottle in case I get anything too spicy!

Saturday evening Paul wants to go see Terminator, so hopefully I'll find some girlfriends, or else stay home and do some much-needed packing.

Sunday afternoon is picnic with my family.

I have no idea what I'm doing on my actual birthday on Monday. We'll see.

Then thank goodness I only have to work 3 days while waiting for THE BIG DAY, May 29, when the house will finally be ours!! Then starts another 3-day weekend filled with before pictures of the entire house, and of course lots and lots of wallpaper peeling. Haven't decided yet whether we'll take the carpet up at the same time, or wait until we're done painting the next weekend. So much to think about! I am already so nervous and excited that I might explode before next Friday.

Come help peel wallpaper, or just stop by to see the house, any time you want!

peacelovemath.com!

2009-05-12T17:46:00.003-04:00

In order to test out how it works, I just paid $10 through Google Blogger to register peacelovemath.com for a year! Much kudos and thanks go out to Jordan, my...cousin-in-law? He is a very awesome person who set up my cousin's site, and she is married to Jordan's brother, so I think that makes him my cousin-in-law. Anyway.

It takes about 48 hours to percolate through the abstract inner workings of the internet, so it might not work yet, but eventually it will just direct you back here. But still, so cool!! I have laid claim to my own domain name, and it was so cheap and easy!

This is all practice for my main goal, which is to claim a domain for Craft Day. craftday.com is currently owned by someone who isn't using it for anything (type it into your browser and it takes you to GoDaddy.com), but I'm still waiting on a reply to the e-mail I sent to her (the current owner). If that doesn't work out, then I will go with something like craftdaypa.com, which is available. Any other suggestions are very welcome!

From what I'm reading, it sounds like Google would even let me set up an online store on the domain if I eventually wanted to, which would be so awesome. But at first, if I can get a little business of the ground, all I want is e-mail (which I already have, but which also comes with the domain - I could be mer@craftdaypa.com!), and a blog setting to upload info and pictures. Which I also already have, but it will be way cooler and feel more official if I can direct people to craftdaypa.com, no need to remember the blogger part of the domain.

Woo hoo! Thanks, Jordan!!

Grow

2009-04-23T12:01:00.004-04:00

I have a few extremely teensy sprouts coming up in my herb planter! They've been under the grow bulb in our living room, and there's a chance of frost tonight and cool weather today and tomorrow, but Saturday and Sunday should be in the 80's (!!!) so they're going outside for the weekend! I should have some pictures by Sunday. I'm so excited!!

I still haven't been able to replace my mysteriously empty seed packet of Genovese Basil, so hopefully I'll stop by HG tomorrow so I can get those suckers planted in time to benefit from this weekend's super weather.

Now that I'm in Bell Choir through the end of the season, you should all come see me and my mom play at TLC on May 3. We are doing both the 8:15 and 11:00 services, communion music plus one piece with the piano that is really exciting and peppy! Should be a good time. Except for the part where we have to be there at 7:30, but you don't have to be there nearly that early to see us, so no excuses.

I'm feeling so motivated today that I cleaned my whole desk at work in addition to getting a bunch of work done already. I wish I could be at home today and apply all this energy to cleaning and packing! Or better yet, actually in my new house so I could apply it to de-wallpapering and painting.

I think I might get some non-pressure-treated scrap wood and make my herb garden a raised garden. Thoughts?

I also got another great idea from our visit to Ikea: They had for sale a live fern in a deep clear glass, filled with layers of stone and sand and gravel and peat and dirt. The fern was still under the rim of the vase, so the whole thing created a really neat layered visual that would make a great decoration, but since it was all inside the glass it was still very clean looking, with the shades of brown and textures of all the layers and the burst of green on top. I was scoping out similar big glass vases at Michael's the other day, so this summer I'm going to make my own. I'm thinking centerpiece for the dining room table, to match the green paint and bring in some earthy tones. Think terrarium without the lid.

Yay for the nice weather to come this weekend! I can't wait. Maybe I can get a little tan going on my dreadfully white toes so they look better in these cute sandals. If the diet keeps going as well as it is so far, I might even need to be tan all over come Summer! Here's hoping.

Already a busy weekend

2009-04-18T18:50:00.006-04:00

Last week, I saw birds on our feeder for the first time! Bright and beautiful Goldfinches:

Then this morning, there were more! Actually probably the same pair:

Last night, before stopping by Highland Gardens to get the makings of an herb garden, we drove past the house to see if anything new was growing. The Bradford Pear tree is now in full bloom, proving that it is, in fact, a Bradford Pear like my mom guessed!

Then we got the herb supplies. Instead of a pre-packaged kit for sprouting seeds, we figured out it was about the same price to buy our own 36 little seedling pellets, planters, tray, and greenhouse lid. Plus three kinds of Basil seeds, Chives, Dill, Coriander/Cilantro, and Parsley, total was about $25! I decided to only plant the Genovese and Sweet basil, and leave the Lemon basil for planting in June because the packet said it didn't transplant well or grow well inside...but then I couldn't plant the Genovese basil because the seed packet was empty! So I'll plant those once I have a chance to go back and get a good pack.

Hopefully in a week or two I'll have little sprouts to photograph!

Once we move, I'll dig a garden out back ASAP and plant all the yumminess in the sunniest spot in our yard, and they'll help spice up lots of CSA veggies all summer long! It will feel great to be a locavore.

Herb garden

2009-04-17T12:22:00.005-04:00

Lemon Cornmeal Cake is a dessert you'll definitely want to try over at my recipe blog!

I also found time to sign on to goodreads for once, and reviewed Brisingr. If this book is still popular with young readers when my kids are old enough, I really hope they read and appreciate Tolkein and Lewis and a few other young adult fantasy writers first so that when they read Paolini's books they can appreciate how not-that-great they are and move on to re-reading Harry Potter. If you look at Brisingr's page on Goodreads.com, take a look at some of the negative reviews - they're pretty great.

Super nice weather forecast for this weekend, so I think I'm going to spend some time on Saturday with a trip to Lowe's for a seed sprouting kit and a bunch of herb seeds. Then I'll be all ready to go when we move into our new house at the end of May, with lots of little seedlings to plant so we have lots of herbs to complement all the veggies we'll be getting from our CSA subscription! I am so excited I can hardly stand it.

Week One of my new measured diet is going very well. I felt a little sad at the skimpy 8 oz of Chiang Mer (made with Tilapia this time) that didn't halfway fill my bowl on Wednesday evening, but as soon as I walked away and sat down to start eating, I was fine...plus, I've already enjoyed the leftovers once, and because I ate so much less on Wednesday I still get to enjoy it twice more!

Herbs for my seedlings:
Basil (two or three varieties!)
Rosemary
Thyme
Parsley
Dill
Cilantro
Chives
Fennel

4 to 6 weeks seems to be the recommended time for seedlings to grow before planting, so if I do it tomorrow it will correspond perfectly with our first weekend in our new home!

New food plan

2009-04-14T10:32:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I got an idea, and I felt so good about it that I had the drive to implement it last night, and I now have stashed in the fridge in the break room 2 meals plus 1 snack for each day this week.

My idea is to start using the nice little digital kitchen scale I registered for before our wedding. It's been sitting on our sideboard, rarely used, for over 18 months now. Last night I gave it a good workout, and it did a great job.

I've tried counting calories, and from that experience I know that I'd never stick with the Weight Watchers points thing either, if I ever felt tempted to try it. It was just way too much hassle to figure out what everything I ate contained, and from there to decide how much of it I could/should eat.

Then on a few occasions, mainly after New Years and right before summer, I've told myself that I can eat all the foods I love, but just eat less of them. Well, this doesn't work for me either, because it's just too vague: I need a hard, bright line to use, but one that's easy to see and stick with.

Yesterday I decided that bright line would be the weight of my meals. Last night, I first took a trip to Giant for some lean protein snacks and a pack of the Ziplock 8 oz plastic containers. At home, I measured and weighed to create containers of breakfast and lunch for Tuesday-Friday this week, and now they're all at work with me, lined up in the fridge and ready to grab. Each meal is 8 oz of food, all of it food I love. I also have supplies for various high-protein, low-fat afternoon snacks weighing in at 4 oz each, and here I'm trying some new things, such as 1% cottage cheese to which I will add a scoop of fat-free salsa, and 1-oz packs of part-skim string cheese.

Breakfast is a 1/2 cup scoop of oatmeal, a scant handful of walnuts, a scoop of the blueberry sauce left over from a cake I made this weekend (it's just blueberries, brown sugar, and lemon juice), and then I top that off with skim milk until I hit 8 oz. The sugar in the blueberry sauce is all the sweetner I need, and it's so delicious that I plan to make more of the sauce, sans cake, just to use on my oatmeal.

Lunch this week is leftover pork curry over rice for two days, and for the other two days an egg salad sandwich piled high with broccosprouts, my new favorite sandwich topper in the known universe. The lunch containers only weigh in at 6 oz, so I'll probably add a string cheese each day for a total of 7 oz.

Snacks are all pre-packaged, so I can decide what I want each afternoon and still know exactly how much I'm eating. Cottage cheese with salsa or plain, some fat-free Greek yogurt (I got one peach and one vanilla to try), and tonight I plan to make some fat free dip out of 3 oz fat free plain Greek yogurt plus 1 oz of fat free sour cream, add some garlic and pepper, and dip in the baby cucumbers I bought to make something like a fat free, high protein tzatziki.

