Keeping up with the Joneses

This is my house.  I really love it.  When we came on a house hunting trip from Denver in 2008, we saw 30-odd houses on the first day of house hunting.  I became convinced that we would never find what I wanted.  Everything was too small or laid out weird or too far away from work or...  You get the idea.

Our realtor added this house at the last minute as it had just come onto the market.  We were the first people to see it.  One look at the porch and I was pretty much sold.  E wanted us to go inside first, so I aquiesed and visited the interior before actively committing.  (Does jumping up and down on the sidewalk before walking in saying "I LOVE IT!" count as committing?)  Anyway, there were a few minor things we wanted to change about the place, but overall it was perfect for us and for our planned (and now very real) two children.  We made an offer (along with 3 couples who saw the house after us), ended up winning (yay!), and now live here.

As with any house, ours had issues that we didn't immediately identify in our half-hour walk through.  Perhaps the most prominent and oustanding of these are our neighbors to the right.  When you're looking at our house, as you are in the photo above, our master bathroom is on the ground floor on the right hand side.  See the big window?  There's another one like that on the side of the house.  Those are over our master bath spa tub (used approximately 3 times).  Directly adjacent to those windows but technically on our next-door-negihbor's property is our neighbor's front porch.

Our neighbors are very nice people.  They are very friendly and have never been anything but super duper nice to us.  I honestly really like them and they're very easy to talk to.  But not easy enough apparently, because there are some things I'd really like to ask them to stop doing, but have not found the cojones to bring up in our conversations at the mailbox.

Our neighbors like to make excellent use of their very nice porch.  Who can blame them?  It's really nice.  They sit on it a lot.  And they are smokers, it seems.  And drinkers.  I have no qualms with smokers and drinkers.  I personally really don't like smoke.  It gives me a headache and makes my eyes water, but if you want to do it, knock yourself (or your lungs) out.  That said, please don't toss your cigarette butts into the yard.  They're often landing our our side of the yard and it looks trashy.  Plus I'm rightfully concerned you're going to catch something on fire.  We're in a drought you know.

I don't want to sound like a nagging Nancy, and I'm cool with your drinking.  It's whatever.  But do you mind please keeping your empties on your porch?  Or better yet, toss them in the recycling bin.  Seriously.  I'll even give you one to keep out there on your awesome porch to put them in.  I'm not a huge fan of finding beer cans blown into my garden.  I'm not a particularly good gardener anyway, and somehow I feel like the debris is making it worse.

One final request...  If you're going to have a knock-down drag-out fight with your husband/daughter/son/whomever, can I recommend you do it inside your house?  Seriously, my bathroom window backs up directly to your porch.  If you're yelling at each other on your porch, I'm totally pulling a Mrs. Kravitz on you and standing in my bathtub peeking through the blinds to see what the heck is going on.  You can't blame a girl for that.

I can't figure these people out.  And I lack the cojones to talk to them about it.

Winter cleaning

I'm a bit of a purger. Not so much as some people, but I really really hate to have stuff we aren't using. There's something about having clutter that makes me kind of itchy. I just like things to be simple-ish, and having a bunch of stuff we don't need doesn't qualify as simple to me.

After B's recent surgery we found ourselves in the throes of holiday madness, but in all of this we had about a week of time at home just for B (and us) to recover. I decided this was a perfect opportunity to purge ourselves of things we didn't need and get a head start on spring cleaning.

E and I tackled a cabinet in our playroom that was stuffed to the gills with extraneous electronics. Seriously. Lots and lots of electronics that haven't been hooked up in years. After pulling everything out, we found that we had the following: one Wii, one Xbox360, TWO Nintendos (the original), one Sega Genesis, three sets of headphones, two wires that we didn't know what they went to, a set of speakers, a VCR, a ridiculous number of CDs we no longer listen to, an ungodly number of DVDs we don't watch, and a small subset of VHS tapes (many duplicated on DVD).

After purging all of the VHS tapes, the Sega, the wire, the speakers, a good number of the DVDs, we were left with a dilemma. Should we keep ANY of this stuff?

