Houseguest & the History Channel

Nikolai moved to the Carolinas and is bunking with the Bald One and I until his apartment was found and ready for him to call his. This means that when I get home, my television is set to one of two things - the Wii or the History Channel. Neither bothers me, just amuses me. He does get home way before the Bald One and I make it out of the Park, so he has the run of the entertainment.

Between Nikolai and the Bald One, there have been almost all the tracks in Mario Kart and almost all of the pieces of the LEGO Indiana Jones have been opened up for fun. The crazy-fun part of having Nikolai around is we’re getting a bit of an edjumacashun. He flips on the History Channel any time things can’t be found to entertain him. We’ve learned about subs, boats, all manner of weaponry and the most amusing episode - the making of Wonder Bread. (Side note: Americans eat a lot of white bread.)

I won’t say that this hasn’t been interesting. I’ve been amused at finding what can be found on television, as the Bald One and I are usually too busy to watch anything but our usual shows and get caught up on our Netflix list. I don’t think I even knew we got the History Channel until Nikolai came to stay. It’s also nice to know that our Wii is a great source of entertainment, as the two boys will often double team the games and clear levels in the blink of an eye.

I’ve also discovered that our guest room isn’t that bad. I wouldn’t say it would be more than a week’s stay for normal people, but the futon is apparently comfortable to sleep on, and the room isn’t unbearable. Once the cat-tortured love seat has been removed, the place will be fairly cat free. Nikolai is even allergic and is doing remarkably well between the allergen reduced bedroom and the Dyson-vacuumed household.

But I’ll be happy come Fourth of July has come and gone. I’ll have another Eno under my belt, my house back to just two humans and two days to vacation.

 

Posting live from the new toy!

I won’t tell if you won’t…I’m using the Bald One’s iMac to post.

I wanted to see if I could do some very basic navigation on his toy without him being around to either complain that I was playing with his toy or be whined at about using it at all. So he’s at work and I wanted to quick check my reader that I didn’t get through before my battery on my laptop died this morning and to do a little post.

His toy is very cool, so far. He’s in love with it and playing on a computer. He’s excited about plugging in his guitars and recording riffs that he has bouncing in his head. And I’m excited for him finally getting this creative outlet out somewhere. The other exciting feature is that it has necessitated a cleanup in his office that has made the place very clean and shiny and bright and I actually feel comfortable being in here for more than sixty seconds.

Okay, I just discovered Safari has tabbed browsing. *love*

Why I’m really upstairs on this gorgeous day is I’m waiting for my yard to finish drying out and the sun to dip low enough I won’t bake when I’m working outside. Instead, I’m getting the Purple Room ready for my allergic friends to be able to crash in there. This means dusting the shelves on tippy top, moving the bookcase and desk around a bit so they’re in better positions to have the new (to us) couch that is being delivered in that room. The couch is actually a futon of full size bed proportions and should happily sleep the ex-Bostonian until he finds local digs to match his new local to us job. After that, the room will still remain an allergen free zone so that our lovely friends can occasionally crash there when the need arises. And it will be pretty. I think.

No more goofing off - dust is calling my name…

 

Darnit, I want my deck

Today is the absolute perfect day to have a deck.

There are twenty gazillion things I should be doing right now, ranging from scrubbing six weeks of life off the interior of the house to mowing the weeds. What I really want is to have some kind of cushy recliner set out on my non-existent deck and enjoy the cool breezes as I doze in the sun. It’s been that kind of week.

Our show opened on Thursday, which was quite excellent. I felt loved and admired as one of the actresses proceeded to say how fantastic I was. I made bonus points with her daughter as well by recommending that she check out the Maine State sumer theater camp. Just the fact that I knew about such a thing apparently was awesome. And, for the first time ever, the Bald One was in attendance. That made my night.

This show’s tech wasn’t a particularly hard one, but the week before of running and notes and discussion every night and will we/won’t we get the set elements in time was a little taxing. Add to that opening on the first of a month when bills are due and being in that odd limbo at work of being on the cusp of being busy but not being busy yet and you have one whacked out little Rae.