For dinners I plan to cook as usual, whatever food we want to make, no restrictions (altho we are going to start eating leaner meat and more fish!), but then instead of loading up my plate or bowl with as much food as it can hold and thus ending up with no leftovers, I'll use the handy scale again to make sure I don't take more than 8 oz. Then if I am really hungry for seconds, or if I want dessert, I can have up to another 4 oz.

In addition to all that, which I'm going to follow 100%, I have two other tricks I'm going to try: I'm going to take time to eat my meal or snack, trying to stretch it over a half hour if possible; and I'm going to try to not drink during meals, and wait for another half hour after I'm done eating before I have anything to drink. That last part is going to be hard for me, because I've been used to drinking as I eat for my entire life, but I've been looking up information about it, and it seems to be better to drink before a meal and not during. I might not stick with that part, but we'll see; maybe I'll get used to it pretty easily.

I feel so differently about this plan than about any other diet-like plans I've had before. I literally never stick with anything for more than a day or two, but I think it's been because it was too much hassle, too hard to follow, or too vague. I don't feel nervous or hesitant or annoyed or hassled at all by this plan - I just feel really relieved that I don't have to think about what I'm eating for the rest of the week, I don't have to fool around trying to figure out what to eat in the mornings or what to take for lunches, and I don't have to worry about feeling guilty when I don't have time to pack my lunch and I end up eating in the cafeteria.

Instead of having a small idea like trying to make myself eat yogurt for lunch every day, which leaves me unsatisfied and craving more food, this time I have an entire plan and all the tools to do it - a variety of food and snacks, reuseable containers in the right sizes, a kitchen scale, and regular, normal food that I like to eat.

I weighed myself last night, and now I'm going to follow the plan for at least 2 full weeks before I weigh myself again. I hope that after 2 weeks of never pigging out, I will have lost a few pounds, and that will be more than enough reward to encourage me to keep doing this indefinitely. Already just the feeling of not having to think about what I'm eating during the day, not feeling guilty, and knowing that I'll be efficiently using all my leftovers and saving money by packing all my food, makes me feel so great that I have no desire to stray at all.

Goals:
- Lose weight
- Waste less food
- Save money
- Eat more protein
- Eat less fat
- Eat more fruits & veggies

Here's hoping I've finally come up with a plan that will work for me!

Back

2009-04-13T16:03:00.002-04:00

I totally forgot to do anything on facebook yesterday, which I guess means my giving it up for lent really served its purpose. And I didn't twitter all day either, except to say "I'm back!"

Easter was fun, with probably my favorite parts being singing the Halleluja Chorus (always makes me cry a little, in a good way), and getting to play in the bell choir. When I get subbed in at the last minute before a concert, I get all the reward of a couple of challenging rehearsals and then a performance, with none of the bad feelings associated with going to practice every single week. When I was in bell choir for real, it meant two nights a week at church, and it was just too much for me.

Saturday since it was raining, I was going to make us work on the basement and getting everything organized and packed down there, but was easily swayed by Paul when he suggested going to Ikea instead. We had so much fun! We didn't spend any money, we found a couch we both really love that we think will be perfect for our new living room, we got tons of other ideas, and the icing on the cake: Paul remembered a bunch of leftover hardware from our kitchen cabinets, which he brought along to return, so not only did we not buy anything but we walked out with a nice chunk of store credit! If we buy the couch we want, it equates to about a 13% discount on the couch!

When we got home Saturday, I got bitten by the domestic bug and proceeded to bake a cake I've been wanting to try (Lemon Cornmeal Cake with Lemon Glaze and Crushed Blueberry Sauce - Paul loved it even more than I did), and also hardboiled and colored the 10 eggs we had left in our fridge. Of course, then I basically forgot about the eggs, and have yet to eat one. I might just make egg salad out of them, otherwise I'm afraid I'll never use them.

I also need to post pictures of my getting-close-to-finished first-ever sweater. Last night I finished the second sleeve and attached both sleeves to the body in-the-round, so now I'm ready to do the raglan shaping decrease rounds, then the neckline, then sew up the few small seems and fix a couple of holes and it's done! Now I just need to find a toddler to wear it. Anyone have a toddler who would fit into a sweater with a 26" chest size?

Next up: Kelly's baby sweater, interspersed with as many wool soakers as I can finish.

More proof that I love Margaritas and Camp Nawakwa

2009-04-09T11:45:00.004-04:00

I still don't remember it, but Tom R and, I assume, Marilyn D have managed to dig up the "contract" Marilyn told me existed. I didn't believe her, and I still don't remember it, but that is definitely my signature, so it must be true...I whited out my last name for purposes of internet posting. Tom posted this on facebook earlier this week, but since it's still Lent I had to have Paul e-mail me a copy so I could see it:

Meredith will live in a hole in Swamp for FCI [signed] Meredith [dated] 11/10/2008 Paul: Maintenence [sic] Shed

I registered for Family Camp I earlier this week, which I'm guessing is what prompted them find this up and post it. I just hope they don't charge me full price for sleeping in a hole in the swamp...maybe they'll let me crawl in with Paul in the maintenance shed if it does rain.

Of course, I suppose a hole in a swamp would be filled with water anyway, so maybe the rain won't even matter.

I can't believe they kept track of a napkin for this long. I'm impressed.

6 more days

2009-04-06T08:29:00.003-04:00

until Lent is over and I can go back to facebook and twitter. I haven't missed them nearly as much as I thought I would. I have missed facebook, and have heard of a few juicy tidbits from people that I wish I could rush online and check out for myself, but it will all still be there next week. Twitter I think I'll cut back on and mostly just use to update my facebook status.

I'm back at work today, but starting light with a couple of hours out over lunch today to see my grandfather get married. That should be really fun. I'm wearing my dark-blue-with-creamy-white-flowers Easter dress at work today as a result, which is really no fun in the rain and I almost forgot how much I hate wearing nylons, but it's OK because I look cute.

David Sedaris was so much fun to see live in Frederick on Saturday, and before that a fun lunch with Kelly P and Luke and Matt P, followed by a very successful shopping trip to the Gettysburg outlets - two perfect summery cotton cardigans and two pairs of pants at the Gap outlet, plus a new pair of sandals that are super cute.

Got up at 6:45 this morning with no problems, so I'm hoping my energy feeding off of preparations for moving in less than 2 months will follow through and start getting me into work at 8 AM regularly, so that I can get home earlier to continue preliminary packing and (more importantly) knitting for all my pregnant friends. I finally started the second sleeve of my first-ever sweater, so I want to get that all finished, and then I have my yarn for Kelly's baby sweater, plus I still want to finish a few baby toys and diaper covers to use up some of the Paton's Classic Wool yarn I have.

Making that big donation to Salvation Army on Saturday morning felt great. I hope some 12-year-old girl really loves the size 4 pink courderoy pants I barely wore, and my favorite-ever jean shorts with the little embroidered sunflowers.

Haven't had time

2009-04-04T08:34:00.003-04:00

Sorry I haven't delivered on the video of the inside of our house. I haven't had time to edit it down to an internet-friendly size yet. In the mean time, here are a few pictures of the outside:

Yesterday I got most of the way done with the basement, altho it still looks like a mess. But now that I'm so far in, I'm more enthusiastic to keep going - it makes the moving seem more real.

Paul went to the gym after work, so I had a little longer to keep working. Since I had off all week but we didn't do anything vacation-y, we decided to go out to dinner last night, and to kick the evening off right, Paul brought home three yellow roses for me! He had them sitting on the kitchen table in my favorite vase when I came up from the basement.

He also got me a new faceplate and mouse pad for my iBook, which is getting up there in years for a notebook computer, and has been having keyboard quirks for quite a while now. For instance, the Q key is overly sensitive: both times I've used it in this paragraph, it's typed two. The zero key is the same way. And then last week the mouse button stopped working reliably. What Paul bought won't replace the keyboard, but it will replace everything else visible, and it will give us a chance to pull of the keyboard and clean it, so hopefully it will solve all the problems. The only other thing that might be a problem soon is the optical drive, but that doesn't even matter - I rarely use it, and if I needed to get information off of this computer I can always use the USB ports and our external hard drive, and transfer it to Paul's computer if I needed to burn a disc.

Also yesterday the yarn I ordered came in the mail! It's so soft. I got a rich, dark brown for the body, and a lovely, muted green for the trim. I'm going to make a cardigan, so the green will be at the edges of the sleeves as well as around the bottom and up the front and for the neckline. So exciting! And before too long, I will get to meet Baby Prep and hold her and have a picture of her wearing the sweater I made. That will be so amazing.

Today we're headed to Salvation Army this morning to make a big drop-off of lots of old clothing, a few blankets, and more than ten pairs of my old shoes. That means I can officially buy a pair of cute sandals this afternoon if I see anything good! And I have Paul's express permission, because I've met his one criteria for buying shoes: get rid of a pair that I already have. So actually, by his requirement, I could theoretically buy ten pairs of shoes today...but I won't. Maybe two pairs if there are cute sandals AND cute ballet flats.

After Salvo and smoothies from the Lemoyne Farmer's Market, we head down to Gettysburg to Kelly's in-laws for a breakfast party for the first day of trout season. Since we're not coming home afterwards we won't be trying to catch any trout, but it will still be fun. I can't wait to see her belly!

Then in the afternoon we will head over to the Gettysburg Outlets, where I will look for some khaki pants, cardigans, and those cute sandals to show off my newly-painted toenails. Then before 5:00 my parents will meet us in the parking lot and we'll hop in with them to head down to Frederick, MD for dinner and to see David Sedaris! Should be a really fun day. Hannah and her friend Carl will be there too, but she's driving separately so she can go pick Carl up from the Northernmost Metro station, since he lives in DC.