We agreed the Wii and the Xbox360 could stay. Those are relatively modern technology that we'd LIKE to play, if only we had time, hooked them up, and decided to use our free time for that. The Nintendos and VCR, however, proved to be a point of contention.

Me: Let's donate the VCR and Nintendos to charity.

E: You can't BUY a Nintendo anymore!

Me: Sure you can - on eBay.

E: Looks at me as if I'm crazy. But we've already got it here now!

Me: Do we really need TWO 8-bit gaming systems that aren't hooked up?

E: What if one breaks and I want to play Mike Tyson's Punch Out?

Me: Do you want to play Mike Tyson's Punch Out?

E: I MIGHT! Fine, what if I get all the Nintendo stuff into this box and put it in the closet for safekeeping? I think the boys might like it when they get bigger.

Me: Realizing he's got me with the boys argument. Okeydoke. We can at least donate the VCR.

E: What if we want to watch a VHS tape?

Me: We don't OWN VHS tapes anymore - we're donating them all. If we wanted to watch any of those movies we could stream them on Netflix. I don't even know where to get a VHS tape anymore.

E: What if my dad gives us a set of old home movies on VHS and we want to watch them?

Me: Your dad has old VHS home movies?

E: He MIGHT!

Me: Seriously, we need to just get rid of this thing.

E: Fine. Pouts.

I look away to sort other miscellaneous junk.

E: I'm going to put this box in the closet. Grabs VHR and throws it on the box and scurries away to the storage closet.

Me: *Sigh*

E: You'll thank me later!

Alphagator!

My friend D has started selling things from Uppercase Living. Check out her website if you're interested. I'm super excited about the things we purchased. We got a chalkboard for N to play with outside his room, a quote that we put in his bathroom, and an alphagator for his playroom. I especially love the alphagator - check him out!

Facelift!

When E and I moved into our house, one of the first things we wanted to do was paint the walls. Bring a little life to the place. However, after thinking it over, we found ourselves paralyzed at the thought of painting the living room ourselves. 22 foot ceilings! How in the world were we supposed to handle that? Scaffolding? This all sounded too complicated. Then we thought about potentially hiring people to do this job for us, but given we didn't have any glowing recommendations, we didn't really know where to begin. Well, we got distracted somehow (had a baby) and sort of forgot about the whole thing. Fast forward a year, and we remembered. We finally sought out recommendations. We hired people to paint our tall ceilings. They did in two days what would have taken us potentially months and months. And we L-O-V-E it. It's fantastic. Here are pictures of our recent home facelift.



Now here's a random picture of N because apparently at this point in my life no post is complete without him. Check out the fantastic use of sippy cup. He's getting good!

Lawncare throwdown!

This is our lawn mower. It's what is known as a reel mower. About as simple as they come - you push it and the blades turn, cutting the grass. You don't push, it doesn't cut. That's really about it. We've got a pretty small yard, so this doesn't bother us too much. Besides, E usually handles the lawn care.

Today I asked if I could help him out with some of the outside-y chores. Why not? I'm fully capable. Plus, it's hot and I don't want him to suffer. My suggestion? I would mow and he could trim. It sounded fair. Besides, how hard could mowing be?

He smiled at my suggestion and then implied (ever so sweetly) that I didn't have enough "poop in my britches" to complete the task. Me, being ever convinced that I can do anything he can do, took offense. I told him that I fully did have enough proverbial poop. He agreed that I'm a fabulously capable women, but then pointed out that pushing the mower around was maybe more work then I realized. I know (and even knew, at the time) this may have been a fantastic ploy in reverse psychology, but I couldn't back down from the challenge.

I marched myself outside and pulled out the mower (which apparently weighs substantially more than I realized) and started marching up and down the yard. I say marching, but I actually mean moving two feet before the mower got stuck and had to be moved by using a draft horse. Unfortunately, I don't have such an animal, so I forced the mower up and down the yard. E and N came outside to watch this spectacle. In about a half hour I had the whole yard chopped down to a respectable height.

I also had sweat running all over my body and a substantial amount of grass plastered to all exposed skin. Admittedly, it was a terrific workout and much more difficult than I had anticipated.

But I did have plenty of "poop in my britches".