The yippy-skippy news is our federal “economic stimulous” package arrived. I should throw it at a bill and make it go away, but at current, I have a plan where we actually are managing to pay things down in a reasonable fashion. Combine that with the couple that gets us to go downtown and have a beer with them so often moving out to the boonies and we have an instant extra money supply. So the majority of the funding went into a savings account.

The not so yippy-skippy news is that the Bald One’s employer officially filed Chapter 11 yesterday. Blaming the sagging home market and the lack of retail confidence and you’ve got a failing home-goods store. Oddly, they’re not closing any stores in this area - despite our bets that one of them really should be. The Bald One does have his resume all shined up and has already applied for another position with a prescription home delivery company. Normal hours and theoretically better pay? If he’s happy, I’m all for it.

But now, I’ve delayed long enough. The house isn’t getting cleaner with me playing online. The bills are paid though, the one odd charge is gone and the breakfast has long been finished. Time to get cracking on life.

Even though the breeze is blowing and the birds are singing. Damn reality.

 

Flowers, mulch and termites - oh my!

This past week, my husband asserted his manliness with a chainsaw and the acquisition of more power tools. With said power tool he cut the downed tree into manageable logs then split the logs into manageable firewood. Too bad that this process revealed a tree fully infested with termites. Our wooden house and wooden screened in porch as well as the many trees in the backyard shivered with this news and I’m trying to determine the fastest number to get the Orkin man on-site to see if we need to treat the yard. Oh happy home ownership!

The nice part about home ownership though is the making things your own. Last summer, we decided not to invest hundreds of dollars in landscaping until we knew what we had. We spent lots of man hours trying to get the yard to look like a yard while discovering that there isn’t much you can do when your city declares water restrictions for a drought. So our front yard wasn’t weed killed and over seeded last fall like we hoped, but we’re still planning on getting that taken care of this season…provided the rain lets us. I’m tired of clover being the main source of green in my front yard.

Part of making the front yard look nice was weeding. We spent way too much time pulling up things that should not be last year and this year decided mulching might be a brilliant idea. I weeded the front of porch section on Friday and yesterday we treated it and mulched it. It looks fabulous. The downside of this is that we now have to do the rest of the yard and buy stone edging. The previous owner edged in plastic…which doesn’t look horrid and we’re able to live with it originally. With mulch, however, and the tendency for the one corner to flood in raid, we’ve realized we need something a little more sturdy than cheap plastic to keep our mulch where we put it. We are going to use the plastic for figuring out the length we need, which saves us the insanity of measuring. But my best guess is we are looking at 140′ of edging…and everything we like is in the $2/foot range. I know where my current show money is going now.

When we were purchasing mulch yesterday, I went a little crazy again with the seeds. I love planting seeds and bulbs - because you know that you made this happen from nothing, and there is something wonderful about seeing the first little green shoots. Again, I’m heavy on the herbs which will likely stay in pots as I do not have a deck to build my herb garden behind yet. Not that I’m being pushy or anything…

The only other excitement is that we’re getting somewhere with our insides as well. Our new lateral file was delivered, which allowed me to move all our financial and medical files into one cabinet and leave the owners manuals in the bottom drawer of one of the old file cabinets. The old cabinets aren’t being FreeCycled - instead, they’re becoming the storage for the Bald One’s guitar magazines. The high hope is that this allows ups to get rid of the cheap book shelves and move the keyboard under the guitars where it has better access to amplification and outlets. We’re also slowly getting my crafty stuff downstairs, which gives us a better idea of just how much storage I need down there. Maybe by the time we move, we’ll have everything how we need it.

 

Spring, where are you?

Today the high was in the mid 70s…and this means that the weather is starting to turn towards Spring. But we aren’t quite there yet and I’m getting impatient.