Tomorrow afternoon: more basement cleaning, and hopefully getting close to finishing my first trial-run sweater. And maybe trying out the salmon with rice salad I was thinking about last week.

Inspected

2009-03-24T15:18:00.002-04:00

The home inspection went very well, and we really liked the guy that did it. He's in business for himself, and also is an electrician and does a lot of other home repair. He did a great job.

We'll be asking the current owner to install GFI plugs in the kitchen and bathrooms to make our home compliant for the FHA assessment, and there is also a secondary electrical panel in the basement that has a major recall and needs to be replaced.

The only other issue is radon. We're going to have to shell out around $800 for a mitigation system, so I've been reading up about it online. We're going to ask the current owner to share the cost with us, so hopefully that will help.

Other than that, the home inspector said our house was "immaculate" and was really impressed! He even gave us some good tips for stripping the wallpaper. So we're feeling happier than ever about our new home!

I've been continuing to think about what colors to paint, and have even been reading some design blogs, like this one that my cousin Katy recommended.

I took some pictures of the outside and a video tour of the inside, so I'll post those this evening hopefully. I think the video might be too long to post all at once, so I have to figure out how to split it up. But once it's up, I'm open to any and all decorating suggestions! I just want to get rid of the wallpaper!!

Mini break

2009-03-20T10:51:00.003-04:00

Tonight I hop on a train to Philly to visit my good friend from Juniata, Nicole. We plan to talk, shop, talk, eat at yummy restaurants, talk, walk around Philly, and talk. Weather on Saturday is supposed to be sunny and in the mid 50's, so I brought my light jacket and my hooded wool tunic. That way I'll be unencumbered enough that I'll be able to comfortably carry lots of bags o' stuff from the fruits of our shopping.

Monday morning Paul and I lock in our mortgage rate (4.87%!! Ridiculous!), then grab a quick lunch before the home inspection at 1:00. I am extremely excited, but I hope to think about it less this weekend and focus on relaxing. I slept well last night for the first time in about two weeks, and it was because I wasn't thinking about our new house. I can't believe that after Monday, I won't see the inside again until the end of May! How will I make it that long? Well, it will just make May 29th that much more amazingly wonderful and exciting.

I will get myself into the relaxation state of mind by spending 2 hours alone on the train knitting and gazing out the window. I'm looking forward to it a LOT. Is it 6:00 PM yet?

ACCEPTED!!

2009-03-16T20:29:00.009-04:00

SHE ACCEPTED OUR OFFER!!! She didn't even counter, so Paul and I are paying exactly what she paid for the house a couple of years ago...she even gave us the 1-year home warranty we asked for! The only thing she didn't accept was the closing date of April 30, she wants to wait until May 29 (the last weekday of the month is when you typically close). Which is fine with us! What's another month? We own a house!!

So you want to see pictures? I don't want to advertise the address, but it's in Shiremanstown, and I saved all the pics to my computer so I can post them. I'll post more after the home inspection, during which I think I'll be able to take a bunch of my own.

If you click on an image you can see it a little bigger.

The is also a third bedroom; the master bedroom has a half bath (no shower) and his & hers closets, plus my grandfather is giving us his nice bedroom suite with queen bed (YAY!!!); and the basement is half finished, with the other half going to laundry room and Paul's future man cave. There's even a separate room for Paul's man cave that also has a cedar-lined closet - isn't that cool? So we can keep some of our nice clothing down there and it won't get moths or anything! And the unfinished room where we'll put the washer and dryer will also have tons of space for an ironing board and plenty of storage. I am thinking up BUNCHES of other ideas already! WOW.

OMG WE OWN A HOUSE. FOR REALZ. SRSLY. As of May 29...woo hoo!!

Remember - I gave up facebook for Lent, so if you want the address, or to comment, either do it on blogger or e-mail me or call me! peacelovemath [at] gmail [dot] com

More waiting

2009-03-16T16:56:00.003-04:00

We're supposed to hear about our offer by "Late afternoon" today. It's 5:00 now and no word yet.

I'm still all fluttery and nervous, but I think by going through the first offer and being RIDICULOUSLY full of anxiety that whole time, I've kind of inocculated myself. I guess another factor is that this time they'll make a counter-offer and it won't be the end of the road because we still have room to offer more.

I also feel better because we have a few other comparable houses that we'll go look at if this offer doesn't work out. And since our current house is SO overpriced, I'm just interested to hear what she'll come back with, and if it will be reasonable at all.

More this evening if I hear anything...

Make me an offer

2009-03-13T18:31:00.002-04:00

Well, we made the offer this morning...and a few minutes ago our realtor called to say they did not accept it. Since we were reaching on this house, we gave them our best and final offer, so there's no counter-offer.

SO we're meeting with our realtor again tomorrow at 12:30 to write an offer on our other house, a rancher only two blocks away. This one is well within our reach, and our realtor thinks it's overpriced, so this time we'll be making a low but reasonable offer and then wait for a counter-offer. And then we will also counter, probably, and hopefully go back and forth until Paul and I decide to accept. And then we will hopefully close on April 30, and start moving in on May 1!

If this all works out, we'll give our 2 months' notice on our current apartment on April 1 so that we overlap for a month while we rip down wallpaper, maybe rip up some carpet, paint, and move into our new rancher. And then hopefully by August we'll be ready to have a big housewarming open house! You're invited.

Who needs sleep?

2009-03-12T15:19:00.005-04:00

Tomorrow morning, Paul and I are meeting our realtor to write an offer on a house we saw last night. The offer is going to be pretty ridiculously low, so we're not really expecting them to accept it. We saw the house by accident because we drove past the "for sale" sign on our way to the house we were scheduled to see. Our realtor pulled it up on her blackberry, and saw that the list price was one thing, when in fact it is actually listed for $15k more. This place is bigger than any other place we've looked at, and would be really fun to live in. It has a nice little sunroom and a big, sunny yard, and LOTS of potential for fun DIY projects. And underneath all that ugly carpet on the top two levels is HARDWOOD. Pretty cool.

Last night I didn't sleep well because I was thinking about this house. I dreamt about it. My imagination wouldn't shut off.

Tonight I won't sleep well because I'll be thinking about our meeting to write the offer tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow night I won't sleep well because we'll be waiting for the response to our offer.

At least then it will be Saturday. But not sleeping well makes me very emotional, and that's not a good state of mind for choosing houses and writing offers.

This is why we can't draw the process out over months and months. I just can't deal with the emotional rollercoaster for that long. But there are two possibilities right now, and both of them would make us very happy, so we just have to cross our fingers that the one won't go under contract while we're making our probably futile offer on the other.

In other news, I just bought a train ticket to go visit my good friend Nicole in Philly next Friday. We plan to walk around and eat at lots of nice restaurants and drink at lots of nice bars. And shop. And talk. A lot. Also I am going to go to her Episcopal church and meet her pastor, who is gay. I hope Lutherans catch up soon. We're better than most, at least.

All in all, a fun Sunday

2009-03-08T18:24:00.005-04:00

This morning I had to wake up at 7:15 to be at church by 7:45, but since we started Daylight Savings Time last night it felt like getting up at 6:15. Not the best start to the day.

After church I went back to my parents' house to hang out with Hannah until she was ready to leave for Lebanon to visit our grandmother in the hospital. I hung out with here all afternoon yesterday too - it was a fun sister weekend. Yesterday she embroidered while I knitted, and we chatted and watched Food Network and Anthony Bourdain until Paul came to pick me up for our appointment with our realtor.

The whole looking at houses thing went very well, but I don't want to tell you about our new favorite yet, because we might actually be making an offer within a couple of weeks or less. So you can ask me directly, or I will blog about it once the process is farther along and our offer has been excepted. I will say that Paul and I are both REALLY excited, and thing are generally going smoothly - we're aligning with each other very well in terms of what timeline we're comfortable with and what houses we like. It's all very warm and fuzzy. I can't wait to have more concrete news for you!!

So anyway, Hannah and I went to visit Gommy in the hospital, hung out with her for about an hour (she was doing very well, sitting up on the edge of the bed to chat with us), and then we stopped by to see Addy, Franny, Aunt Judy, and of course Greer. Greer has been a little too big for lap-sitting for years now, but for some reason today she just wanted to sit on my lap! Furthermore, if I moved my hand just a little to, say, scratch my nose, she gently but firmly grabbed my wrist and pulled it back around her waist. Luckily, I got Judy to take a picture:

Greer is holding Hannah's foot because she was in the process of convincing Han that her foot was very smelly (it wasn't) and that Greer herself was not smelly, of which Hannah kept accusing her. Once she got off of my lap, Greer also told me that my feet were smelly. She was in a pretty good mood. It was quite amusing.

So that along with all the hanging out with Hannah and the happy house hunting made this a pretty darn awesome weekend and a good Sunday, even though it got off to a rough start and now I'm very tired and it's only 7 PM. Time for dinner with Paul followed by Battlestar Galactica 3rd-to-last episode! More house news as soon as I can share!

Jon and Kate plus Juniata College!

2009-03-06T17:37:00.004-05:00

I've never even seen this show, but I always hear my friends talking about it. Look - Jon of "Jon and Kate Plus 8" is hanging out with Juniata College students in Huntingdon at two of the bars I used to frequent! Fun fun. Clicky!

Pre-Approved!

2009-03-04T20:38:00.002-05:00

Paul & I got pre-approved for a mortgage today! It was so exciting and not nearly as stressful as I thought. And Saturday we have an appointment with a realtor who comes recommended, and who works with my friend Jo's dad! So hopefully over the next few weeks we'll tour a handful of other houses, and then make an OFFER on one!!