Little things that thrill ya

After over a year of books-stacked-unceremoniously-on-the-floor, E and I decided it was high time to purchase shelves for them to live on. Tah-dah! Faulkner? You don't have to live under Calvin and Hobbes. Digital Signal Processing? No longer will you live next to the paperback we picked up at the airport. It's salve for our obsessive compulsive selves. Everything is organized. There are sections for everything. Textbooks, check. Religious books, over there. Books that make us think are just below books that let us escape from thinking. After a year of seeing all our beloved books wasting away on the office floor, this is certainly a nice change of pace. I'm sure they appreciate it too.

We got an extra bookshelf for the living room that currently houses all of our photo albums and new photos of our little man. Over all I think we really scored. They've even got mood lighting, which, as it turns out, it an excellent way to check on the little man in the middle of the night.

Speaking of that - last night he went down at 10 pm, got up at 2 am, then got up at 5 am. After six weeks of much more chopped up nights, it was like heaven. Let's hope it continues!

One other thing to note. We have doves. Two of them. They've taken up roost in the window above our front door, under the shade of the porch. I'm not really sure what to do about them, but it was kind of exciting discovering them there. I don't want to deal with any more poo than I'm currently handling though (diapers, anyone?) so I might have to find a way to relocate them to one of our trees. Ideas?

It's never too early to start...

There are all kinds of chores that always need doing at a house. The grass needs mowing. It's time to vaccuum. You get the idea. Wanting to contribute, N has taken to doing the laundry. Good job little man! We're going to have to work on sock folding and actually hanging things up, but he's definitely a fan of clean laundry.

In other news, our little man has managed to roll over three times! Does it count if he's on his belly and gets really REALLY angry and flings himself over to his back then looks really surprised at himself? We're going to say it does. No more hanging out on the ottoman for you. The last thing we need is for you to fling yourself off of it in a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde fit.

He's pretty incredible. If I could learn to do so many new things in only five and a half weeks... Who knows what I could accomplish!

Spring in Texas

Who says I can't grow things? It's springtime in Texas, and everything is in bloom. (That includes me - you ought to see the belly. That's another post for another time though.) Anyway, as you might remember, I'm terrible at growing things. Just awful. But apparently Mother Nature has smiled on me this year - check out these beauties!
My azela is even looking fantastic. It's an explosion of pink blossoms all over the bush. Are there more leaves or more flowers? Heck if I know? All I know is that it's BEAUTIFUL!

Perhaps the most amazing thing of all, my tomato plant is not just growing happily, but it's successfully producing tomatoes! Look at them. Two little green tomatoes! Hopefully soon they'll be happy red tomatoes that are more delicious than I could even imagine.

Grow plants grow!

Warm and inviting

As promised, some pictures of our re-done bathroom in the nice new shade of yellow. It's very warm and inviting. We like it a lot. Plus, check out the fantastic mirror that started it all...
Be impressed with the new light fixture and towel ring. There's a new matching toilet paper ring too. It all looks very classy. Nice work E! He's just so handy.

It all started with a mirror...

Remember how I decided I thought it would be great to replace a mirror with a framed one? And how after I decided to do that my loving and dedicated husband discovered that the mirror on the wall was glued to it? And even more than that - how after we figured we'd have to repaint, we might as well do something "exciting"? Well, here is a shot of the exciting orange color we picked for the walls...

After a few hours of "Do you like it?" and "Well, it's certainly bright and cheerful!", we decided that orange was not the right color for our little tiny half-bath. This was spurned on further by the fact that when the light was on in the bathroom, it shone a sun-like orange glow out into the adjoining rooms. Back to Lowes where we purchased a new, more subdued color for the bathroom. In addition to this, I decided that as long as we were repainting, we might as well replace the fixtures with ones I loved. Why stop at just paint?

Before you think I have anything to do with the fixing up of the bathroom, know that when in the eighth month of pregnancy they really frown on painting, especially in confined spaces. This is all being done by E - who is quite possibly the most patient and loving man in the entire world.

Pictures to come of the fully redone bathroom. We (read - E) still have to put up the second coat of the newer, more subdued color.