I’ve started watching the purple unfurling of my transplanted peonies. They’re heritage plants, having been brought over from Slovenia through my maternal grandfather. The peonies have been a large bouquet in my parents’ yard for as long as I can remember. The plant was always split and taken when they moved. When my brother and I moved out of under their roof, we were both presented with a split once spring arrived. Last April, my parents came to visit our new home bearing splits and a weekend of labor.

Now I watch as the split plants poke forth from the dirt, showing that they survived the drought of our high, hot summer and the shorter winter. The slight warming of the weather means that now I can start planning spring. This will be a slow spring though, with the lack of water in the Carolinas chancing any new plantings. Instead, it is a good year for building the deck and clearing out the brush in the back. The front will also be in a hold, as we mulch what we have and try to clear the weeds in the lawn.

But Spring is on her way, with her verdant cape and a slight promise of rain. And I can hardly wait.

 

T13: Crafty Nook Needs

A recent purchase of a stackable washer/dryer has made our laundry room a much more open space. It means that I can have a small crafty nook that I can customize in there. But first, I need to figure out what exactly I need in the 24″x35.5″ space.

13 Things I’m Hoping for in my Nook

 

An even dozen…

I’ve done brighter things than this, but it felt really really good to get something concrete done.  This week is scheduled to be a scorcher, and this is when I decide that I’ve gotten the house inside caught up and need to spend more time outside. Brilliant. Yesterday was the coolest day scheduled for this week and that’s the one I spend inside.

Today I decided to tackle some of the yard. I’ve been politely waiting for the Man of the House to mow the lawn for about a week and a half. We had some fairly sweet rain storms about two weeks ago and now it’s been dry…causing serious forest quality in the lawn environment. I figured I haven’t mowed in about a decade, but how hard could it be? It stalled a few times because of the height of the grass and once because it was out of gas, but both the front and back yards have been trimmed to a nice even height. I did leave the weed-whacking for him though…hoping that he feels up to it later once the “excessive heat advisory” ends.

 

Feeling undervalued

This is probably very small of me, but lately I’ve been feeling undervalued. Every time I go to an interview lately, they’ve been telling me that while my test scores are amazing and I have the rarely seen thing of longevity with a company I’m asking too much for what they could possibly get for me. Granted, these have been staffing agencies which will charge about fifty percent more to the company to have them handle my payroll and such, but really…being unemployed sucks enough without people telling you that you’re not worth what you think you’re worth. The salary I’m asking for is actually less than I was making, since currently I’d have to pay for everything in benefit land on my own, unlike my last employer who paid for everything. I have a masters degree. I’ve been working in databases and advanced administrative work for six years in a non-profit and they were able to pay me that kind of salary…I think I can find something similar, but I’m tired of being told I’m not worth it.

I think the big fuck-you this week has been just living with my husband.

 

why I won’t ride the bus

I know I live in a suburb and I work in one of the biggest hubs for people commuting in the area. But after this morning where I went East-North and then South & West to get to my major artery to Work in order to avoid sitting in traffic (accident stopping traffic) and still got to sit in traffic, I wanted to see about letting someone else getting pissed off on a daily basis. My commute is usually 45 minutes. The bus system here? 3 hours.

That’s what I get for living where I do, I guess.

The Bald One & I were talking about the new high-rises going up downtown. We thought of the dreams we had of being able to live in such a place. Course, that would mean me being able to give up my car so I could walk or rail or bus to work quickly and easily. So, no time in this decade will that happen.

But we’ve officially added a Tudor style house to our list of homes to own one day. Before the Georgetown walk-up. Because the walk-up will be our retirement, as we’ll be spending all day working with contractors and refinishing. Except for the days we’ll be at the museums.

 

13 random things found in our office…

As some folks know, my parents are visiting starting tonight. While we’ve been in the house for three months, there are two rooms that look like they haven’t quite been unpacked - the guest room that’s full of knick knacks and the office. So we were trying to make sense of the office last night…and found some very odd ball things.
13 Random Things Found in our Office