Here's the list thus far; the red tack is already sold, and the pink tack is our FAVORITE so far by a pretty big margin. I think we'll tour it again with our official realtor and during the daytime so we can get a better feel for everything.

View Larger Map

If you click on a tack it should show you the info I typed, including a link to the listing (copy and paste it into the address bar).

We are SO EXCITED!!!

Growing

2009-03-02T13:09:00.004-05:00

My little baby Jade plant that my mom rooted from a broken bit of her big Jade is getting two new little limbs on top. There was just a little bump on top, but it's now resolved itself into to teensy round bits, so it's definitely growing! Yay.

I'm also happy about my herbs, which are finally flourishing: the rosemary has more bright-green, fast-growing new branches than it had all last summer when it was planted outside, so hopefully it will eventually get big and bushy so we can actually use it to cook without taking more than it can spare. The basil is also finally growing, but definitely needs to be moved into a bigger pot, something I keep not getting around to. Maybe this week.

Hopefully this summer we can see the basil I've been told about that grows and grows until you have more than you know what to do with. I would love to have that much basil, because I would know what to do with it: make lots and lots of tomato-basil sandwiches, salads, and pesto!

I hope our house has lots of big, sunny windows and a big, sunny backyard!

Homebuying Mania!!

2009-02-24T22:18:00.003-05:00

Check out tonight's delicious side dish, a la Paul and Slashfood.

As expected, tonight's house is a definite "no." In general it was in quite good condition on the inside, and it was VERY charming. Gorgeous wood floors and trim in excellent condition, very vintage and beautiful, LOTS of character. One less serious setback was the bathroom: Only one in the whole house, VERY tiny, on the second floor: one teensy sink, the claw-foot tub as promised, and a small toilet, with no counters or other storage space in the tiny room. Also no shower! It wouldn't have been hard to install a hose, shower head, and curtain so that we could shower, but it would have been harder and more expensive to make the bathroom usable for the long term.

But the deal breaker was the brick chimney that came up from the furnace in the basement inside the wall and up through both floors: it was severely structurally damaged. Because of the structural damage, the lining was of course beyond cracked, showing severe water damage on all the walls around it on both floors. Paul, who knows something about chimneys from work, says it would have cost AT LEAST $30,000 to fix, and possibly as much as double that.

I'm kind of relieved that this decision was made for us - it would have been amazing to own a house like that in the long run, but even without the chimney it would have been a really big job for us to take on. So here's where we stand:

this house that we saw yesterday is the first one officially on the short list. The inside was really great, with a lot of new stuff, wood floors throughout, great size, and a SUPER basement - not finished, but with a laundry room, chest freezer, big double basin sink by the washer/dryer, a separate room for the furnace and hot water heater, water softener, a walk-in closet with built-in shelves, a full bathroom with stand-up shower, and the crowning feature of the basement: A BIG and very clean room with built-in hefty wooden tables that will make about the most wonderful man cave Paul could ever hope for. The entire basement was very clean, impressively so. The little shed at the back of the carport was also impressively clean. The kitchen definitely needs some updating, but nothing we won't enjoy doing ourselves - first and foremost installing a gas range. And there's room for us to make it to our second kid without being too cramped.

Our plan is to get pre-approved for a mortgage ASAP (hopefully next week) so we have a clear picture of what we can afford and what our monthly payments are going to look like. Then we plan to see two more houses: this one and this one.

And then, assuming the mortgage pre-approval goes smoothly and we can afford what we think we can afford, I think we'll make an offer on one. Only the second of the two new ones above is currently occupied, so with that possible exception we could be moving into our first home easily within the next 90 days, and possibly in less than 60!!

Depending on the timing and if we can afford it, we hope to have a full month of overlap living in our apartment so that we can really plan out the move, get the house ready and do some painting, and just be really organized about the whole thing.

So let me know what you think about the three we're currently focused on! I'm sure I'll be posting more as soon as I know it, and once we've visited the other two. I'm particularly excited about the fireplaces in both of the others, which is one thing the house on Marble Street doesn't have.

Here are the three short-listed houses mapped:

View Larger Map

This post is getting long, but I have one more thing to share:

Paul and I were just planning to start slowly right now, and take a few more months before we really got into it more deeply. I thought that, as usual, I would be the one getting super excited and wanting to get ahead of ourselves, and Paul is much more reserved and acts as the voice of reason. It works out well. But this time around, Paul has jumped in just as enthusiastically as I have, and so he's not being reserved at all! So we're both just extremely excited, chomping at the bit, and eager to buy our first home. So instead of a slow start to a multi-month process, we've snowballed into a full-blown, full-scale house hunt that we hope to culminate in less than 90 days. It's a little crazy, but I don't think it's the wrong move. It is an amazing time to buy, and we can have the whole summer to make our house into a home. I'm so hopeful that we'll be able to start our garden with a big fall planting, and be settled in enough to have a big housewarming party while the weather is still nice enough to be outside. We already have many family and friends who will help us prepare, and I can't wait to get started.

Week

2009-02-24T08:41:00.003-05:00

Yesterday: picked Paul up at work at 6, met realtor to look at this house, then to the gym where I swam with Kelly and Paul walked/jogged around the track. Home for dinner, watching more West Wing, and of course massive amounts of conversation about this house and home buying in general. We REALLY liked the house, it is definitely on the short list. Plenty for us to customize and enjoy to feed our DIY tendencies, but nothing huge that would require immediate or costly attention.

Today: meeting Paul and realtor (a different one) at this house to finally see the inside, after much speculation and getting ahead of ourselves. If the inside is a complete hole (very possible: why else would they post only outside pics?), then we'll probably cross it off. If it's redeemable, we'll have to decide whether we want to buy a house on an entire acre of nice, flat, grassy, very garden-friendly land that we could gradually turn into our dream home and live in possibly forever, but that would be a BIG task for us to be taking on at this point in our lives; or whether we want to stick with plan A and get a starter home that won't have nearly so many potential issues and that we'll plan on selling to trade up in 5 years or so.

After that, Paul heads to class and I have a haircut at 4:30, followed by passport photos one last time, a trip to the post office to mail everything (Paul already got his passport and I am jealous! also afraid he might leave the country without me), and finally meeting Kelly at the YMCA for Cardio Kickbox.

Wednesday: Stopping by the house of the family whose house I'll be using to host four boys from the Theil College Choir on Saturday night, then to church for the Ash Wednesday service.

Thursday: Working late to get in some extra hours, then choir practice as usual while Paul is at class.

Friday: Leaving in the early afternoon with Kelly (I see a lot of her lately, it's a good thing we like each other) to head down to Camp Nawakwa while it's still daylight, possibly with a detour to see her niece who I haven't seen in almost a year. Somewhere in the past few days I need to have purchased some crusty bread to take down to Nawakwa for book group.

Saturday: More book group, dinner with Sally and Joan?, then the Theil College Choir concert at Trinity and heading to the house from Wednesday with four students for the night.

Sunday: Attempting to wake up myself and four college boys in time to get ready, eat breakfast, and be back at church by 9:30 AM.

I haven't had so many plans every day of the week since I don't even know when. Ack! Busy. Hopefully Paul will hear back from PNC today and we can go in and get pre-approved for a mortgage, and get a better idea of how much home we can really afford and what our monthly payments will be. But that's going to have to happen next week. And who knows, it's possible that within a month or two we'll be home owners! Wow.

Wow...

...wow.

Chiang Mer II, House Hunt, and sweater update

2009-02-16T23:03:00.004-05:00

Very yummy dinner tonight! Another permanent addition to our rotation, altho to make it for a young kid I'd have to figure out something other than mild curry paste that isn't really all that mild. Enjoy!

Also, here's our favorite house thus far:

Favorite based on list price, location, size and style of house, appearance, off-street parking, and a nice big backyard. We're scheduled to see the inside of it next Monday evening! Should be lots of fun, and hopefully educational.

We got to see the inside of two places on Saturday, and they were polar opposites: one was a bank-owned place that was way too shabby inside for us to take on, plus was too big for us. The other was FSBO and too brand-new for us to make our own to satisfy our DIY itch, and was maybe a little too small with no second floor AND no basement. Because of the newness, we recommended it to our other house-hunting couple friends.

Still working on the sweater, just barely started the first sleeve. Body is done to the armpits, waiting for the sleeves. Somehow I managed to knit not at all on my unexpected day off, but I did get a significant amount of laundry done, so it's OK.

Bed time!

Limited facebook access

2009-02-10T11:45:00.002-05:00

Paul has now given me access to facebook from 5:30-9:30 in the evening. I like this arrangement - it forces me to limit my time on there and not get too sucked in.

As a result, last night I finished the body of my first sweater up to the armpits! Now tonight I will start on the first sleeve!! I'm quite excited. Making the sleeves should go quite quickly. I'm going to try the provisional cast-on method of tubular cast-on to do the sleeve edging so that it's a little tighter than the bottom of the sweater.

More pictures soon! I also want to share the pics of the tamales Paul and I made on Sunday. They took us until 10:30 PM, but they were quite tastey, and we now have a whole freezer full to reward us for our patience and hard work.

I also wanted to share with you that I know SIX pregnant women at the moment, four having their first babies and two having their second. It's no wonder Kelly M and I feel left out! Sheesh. And we're not even getting pressure from our mothers-in-law, but really, it's hard to stave off those nesting hormones when you're surrounded by them!! Hopefully within a few months we will both own our first homes, and then maybe we can start thinking about giving in to the tug...