Mirrors made of diamonds

When you buy a house, it comes equipped with certain essential items. These include the things you'd expect, along with things you'd never think about such as garbage disposals, air filters, and mirrors in the bathrooms. Our half bath came equipped with a workable but un-beautiful beveled glass mirror (sans frame) that I wanted to replace with a framed mirror. We purchased the new framed mirror below this weekend with the intention of removing the old mirror and replacing it with the newer, frame-y-er model.
This all sounds reasonable, until we realized that the mirror in the half bath was not affixed to the wall in any traditional way. Mounting brackets? No. Clips? No. Screws and D-rings? Absolutely not. No, no, no. The mirror in our half bath was affixed to the wall with nothing less than industrial grade adhesive. I'm not sure what it's typically used for, but I am quite certain that anything stuck with it is never meant to be un-stuck. Until we entered the picture, of course.

E decided the best way to remove the old mirror would be to tape it up (in case of breakage) and pry it away from the wall. Attempts at prying included the use of a spackle tool, the claw end of a claw-footed hammer, and even so far as to attempt sawing the mirror off the wall using twine. When none of these tactics proved to be working and a good amount of time had passed, E resorted to hitting the mirror with the hammer. Breaking a mirror on purpose isn't bad luck, right? Well, it doesn't really matter, because this mirror is apparently laced with diamonds and titanium, because it is unbreakable. No amount of smacking with hammers and other heavy things would lead to breakage.

Eventually E resorted to prying again, and managed to pull the mirror off the wall without breaking it. See below.
Unfortunately for us, prying the mirror off the wall may not have broken it, but it did in fact break our wall. Below you'll see the three spots where the industrial adhesive had been used to affix the mirror to the wall. It's black. Who's ever seen black adhesive? What is this? Tar? Anyway, the brown you're seeing is where the paper peeled off the sheetrock in the process of mirror removal.
Below you see portions of our wall affixed to the back of the mirror. No wonder I couldn't stand this thing! At least it's off the wall now. I guess.
Now, we had always intended on painting this bathroom something funky and fun and just doing it up interesting. Nothing like a little bit of holes in the wall to prompt us into action. We headed off to Lowes and purchased mud to fill in the holes with and some sample paints. We decided that if there was one room we could do something a little wild in, why not the half bath. Right now we're debating between roasted squash and toasted coffee for the walls. We'll see. I almost think toasted coffee belongs in the kitchen. Regardless, after the mud dries tonight we'll be back to Lowes to make a full paint purchase and spend some time this week fixing up the bathroom. Photos to come...

Rest in peace/Taking a mulligan

We've mentioned before how all the women in my family are very adept at skills such as growing things and making things. I've decided that I should join this group, and decided that this was the year I was going to grow my own tomatoes. What could be better than picking a fresh ripe tomato? No more produce bills for me!

So three weeks ago I purchased the plant you see above. I lovingly put him into the pot shown, and willed him to have a good life. His tag said he needed full sun, so I put him out in the yard near our oak tree, thinking he'd like it there. Surely I was doing everything right.

One week later we went to visit my grandparents, and over the weekend it froze not one, but both nights. This, apparently, was not to the liking of this plant, because when we got home he was shriveled and destroyed. There was no hope for him. He'd only been with me a week, and already he had died.

My mom visited me this weekend and assured me that this wasn't my fault - how was I to know it was supposed to randomly freeze? She took me out and helped me pick out a new tomato plant and a new pot for him, and we planted him yesterday. He looks pretty happy so far. I'm sure this time he'll make it. After all, my mom did touch him, which is pretty much all it takes for a plant to survive, as far as I can tell.

I'm excited about my fresh tomatoes. Along with my fresh limes. Maybe I'll make pico.

Little boy blue

We successfully painted our little guy's room. It's light blue, with a light blue ceiling and chocolate brown stripes on the wall. We think it looks fabulous for a little boy, and hopefully when he gets here he agrees.
It turns out that putting stripes on a wall is not, in fact, the easiest task in the world. Our walls are textured, so even with the help of painter's tape, a laser level, and a tape measure, the stripes aren't perfect. There are small places where the brown paint was able to seep through and make the lines fuzzy. Somehow, I've grown to like it. There's something nice about the imperfections, something soft about the lines. I thought it would make me crazy, but I think now it's - what's the word - character.