Speaking of hard work...I should probably be doing some right now. Getting right on that...

No more facebook

2009-02-08T17:49:00.003-05:00

So Paul has blocked my access to facebook. Sometimes it's not so fun to have a tech-savvy hubby.

But I deserve it: I get sucked in and then I don't come to bed to snuggle. I keep saying I want to start going to bed earlier, and facebook is one of the major players keeping me up late. I'm weak.

Also, I was planning to give it up for Lent anyway. I also plan to give up twitter for lent. On Mardi Gras I'll post a status saying the date I'll be back, and then I won't even look at it until Easter. If I succeed, it will be the first time I've ever stuck to something like that for Lent, unless you count me giving up, say, soda, which I hate and never drink in the first place.

Now I will hopefully finish more important things, like knitting and crocheting sweaters, booties, blankets, hats and toys for my various friends planning to push out babies all summer and fall.

Upon re-reading it a day later, this post sounds remarkably like a silly version of "he hits me because he loves me, and it's for my own good," but really, I do spend WAAAAaaaaay too much time on teh internets.

I need to get on facebook for a few minutes, though, so I can send a message to someone from my old job who just friended me...I'm not ignoring you, Diora!! I wonder if I can access facebook through Paul's computer?? Just one more hit, please, then I swear I'll quit! I can change, really!! Just once more, then I'm done forever!

Knitting books

2009-02-06T23:52:00.003-05:00

I need advice from knitters who own books:

What are good knitting books to have?

I am considering purchasing Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitter's Almanac on Amazon for $8 (I have a $25 gift card too), but some say that it's hard to follow without learning her abbreviations and lingo in Knitting Without Tears. I searched the entire Cumberland County Library System, and the only Elizabeth Zimmermann book they have is Knitting Without Tears, so I put it on hold. I figure I could get the Almanac, and photocopy the parts I need from KWT. Mainly I want the baby surprise jacket, but lot of Ravelry people and knitters in general always call Almanac the best knitting book for $8 you will ever buy, and I'm curious. Does anyone have a copy I could borrow and skim?

Do you have other knitting books that you think are vital to your knitting library? I have now read Stitch 'n Bitch, the entire learning part before the patterns, and I am about 20% through my first sweater from Ann Budd's Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns, which I think was a good choice for my first sweater book.

Katy! Nic! Anyone else who knits! I need thoughts.

Wool and the sheep it came from

2009-02-02T21:21:00.006-05:00

Well this isn't the actual sheep that the wool for my sweater came from, but it's still a nice parallel.

While uploading a new pic of my sweater, now a few inches long, I finally uploaded a video I took at the PA Farm Show. I totally forgot I took this, and you are going to LOVE it! This is the sheep I told some of you about. It was much more angry and unhappy about having been sheared than any other sheep - the rest of them were standing quietly, looking rather pathetic and embarrassed in the corners of their pens. This sheep, on the other hand, wanted everyone to know that it hadn't given anyone permission to take its wool! Keep your eyes on the kid in the stroller at the end.

First the sweater:

Now the angry sheep video:

Enjoy!

Another to-do/schedule post

2009-02-02T09:50:00.005-05:00

Monday evening:
- Zumba @ WSYMCA w Min & Kel 5:30
- Make something reasonably healthy for dinner - think low fat!
- Mail prescriptions in to Express Scripts
- Laundry
- Finish ripping HP3 to iTunes
- Finish Sarah & Ginny's sample invitations & mail them
- Upload knitting pics to Flickr
- Finish setting up Ravelry account (using above Flickr photos)
- Knit & go to bed

Tuesday evening:
- MWM (My Wonderful Mom) picks me up from work @ 5:00 PM
- MWM takes me to dinner @ Passage To India (YUM!!)
- MWM then drives me to St. Patrick Cathedral in Harrisburg for
- 7:30 PM Mendelssohn's 200th Birthday AGO concert
*Come see me sing three beautiful pieces w ~15 other Trinity members!
*Celebrate Mendelssohn's 200th Birthday!
- Hopefully time for some more knitting before bed.

Wednesday evening:
- Maybe WSYMCA with Min at 5:00ish?
- 7:00 PM Herby's El Mexicano with lots of fun Nawakwa people for Mare's birthday celebration!
*Yes, that's two birthdays in a row, but this one is for a living person who is much younger than Mendelssohn.
- Multiple margaritas might not be conducive to knitting before bed, but I'm going to try to control myself...

Thursday evening:
- Manning the Juniata booth at the Harrisburg Academy's College Fair
- Hopefully time for plenty of knitting before bed

Friday evening:
- Hopefully WSYMCA with Min around 4:30
- Relaxing after a really busy week!!

Other things to do ASAP:
- Passport photos @ AAA to finally get updated passport application in the mail so that Paul and I can legally travel outside the country at some point.
- Have Hannah over for dinner so she can give us our delicious Christmas present
- Mail in application for March First Time Homebuyer's class
- Update automatic Amazon credit card payment to include YMCA membership and online prescriptions

I like being busy!! *Whew*

Sweater

2009-01-27T08:43:00.007-05:00

I have started my very first sweater! So far I have about 1" of the bottom 2x2 rib.

Even better: last night I learned how to do tubular cast-on so that the hem is flat and pretty, just like the hem of a professional sweater! Because I am a beginner, mine is a little loose, but that is OK - it still looks loads better than if I had done a regular cast-on. I even used the next smaller needle size, but next time I'll go down two sizes, at least for the cast-on.

Despite staying up past midnight working on my cast-on, I still got up at 6:50 this morning, showered, and shaved in preparation to meet Kelly for lap swimming this evening at the West Shore YMCA. I'm quite proud of myself. I don't think it will always be this easy, because this morning I was honestly still hyped up about my tubular cast-on, and I think the adreneline helped. BUT hopefully the motivation of meeting someone else and not having to exercise alone will continue to motivate me, and after getting up earlier on a regular basis I will get better at it, and hopefully even make it a habit.

Also hopefully I will lose weight and fit into my old jeans again.

Even more wonderful would be if I lost enough weight to wear my old, barely-worn suits from Casual Corner that I can't bear to part with even though I haven't fit into them for over three years.

Well, since I'm at work so early, I suppose I'd better...uh...work...or something? Yeah.

Mushroom Risotto

2009-01-26T09:44:00.002-05:00

It was delish! Enjoy...

Chiang Mer recipe

2009-01-21T15:24:00.002-05:00

I made this last week and it was really good!
My Recipe Blog

Awesome

2009-01-20T20:51:00.003-05:00

I streamed the inauguration from CNN online at work today. Teared up a few times, especially during the swearing in...I am just so excited to see what will be set in motion over the next months.

Something else I meant to share from a few weeks ago: Paul officially paid off his student loans!! We are feeling so happy and light and free to have NO DEBT except for our car payment, on which we're months ahead of schedule. And we feel really good about the amount of money we're saving towards buying a house this summer. So everything is just really awesome right now!

Paul had his first class of the Spring semester tonight: Econ on Tuesdays 5:30-8:30, and Math on Thursdays 6:30-9:30. I have choir Thursdays during the same time, and on Tuesdays hopefully I'll keep going to the gym at EDS and/or to the YMCA, which I'm re-joining with Kelly and Mindy so we can all go together and reinforce each other. Mindy can't do Tuesdays, so maybe if I can't go with Kelly I'll just stick to EDS's gym on Tuesdays. I did an hour there today on the recumbent bike and elliptical, and the time went faster than ever because I tried doing Killer Sudoku for the first time - it worked!! Time slips away when I'm working on one of those, seriously. It's great.

The end!

OBAMA!!

Winning and losing

2009-01-19T20:49:00.002-05:00

The Eagles lost, so no all PA Super Bowl. Bummer.

But the Steelers won, so I have a team to cheer for! Yay!!

I didn't win the knitting giveaway I entered, which is fine because I wasn't really excited about anything but the yarn. And maybe the wooden crochet hook.

But I did win my Ebay bid for the interchangeable knitting needles, so hopefully by late this week I will have just about all the knitting needles I'll ever need! Yay. Super sweet. And then I will start knitting a kid-sized raglan sweater!

Poll for everyone: who has a kid that can wear a 26" circumference sweater, or grow into one by next winter? I'm making the first one out of plain off-white un-dyed wool. Might look cute on a boy over a collared shirt? I'm sure I'll post lots of pics once I get it started! In the mean time, I want to see pics of Katy's first sweater!

Giveaway!

2009-01-14T16:50:00.002-05:00

My friend Nic just clued me in to a nice online giveaway at a blog called petit elefant that reviews a lot of neat stuff. This sort of thing apparently happens pretty often, and I plan to start seeking them out more! There is a lot of nice free stuff to be had through the blogosphere!! Anywhoo, enjoy. I am excited to be discovering all these recources for cool crafting supplies, gadgets, patterns, and baby items!!

Just heard from the PA Farm Show

2009-01-14T14:35:00.005-05:00

I'm watching the PA Farm Show on PCN in a small corner of my desktop at work, and the woman covering craft judging just said the following of what the judges are looking for in a quilt:

"...the judges are looking at, is the colors combinating well..."

That was pretty awesome. In other news, I didn't know the Farm Show had a craft competition, so maybe next year I'll have a sweater to enter! I definitely want to have something to enter in the York Fair.

Someone else on PCN just said "youze" (as in, "you" with a "z" sound on the end) for a second person plural pronoun. We're definitely in PA!!

Attention Pregnant Friends

2009-01-13T12:29:00.003-05:00

You're all getting one of these, which I'm going to make so that I can use up some of my excess of wool and polyfil. I'm open to color requests if you'd like to coordinate.

Grammar question

2009-01-12T09:55:00.002-05:00

I need professional opinions from my fellow grammar policepersons out there:

What is the plural posessive form of the word "lady"? Is it "ladies'" with the apostrophe after the s?

I ask this as a result of noticing the following bathroom signs at the Farm Show on Saturday:

<--- Ladies Men's --->

It caught my eye, but I wasn't sure what to say was wrong with it. I don't think it's wrong to have a bathroom for females labeled "Ladies," as the plural of "Lady," and I also don't think it's incorrect to label a bathroom for men "Men's," because the bathroom is for the Men so the posessive makes sense. But together, I think it's inconsistent to label one as plural only, and the other as plural posessive...UNLESS "Ladies" is already posessive? But I don't think it is...

What do you think? I think it would be best to just stick with plural and not posessive for both, "Ladies" and "Men"? But that does sound kind of weird because of the "s" on one. I guess I probably prefer "Men" and "Women" or else "Ladies" and "Gentelmen," just to keep a more traditional pair of words.

What a silly post this is...mainly seeing the two signs just got me wondering what is the plural posessive form of "Lady." To be clear, I'm not really bothered by this - my interest is purely academic!

In other news, the farm show was a lot of fun, very delicious, and even fairly guilt-free since Paul and I opted to walk the 1.2 miles uphill in the cold, snowy weather back to our car rather than waiting in the long long long lines for the busses to take us. Only disappointment for Paul was not being asked to judge the Pineapple Upside Down Cake competition!

Organized

2009-01-06T22:31:00.004-05:00

On Sunday December 28 2008, Paul and I spent the entire afternoon cleaning our apartment. He scrubbed the bathroom from top to bottom, and I focused on rearranging all the clutter that had accumulated upstairs over the last 15 months. The basement is still the same mess, but now the upstairs is about as organized as it gets. The dining room was never bad, and the kitchen was fine too, except for the dishes we always let build up (since we don't have a dish washer!!), so the main improvements are the bathroom, bedroom a little bit, and the living room.

We had been planning to clean already, but on Sunday morning I woke up suddenly at 8 AM with an idea: photo boxes from JoAnn Fabrics like the one Rachel had given me for Christmas a few years ago. So I left early for church, and got to JoAnn's right when it opened at 10, and got myself 6 photo boxes...then when I got to the register, they were only $2 instead of $4, so I got 6 more...and then one had a small scratch on the lid, so I got it for only $0.50, so I ended up with 13. 9 are black, 2 are white, one is black with a grey design, and one is lime green. I have 9 on the bookcase and 4 on the shelf under the coffee table, and they are the coup de grace of the entire organization effort.

We have two matching bookcases, one of which is in the foyer and the other is in the living room. For some reason, we had all our books out in the foyer, and the one in the living room was just piled with junk. After filling a huge box to overflowing with trash and moving all the books into the living room, the bookcase in the foyer is now only half full, and the living room feels much more homey with all my books smiling at me from two neat rows. Here is what my living room bookcase looks like now:

From Home Improvement in New Cumberland

Isn't it neat how the photo boxes fit perfectly in the bookshelf? They all have labels, and now all the little stuff is organized: extra office stuff like markers and pens, stamps and envelopes and packing tape, random stuff like plug splitters and the old remotes, some of my craft supplies, and all kinds of stuff. Plus there are still three empty boxes waiting to obscure and organize the additional junk that we're sure to accumulate in the near future!

I also moved most of my smaller plants out to the living room on the radiator, and set up a bunch of photos on the window sill, so now I'll have to dust more, but there's no room for me to set papers and crap when I'm feeling lazy, so hopefully it will look nicer.

From Home Improvement in New Cumberland

I don't keep it on while we're home because it's so glaring, but I have a full-spectrum fluorescent bulb that stays on during the day to give the plants plenty of growing light. The aloe is growing like crazy, but I wish the basil and rosemary would thrive more. The pepper plant (not shown) just died after putting all its energy into one perfect red chili, so I'll probably re-pot the basil into that bigger pot and see if it's any happier with that. I should probably also get a bigger pot for the rosemary.

And finally, I thought of a good way to disguise the big ugly (but effective!) antenna Paul built to improve our over-the-air TV signal, and display one of my big pictures more prominently at the same time:

From Home Improvement in New Cumberland

The Van Gogh picture is leaning on the antenna, hiding it completely!

So there's New Year's Resolution # 1 still going well.
NYR # 2 I acted on today by using the gym at work for the first time: recumbent stationary bike for 30 minutes followed by elliptical machine for 15 minutes. I plan to go every Tuesday and Thursday after work, and strive to do some major physical activity every weekend, giving me at least 3 days of good exercise every week.
NYR # 3 is still in the works, planning to take the first time homebuyer's class in March with Paul.
NYR # 4 is obviously not going that great, since it's after 11 and I'm still blogging. But I have a doctor's appointment at 8 tomorrow and an eye appointment at 8 Thursday, so I'll have to get up earlier anyway. I'm going to shower now and go to bed, no earlier than before New Year's.

Oh one last thing, I settled on a sweater knitting book:

But I got it at Border's with my Christmas gift card from Paul's family.
The one Crystal used years ago I looked at, but all the comments on Amazon said it had good techniques but made very ugly sweaters; plus, it only made one kind of sweater, and I want to learn about all types and styles of knitting sweaters. This book goes through each different way to make a sweater with the different shoulders and necklines and bottom-up or top-down, and both circular and straight needle techniques, plus tells you how to do each kind with lots of different sizes, gauges, needle sizes, and yarn weights. PLUS it's spiral bound and hard cover, so it's very portable and useable. I think I picked a good one. Yay! I am excited to knit an actual whole (kid-sized) sweater within the next six months! Very cool. Also, yay for pregnant friends - I went first in the marriage thing, so I'm glad I don't have to go first in the baby thing.

OK seriously, good night for real this time. Byes.

NYE NC

2009-01-04T21:21:00.002-05:00

Paul & I went to North Carolina to visit Rach, Kelly, Luke, Sarah, and Matt for New Year's Eve. Rachel and Shawn were there too! It was lots of fun! Pictures here.

Football is over, but we didn't want to give up our fun Monday evenings, so Kelly, Reed, Mindy, and Keith are coming over tomorrow night anyway. I got snacks at Wegman's since my mom said the quiches she got were so good, and I made the dip that Aunt Judy gave me the mix for. Also I got more of that artichoke lemon pesto that everyone liked so much, since I was at Wegman's. So we have four different yummy snacks, plus salsa if we want...Oh, and celery and carrot sticks.

New Year's resolutions:

1. Keep apartment neat and clean - so far so good, it's nice and clean now!
2. Eat less and exercise more - meh, so far I've eaten a bit less maybe, but hope to start exercising this week in the gym at work
3. Buy a house - going to go read more "Home buying for dummies" right now, and we're planning to take the first time home buyer's class in March that Susan recommended.
4. Go to bed earlier and get up earlier - implementing that NOW by going to bed at 9:30, hope to be asleep by 10:30. Readysetgo!

Clean

2008-12-29T17:42:00.002-05:00

My apartment feels extremely super much nicer. Still a little work to do in the dining room & kitchen, but in general things are all neat and tidy, and New Year's Resolution #1 is to keep it that way. NYRs #2-4 are, of course, to be more active, eat less, and lose weight. It sure would be nice to fit into my jeans from last year, and to fit into my capri pants by summer so I have something to wear at Family Camp.

Time for a quick shower, real clothing, and then out to dinner and a movie with Keith and Mindy. Our usual Monday night crowd is otherwise occupied, so it's just the four of us and we decided to change things up. I'm looking forward to lots of movie popcorn with plenty of cancer-causing butter flavoring, and then seeing if I hate Benjamin Button as much as Katy did.

Tomorrow I'm really looking forward to a relaxing day with my Mom, lounging around at her house knitting and crocheting all day. Also hopefully I'll stop by Salvation Army to drop off a few sweaters and some votive holders someone gave me that I've never taken out of the box, and JC Penny to see if they'll exchange the pants I've only worn a few times that have a broken side zipper. If not, then maybe my Mom will try to sew in a new zipper for me, which could also work and might even be easier.

Wednesday we head down to Cary, North Carolina with Kelly and Reed for New Year's Eve with Rachel, Kelly, and Luke. I'm super excited for that, it should be a fun little trip. And by "little" I mean "14 hours round-trip and less than 20 hours in NC." But this is the kind of crazy thing we need to do in these last couple of years before we have babies!

Thursday we'll have brunch with Rachel, Kelly, and Luke before heading home.

Friday will hopefully be relaxing again, with maybe a little more cleaning and hopefully more knitting and crocheting.

Saturday Paul works, so maybe I'll be able to go hang out with my Mom some more.

Sunday afteroon I'm hoping for a hike, or at least a long walk.

Then I guess I have to go back to work. Ah, well. It's been a great vacation.

Craft for Christmas in Lebanon

2008-12-19T13:30:00.000-05:00

Hey family,

I think on Saturday when we're done unwrapping presents we should keep the wrapping paper fairly smooth, cut it into strips, and make these cool stars! They're so easy - it takes less than a couple minutes per star. We could string them onto a garland, or put them in a box to use for filler for next year's presents, or string them individually to make ornaments! Let me know what you think.