This room's got character.

Getting industrious

E and I decided to get industrious this last weekend of the holidays. We have removed all plates from all light switches in the future nursery in preparation for painting. Now E is something of a pro at painting, as he worked as a painter to sustain himself throughout high school, but I am what you might call a novice. Okay, I'm terrible. I don't know anything about the finer points of putting paint on the walls. Thankfully, I'm married to a very patient man who understands that I like to "help". This mainly consists of me slapping paint in the safe regions using a roller while E does all the fine work like around the trim. This is okay with me, as I know I would be terrible at this anyway.
In addition to the removal of plates, we purchased many miniature cans of paint. These are testers, E has told me, though all of my previous tests have simply involved me buying gallons of paint, coming home, painting the entire room, and realizing I hated it. I can see that this a much better plan. Above are the three testers that we finally settled on for painting the nursery. Only two trips to Lowes were necessary. (Well, plus one more this week to actually buy the rest of the paint to cover the walls.)
Okay, after buying the testers, it's apparently customary to paint different areas of the room different colors and then look at them in various lights. Who knew? We had originally thought that we'd go with green, but after some looking, we decided to move forward with blue with brown stripes. Hopefully this looks as good as I have imagined it in my head. If nothing else - I'll get some practice for when we repaint! More to come as we complete this project. To be done next weekend...

Internet, I've missed you so

Today is a monumental day for us - the internet is restored! We went away for the weekend, and when we returned... No service. Router = working, but internet = gone. I had no idea what a serious problem this would be for me until I decided to pay the electric bill. But how? With a stamp? I don't think so.

After two days of attempting to foil whatever internet gnomes had taken our beloved service away from us, E broke down and called the service provider. There are few times I hear him get so riled up as when talking to a service person. "What do you mean did I try restarting my computer?" I'm no better, so I am eternally grateful that he does this duty and saves me the trouble of talking to someone I don't know about exactly how I reset the cable modem.

Today E even left work two hours early to come and meet the cable repair guy. After two hours on the phone Tuesday night they came to the conclusion that the hardware they provided us was faulty. Of course, E had already reached that conclusion before he made the call, but I digress. The internet repair man came and repaired the cables leading into our house, which it seems were destroyed by a mongoose (or never installed correctly in the first place), and he replaced our cable modem, which now functions as an expensive doorstop at the cable company.

Hooray for the internet! Bills = paid. Email = read (and attempted to be returned, though I'm terrible at it). Blog = updated. All excellent for a Thursday. Now if only it weren't going to be so cold for our golf game tomorrow afternoon... Could the internet repair man fix that too?

Mr. and Mrs. Fix-it

This weekend marked a first for us - the installation of something - permanently - into our house. After a few days of sitting in the office and complaining "I wish there was a fan in here!", E decided that it was his job, nay, his duty, to install one. So, one trip to our favorite big box home supply store later, and we have everything we need to replace our boring light fixture with a new and fabulous ceiling fan!

We opened the box and spread all the pieces out on the floor before even beginning to get started. We haven't even looked at taking the light fixture down. All the hundreds of tiny pieces lay on the floor in front of us - here's a small sampling.
It is at this point that E looks at me and realizes, "You know, I think I'm going to need a ladder for this." We don't own a ladder. We've been waiting for just such a situation to head out and purchase one. However, not wanting to bother with another trip out, he improvises by putting our kitchen step stool on four bed-risers from college. This seems awfully precarious to me, but he's more than satisfied. Fine. This seems to work.

In the end, more swear words were uttered than I can recall, specifically pointed at a certain drill owned by a certain husband and only one extra trip to the big box home supply store, he had the whole thing mounted and running like a champ. Good work! I'm enjoying it as we speak.

I think it's mocking me

Before our black thumbs got a hold of it...We moved into our house in March of this year. When we moved in, the yard was beautifully manicured. Beautiful azaleas out front in the garden, lovely purple cabbage decorating the walk, Burr Oak trees listing lazily in the wind, and a ocean of green green Bermuda to sink our toes into. It was a sight to behold. In fact, check it out. It's beautiful.