Love,
Mer

Mondays are good days

2008-12-16T17:26:00.002-05:00

A month or so ago, a few husbands including mine decided they were going to get together to watch Monday Night Football every week. It only took a week for Kelly and me to realize that we could get in on the fun by having our own separate gathering; two weeks after that, Mindy joined us too. So now every Sunday instead of feeling bummed that I have to go to work the next day, I instead am looking forward to a relaxing evening with some girlfriends. The difference this makes to the entire week is pretty amazing - we were talking about it last night. Sunday evening feels completely different now, and Monday is so much less bleak; in fact, it's actually one of the highlights of the week!

Next Monday is Kelly and Reed's first wedding anniversary, but Mindy and I decided that we don't want to give up our new little Monday ray of sunshine, so we're planning to get together anyway. I'm not sure what will happen after January when football season is over and the husbands stop meeting, but I'm thinking we might just keep going with the dinner rotation. It's seriously the best idea ever for a Monday night.

From the start the wives were cooking dinner at rotating apartments, and after about 4 weeks of going to a bar the men decided it would be cheaper and easier to just pick a different apartment from the women and order pizza or something. Last night was the best dinner yet - Mindy made this amazing tomato bisque, plus grilled turkey and brie sandwiches to go with it. Pretty amazing. The only downer of the entire evening was when I got home and realized we forgot to eat the caramel apple pie she had made for dessert!

CC Update

2008-12-11T15:44:00.003-05:00

*update*

Got Christmas cards, better than I hoped for: 8.5 x 11 paper pre-creased and with stickers to seal it. I wrote a (not-so-short) letter, imbedded a few pictures from the past year (or so), and all I have to do now is type everyone's addresses into the Word doc I formatted to print everything on the outside of the letter. So then you print all the addresses on one side, turn them over and print all the letters on the other, fold them all into thirds, and apply the snowflake sticker. Bam! Christmas cards! I love it. They're even pretty cute. I really feel like I've saved myself a bunch of time and money, and still turned out a pretty darn nice mailing for Christmas. Ten points to Staples for carrying these cool mailers, and another twenty points to my nice, new 3-in-1 wireless HP printer!

Tonight: looking forward to some quality knitting time at Cornerstone before Choir practice and a new small-ensemble song to practice, then home for Lamb Khorma (my fav Indian dish from Masala Bistro), picked up by Paul to be waiting for me when I get home at 10:00, by which point I'll be quite hungry so that I enjoy it all the more.

PS: Everyone should read this blog post and link to it from their own sites to increase its audience.

90 more minutes at work...

Christmas cards

2008-12-10T15:51:00.005-05:00

I have claimed a shortened url for peacelovemath-dom forever:

http://bit.ly/plm

Points to this blog, but it's super short! I would have used http://is.gd/ but it doesn't allow you to customize the hash, so I had to go with a total character count of 17 instead of 16. Oh well.

Tonight I'm stopping at Staples for envelopes and a pack of festive printer paper, and my Christmas cards this year are going to be a short typed letter and a picture or two printed at home. I think it'll save money; also, with the new printer it will be super easy to print everyone's address (and return address!) right on each envelope, so no sticking of anything. I might even see about paying online for printed postage...we'll see.

Compare this plan to my good friend Kelly, who spent the evening at my house on Monday using the leftover supplies from her hand-made wedding invitations to make sixty hand-made Christmas cards. More power to her. She also had all her thank-you cards done within a couple months of the wedding, so obviously she has that segment of personal discipline way up on me.

My excuse: two of my relatives-in-law have already spelled my name incorrectly (a typical "Merideth" on one, but the baffling "Merrith" on the other), and all of them have addressed the envelopes to "Mr. and Mrs. A____," thus obliterating my name completely, so that hardly merits hand-made cards on my part. I will have two things on Kelly's lovely cards: photos and a short letter. Should count for something.

What are your Christmas card plans or non-plans for this year? I'm interested to hear what everyone does, especially those my age. Usually I just see a card with a signature, and maybe my name written as an address before the pre-printed message; occasionally a short note, and also frequently those photo greeting cards, but I'm not springing for those until I have a baby to put on there with me, haha.

Recipe

2008-12-09T17:49:00.002-05:00

Roast Chicken & Carrots with Mirepoix Rice

Enjoy!

The floodgates open!

2008-12-04T16:46:00.003-05:00

VERY busy weekend ahead, packed with lots and lots of fun Christmasy goodness:

Friday evening is the fast-becoming-traditional annual night out with my MIL for dinner and the Hershey Symphony, for which she gets free tickets from her co-worker who plays in the all-volunteer orchestra. This year there is a choir, and we're going to dinner a The Chocolate Avenue Grill, which is Hershey's equivalent of Café Magnolia, a great little restaurant. I plan on having the sesame-encrusted Tuna with risotto. Plus the Hershey location has a liquor license, so I'm also going to take advantage of that...yum!!

Saturday morning I will bake an apple pie to take down to Leesburg, VA for my good friend former co-worker's annual Christmas party! We'll stay late, but drive back Saturday night, because I am playing carillon again on Sunday.

Sunday afternoon from 4 until 5:45 I will be plinking out melodies on the piano for Trinity's two children's choirs, and then right after that Paul and I will book it down to Gettysburg for dinner with various camp people at the Berkebiles'! I'm excited to see them and where they live. Should be a fun time. Not sure who all will be there, but I know it will be good people!

Sometimes I think we're just way too wholesome for our own good. Seriously, when did we develop such a rich social life?? I love it, but it still amazes me. And sometimes it gets a little tiring, but around the holidays I'm OK with that!

Who?

2008-12-03T10:02:00.002-05:00

As I left my office building last night, I heard something I wasn't expecting:

Hoo-HOOO HOOO hoo-hoo!
hooo hoo-hoo...

There was not one, but TWO big owls sitting on the roof of the building!! At first I thought it was just one owl doing a louder hoot and than a few extra softer hoots each time, but then they hooted simultaneously. It was so cool!

I could only see one, and only dimly - I could see a white patch that I assume was his upper chest, and I could tell he was turning his head sometimes because the white patch would kind of blink in and out of sight.

It's the talk of the office this morning, so apparently everyone who left after dark heard them. They were hooting frequently when I heard them. I'm hoping they're there again tonight!

Debt

2008-11-30T21:47:00.003-05:00

I just paid off my credit cards. 100%.

My internet and Netflix automatically come out of my one credit card every month, so I have an automatic payment set up to pay that off every month now, so I will never get any more finance charges. I won't even have to worry about paying the bill, because it will always be $0 by the time I get it.

And we have enough in the savings account for Paul to pay off his student loan, so he's going to do that this week too!

I feel so awesome right now. This means our only debt is the car, which is still way more than we can pay off, but we're way ahead on payments so it shouldn't be a bad mark on our credit when we go to get a home loan

I am officially free of my credit cards. YAY! I feel so...light!

Made for TV, but not for DVD

2008-11-29T22:09:00.003-05:00

I'm bummed because The Christmas Toy was only released on DVD without Kermit's narration, and even that isn't available on Netflix. The original made-for-TV movie released in 1986 is only available on VHS, so if I want to watch it this Christmas I will have to spend an hour in my basement. Maybe my dad still has it in the basement, and then I can watch it while I do the stationary bike.

Had a nice second Thanksgiving this evening, even though Paul and I fell a bit behind our planned schedule...everything was still very yummy!

Lots of fun plans between now and New Year's...

Friday dinner & Hershey Symphony with Linda
Saturday Christmas par-tay at Jeneane's with the VA SAIC crew
The next weekend Trinity choir concert followed by the choir Christmas Party, which last year had more top-shelf liquor than I have ever seen outside a liquor store
The weekend after that KFC Christmas party (yes, that's one Christmas party every weekend from now until Christmas!)
Then 1.5 more days of work, followed by 12.5 days off from the afternoon of Tuesday 12/23 through Sunday 1/4/2009. Hey, I had 3.5 days of use-it-or-lose-it vaca at my new job, plus designated holidays on 12/24, 12/25, 12/31, 1/1, and 1/2. Can't beat that!!
I'm planning on 12/23 Cookie Fest 2008 with Han, baking all afternoon
Christmas Eve with my family followed by the usual late service with the choir at church
Christmas Day with Paul's family, officially upholding our new one-location-per-day rule of Holiday travel
Saturday after Christmas in Lebanon with my Mom's family
Some quality time the next week hanging out and crocheting with my mom
and for New Year's Eve hopefully driving down to NC with Kelly and Reed to party with the other two PREPs!!

And somewhere in there, decorating our apartment and going to get a real tree with Kelly and Reed! Yay for that piney smell every day when I come home...we should probably do that this week sometime...

iPhone, bitch!

2008-11-27T00:48:00.002-05:00

I am having lots and lots of fun with Kelly and Rachel (and Paul, Reed, and Matt). Also, as I believe I mentioned on twitter, I am drunk. Furthermore, I wish Kelly P. could also be here!!

Happy Thanksgiving!!!

I heart Rachel's iPhone...

The end.

This post is NOT about Twilight.

2008-11-25T18:58:00.003-05:00

Which I haven't quite finished yet. I'm not talking about it.

Tonight: using 10% off coupon at Giant, which I MUST use because I missed using my last $0.40/gallon gas discount from Giant, which means I am giving them free money. I am still going to be disappointed that my shopping trip wasn't bigger, but I just don't need that much stuff from Giant right now. I am going to go make a list of stuff I can buy anyway.

I need to go do laundry. And us my avocados and tomatoes. And make the grocery list. And finish reading...but I'm not talking about it...besides, tonight is House, which I will be watching for the first time with the digital converter, which hopefully means it will be clear! It will still suck, but I will still enjoy it.

EDS had a fire drill today 3 minutes before my phone call for my first-ever RFI assignment. The alarm made the most awful, head-exploding sound I have ever heard, including when the alarm in my dorm went off every 15 minutes from 2AM through 4AM at Juniata. Worst. sound. ever. I held my ears all the way down the stairs, which was only 5 flights as opposed to the 11 flights I had to go down at SAIC in Virginia, so I guess it's a trade-off.

Other than that, work is going quite well...I might even get to do some programming! And traveling for fun training things!

Ok. Laundry. And avocado slicing. And grocery list making. And House. And reading...that book. You know, that one.

How ironic

2008-11-21T14:20:00.002-05:00

Today I successfully donated blood for the first time in a while...I got a really no-nonsense woman who took about 90 seconds start to finish to find a vein, smear iodine all over my arm, and poke a needle in there. It only took her the one try, and I proceeded to fill the bag quicker than I've ever done it before! The needle did hurt this time though, which is unusual for me, so she wasn't perfect.

Ironically, I was reading the 4th Twilight book as I bled. Pretty funny.

Tonight Paul is going to donate at Holy Spirit's center, and then we are going to treat ourselves to dinner out - I think donating blood must take a lot of calories to recover from, so we're justified, right?

I think I'll definitely have Twilight finished in time to discuss it in depth with Katy and Hannah again over Thanksgiving. Oh, and with Kelly on Friday at Herby's - that's probably the most important part. Haha.

Twilight Gripes

2008-11-17T20:37:00.003-05:00

I'm about 3/4ths through the 3rd book in the Twilight series. I only really started to hate Bella in the 2nd book after way, way, way too many pages of her angsty, self-centered, masturbatory whining. I'm enjoying the 3rd book much more with Edward back in the picture, but last night I read a sentence that really made me cringe, and my inner feminist just about jumped out of my head and burned the book on the spot.

The scene is Bella wanting to go visit someone, and she knows that Edward wouldn't want her to go because he would consider it unsafe. No spoilers, I promise.

"I just stared at him, trying to understand what he wanted, and trying to put out of my mind the yearning I felt to go to La Push so that I wouldn't be swayed by my own wishes."

The thing that infuriates me is that she is mad at herself for not being able to completely push aside her own desires in order to completely understand what Edward wants so that she can do what he wants despite the fact that it is the opposite of what she wants. Not only that, but she feels it's necessary to not even tell Edward how she feels, because it's not OK to discuss her desires with him, she feels that she should just think about it until she convinces herself that he is right to begin with, and her desires were wrong and don't matter at all.

Now, in the reality of the book, she does get what she wants, but the way it plays out casts Edward in the role of benevolent patriarch who is giving Bella what she wants in order to prove to her (and himself) that he can be "reasonable." Bella is still worried that he is hiding his disapproval of the plan, and seems like she is STILL considering not going just to give him what she thinks he wants. It's ridiculous!! Gah. I hate Bella so much.

Also, I hate that Edward keeps taking Bella's face in his hands and making her look at him. I think it happened 3 or 4 times just in the few chapters I read last night. It's so condescending, or patronizing, or something. I hate it.

That said, I am enjoying the books on the whole. The story is fun. The writing is definitely mediocre, or worse, but the plot is good. The relationship between Bella and Edward is definitely the most compelling part of the entire series, but I'm even getting a little weary of that - how many different iterations of proving to themselves that the other really does love them unconditionally can they go through?? Seriously.

OK I'm done now.

Let's Get Digital

2008-11-15T23:00:00.002-05:00

Our government coupon for the digital converter box for backwards people such as ourselves who get our TV for free over the air. So we stopped at Best Buy this afternoon and got the box, and first impression is great - the signal is WAY clearer, as good as if we were paying for these channels, and no fuzzyness! Plus, now we have 11 channels! BUT when we do anything but sit still on the couch, like if I'm walking around the living room picking up clutter, we get the new digital version of snow: pixilation. Plus the sound sometimes cuts out as well. But the problem isn't bad, and I think the extra channels and clearer signal in general totally make up for it. With the coupon, the converter box was only like $25. Only other down is that now we have FOUR remotes: TV, stereo, DVD, and now the converter box. Ick.

Then I walked into the kitchen to make myself a hot drink in the microwave, and Paul went "WOAH!" I peeked out, and the TV screen was a colorful mess of little squares, with the sound wiped out as well. Interesting discovery. So I guess if I don't like what Paul is watching, now I know what to do! *evil grin*

In other news, we left the Hershey Bears game early to avoid the traffic once the Bears scored their 6th goal, putting them up 3 with 8 minutes left. They scored again as we were walking out. So I think they won. They scored first, then the Philly Phantoms scored 2; Bears tied it up, then the Phantoms pulled ahead again 4-3. But in the 3rd period, the Bears tied it up again, and soon pulled ahead. It was a fun little evening.

Earlier in the day, Paul and I headed down to York to pick up his re-sized wedding band at the closest Zales, and on our way to Best Buy for the digital converter box, he spotted a sign pointing us to a Greek Church Festival. So we changed our dinner plans on the spot, and detoured for some yummy Greek food. I had a delicious Gyro, and Paul had a really yummy potato/noodle/ground beef layered thing, all washed down with our favorite Greek coffee. The ham loaf is now waiting in the fridge to cook tomorrow for use as a yummy lunch sandwich ingredient for next week's lunches.

As for dinner at the YCI student restaurant last night: really amazing! It was all super fancy, artfully plated, and perfectly cooked. One of the fanciest and unique meals we've had, and all for way less than we've paid for other nice dinners. I would definitely go back there again!! Plus of course it was WAY less since we had our actual dinners for free a la the gift certificates Paul's family got us for our anniversary. I highly recommend it to anyone for a budget date night of the highest quality. Just don't expect matching gourmet service - the waiters are just the same students in a rotation, so they'd all rather be back in the kitchen, but the girl who served us was very nice anyway. We waited a while for our waters at the beginning, but that was OK since we brought our own wine to tide us over! Oh, also, all the courses were perfectly sized, so I was pleasantly full but not stuffed even after 4 courses.

Tomorrow: singing at church at the early service, then headed to the grocery store and home to tidy up a bit before Crystal arrives. Hopefully she's in the mood for some grilled sandwiches for lunch. Afternoon of socializing with Crys followed by some veggie pot pie a la Hannah at my parent's house for Mom's birthday! Another fun-filled weekend with Mer and Paul.

Date Night!

2008-11-14T16:22:00.005-05:00

This is what I'll be having for dinner tonight:

Current four-course prix-fixe menu:
Louisiana Cuisine

Course One
Chicken and Andouille Étouffée
a classic blend of chicken and smoked andouille sausage in a rich, dark bodied sauce - served over red beans and rice

Course Two
Crab Cheesecake with Pecan Crust
a savory blend of blue crab, cream cheese and spices baked in a pecan crust and smothered with sauce meunière

Course Three
Beef Wellington
spice-rubbed tenderloin topped with mushroom duxelles and wrapped in flakey pastry - served with red wine demi-glace

Course Four
Apple beignets with Creole cream cheese and bourbon caramel sauce

Paul will pick from the 3-course menu and we'll share the dessert. I'm headed to the liquor store on my way home for a bottle of wine!

(I originally typed "I'm headed to the liquor store for a bottle of wine on my way home," which is a very good example of a misplaced modifier! Happy grammar lesson of the day.)

PS: after dinner, we are going to see the new Bond movie, Quantum of Solace! Fun fun. I wonder if I'll have room left in my belly for some popcorn...probably not...darn.

Cooking

2008-11-11T22:32:00.002-05:00

I miss posting recipes like I got to do with the whole Whip It Up thing this summer, so I started another blog for the rare occasion that I make something new and yummy for dinner and feel like sharing.

Tonight that very scenario happened for the first time! I give you Salmon & Rice Casserole. Enjoy!

Shaping up to be a busy week...yesterday Paul and I had a lovely evening at Herby's drinking way too much for a Monday night, and hanging out with some wonderful Nawakwa people: Kelly, Reed, Tom, Gerry, Mindy, Keith, Marilyn, John, and Jack. We almost had the restaurant to ourselves, which is good, because at times we were rather loud. It was really really fun.

Tomorrow we're going to attempt making pasta from scratch, so maybe I'll actually take photos and post again. Paul tried to do this on his own on Sunday afternoon, but because he does not have a knack for dough, it didn't go too well. I eventually figured out that most of his problem was using semolina that was not ground finely enough - it was like corn meal. We managed to get a bit of misshapen fettuccini anyway, and boiled it and ate it, and it was OK. Tomorrow we're going to use regular all-purpose flour and see what happens.

Friday we have a date at the York Culinary Institute's student-run restaurant, for which we have a gift certificate from Paul's family that should get us both our meals for free. I plan on bringing a bottle of wine, so that will be an extra $0.50, not bad for a 4-course meal.

Saturday evening we have tickets to the Hershey Bears game with 40 other Juniata folk, yay!

Sunday I should hopefully get to finally see Crystal, and then Sunday night is birthday dinner for my Mom.

Whew!

Tainted victory?

2008-11-05T13:16:00.003-05:00

Not cool, people. Not cool.

I can only hope that a more tolerant culture fostered by the Obama presidency will lead to change on this issue - like at least a nation-wide institution of civil unions for same-sex couples.

On an unrelated topic, and I know at least two of my friends agree with me on this, what the heck was Michelle Obama wearing last night? Yuck.

President Elect BARACK OBAMA

2008-11-05T00:05:00.002-05:00

I am so happy right now.

I voted at around 7:50 AM beside my wonderful husband, and spent this evening with him as we watched history unfold. What an awesome experience.