This lovely piece of land, unlike the other homes on our block, did not come equipped with an in-ground sprinkler system. No problem, I think. I didn't grow up in a house with a sprinkler system. Neither did he. Installing one costs HOW much? We'll just water our lawn ourselves, thank you very much.

It's now August, and we've had more 100-plus degree days than I care to recount. With the two of us holding down full time jobs and our worthless dog refusing to do any kind of yardwork, the lovely landscaping fell into something of a state of disrepair. Not that we weren't trying. Every evening we'd come home and water all areas of the yard thoroughly and drench the flowerbeds. We filled up watering bags to keep the trees sated day and night. We were really, honestly, trying to keep things lovely.

Despite our best efforts, we soon realized that not only were we fighting a losing battle, but that it was being highlighted brilliantly by the fact that our neighbors were not involved in any such war with their yards. Their yards? Lush and green. Like jade masterpieces in the summer sun. Our yard? Some stage between Texas desert and the Serengeti.

In the end, we ended up giving up. We had sprinklers installed to help salvage what little dignity we had left with the neighbors. Not only is the grass some sickly shade of yellow, but it now has two inch wide dirt trenches running throughout where the sprinklers were put down. There is a ray of hope though. We now have green patches. It's only a matter of time before it's back to the flowering masterpiece it once was.

And my Knockout Rose is STILL a knockout.

Imagine waking up to this face

This weekend Zoee and I are on our own. With E off on a trip with his padre, she and I had the run of the house. So instead of falling asleep in my comfy bed where I like to sleep, I nodded off watching a movie on the couch. Rather than moving, I ended up spending the night there. My dog loves the couch because when I lay on it she and I are eye level. She woke me up with a swift poke of the nose at about 6:30 am. After that, she spent the remainder of the morning continually blocking my view of such guilty pleasures as "Saved by the Bell".

Probably for the best. Upon her insistence, I got myself off the couch and was productive. I went to the garden center, purchased a bunch of flowers and potting soil, and set to fixing up our garden. Yes, I know it's late the season for this. Yes, I know that flowers have a hard time taking hold when it's 100 degrees outside. However, I also know that I absolutely despised walking into our house and looking at the dead azalea bush and horrible horrible cabbage plants. So I pulled these up and replaced them with beautiful hibiscus plants and a new knockout rosebush. (The other one is doing so well!) I already feel better.

The cost of summer living

Today we were being the diligent young Americans that we are and doing financial planning and reconciling. We do this periodically, say once a week or so, to make sure we know whether or not I can really buy that piece of art I'm wanting (read: sno-cone). Anyway, this was always a relatively simple task in Colorado. All of our bills were approximately the same in Colorado at all times, which made budgeting a super easy task. In fact, the time of year we found ourselves most concerned with utility prices was the winter, when the freezing air tried to creep into your bedroom at night. Thankfully, it was always possible to pile on more down and keep warm.

Now we find ourselves in the opposite situation. We're in Texas. In June. It's hot. Really hot. We've done everything we can think of to keep our energy costs down. We programmed our thermostats to be energy efficient when we aren't here but not so much so as to overtax the AC unit when we get home. We try to keep all doors and windows closed to keep the bought air in. We even go so far as to stripping off clothing before turning down the air. (Well, there's a limit to stripping when company is around.)

Anyway, we're thinking this is working fantastic. We've been living in our house since February with no energy bills over $50. This is GREAT! Well... All that was true until our latest energy bill. If things keep increasing at this rate one of us will have to take a second job flipping burgers! I can only hope we've seen a peak in the energy-cost-increases. There are four more months of summer to go!

(For those not of Texas, I do mean four more months of summer. It's mid-June, and summer in Texas officially ends mid-October. We won't see temperatures below 80 for the daytime high again until that point, and I really don't think any daytime high above 80 should as "autumn".)

Your future? My fridge!

The lime tree I have been growing on my back porch since March has decided that it is time to produce. Enough of this mooching water and doing nothing. It's time to start pulling some weight around here. And pull it does! Check out the size of those babies!

Okay, so it's not impressive yet. But, trust me. As the summer progresses, it will quickly morph into amazing lime-tastic-ness.