Posts Tagged ‘things around the house’

Happy birthday, Erica!

Monday, August 8th, 2011

Happy birthday to my wonderful sister, Erica, who I totally tried to call earlier but who didn’t answer, even though it was only, like, 4:30 in Minnesota and who I must therefore assume was out rocking the town because by my count she’s turning 30 and that’s absolutely the birthday for which you should go out and rock the town.  Yea!!  So I’m not going to call her back tonight because now it’s after 8:00 there and I’m really hoping that part of her birthday also means that she actually gets some sleep for the first time since JD’s birthday (doesn’t that sound like a fantastic birthday present?!) and besides that I don’t have any cell service at the house and she’s not on Skype right now (again, hopefully either rocking the town or sleeping) so I don’t actually have a way to call her and I’ll just have to catch up with her some other time.

BUT!  I really do hope that your birthday was ABSOLUTELY OFF THE WALL FANTASTIC and I’m sorry I didn’t send you anything, but I hope Tim got you something AWESOME and we’ll totally have to catch up later this week.

I wasn’t even home on Friday, when I would normally call.  Friday, I got up and went to the church offices to do my monthly cleaning there, and then when I got home, Justin and I ran down to Savannah to run a couple errands and catch a showing of “Cowboys & Aliens” (really fun movie, by the way) and then drove straight from there up to Beaufort to go to a board games party at a friends house.  And we were there until after midnight so I started to fall asleep on their couch, which was why it wasn’t until we were nearly all the way home before we realized that I’d forgotten my purse, with our house keys, back at their house.  45 minutes away.  But luck!  I stuck a spare house key under the bumper of the car!  And fail — the key didn’t actually work.  We have no idea why it didn’t work, but the dang thing wouldn’t turn.  So at 1:30 in the morning, Justin borrowed our neighbor’s extension ladder and climbed in through a window on the second floor of our house.

Saturday, I was fighting off some bug because I slept a lot.  I tried to stay awake and managed a couple hours at a time, but then would fall back asleep again.  It was really annoying, actually.  I slept through most of Sunday morning, too, failing to go to church, and then took it pretty easy for the rest of the afternoon.  Friends came over in the evening to collect boxes from our attic for moving and we fed them dinner in exchange for ice cream and Justin fixed the power supply on one of their computers, too, and some other computer work.

And after they left, because the air conditioning unit refuses to blow cold air, we set up the bed in the living room and slept down there.  The a/c unit upstairs hasn’t been working right for the last week or so.  It was working in the evenings, like it was exhausted from the heat, too, and decided that it would just work its best overnight.  And then it stopped doing that, too.  The downstairs unit is working, so we’ve got a box fan at the bottom of the stairs, blowing air up to another fan that moves it closer to either Justin’s office or the bedroom, depending on where it’s turned, and a third fan that blows air up from the floor into faces.  But it’s just not quite cutting it.  So we’ll be camping out downstairs for a couple days.  We have an appointment set up for a guy to come look at it on Friday, which our landlady set up a couple weeks ago for regular maintenance.  So when he comes, hopefully he’ll take care of the problem.

And how’s that for about the most random post ever?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MAE-MAE!!

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Well, I feel good about that anyway.

Saturday, June 18th, 2011

Do you ever get to the end of your day and realize that you’ve only crossed off four of the twenty-odd items on your checklist? But you know that you’ve had a successful and productive day, even if the list doesn’t show it?  Like, the floors in my house are so clean right now!  And that decorative thing that’s been broken for a couple months is finally fixed.  And I can actually find things in my jewelry box again and all the pendants that were separated from their chains are all back and hanging where they should be again.  And my bra drawer isn’t exploding all over the place anymore.  And the bedding for our guests on Sunday is downstairs instead of sitting in the corner of our bedroom.

And it really was a fantastic day, with some sleeping in, and some working up a sweat getting the house cleaned (I even washed the patio doors!) and projects getting done (moving a couple thousand songs onto a petulant music box) and even a bike ride (where some guy threw us out of his neighborhood — but that was the only non-fantastic part of the day).  I feel like I got a lot accomplished, even though when Justin asked what I’d been doing for the last couple hours while he was working, the only things I could think of were the music box thing and the jewelry box, but I’m sure there was something else I did with that time.

Another storm is threatening to thunder overhead.  There’s been lightening and thunder for the last hour or so, but still not any rain.  I hope that it comes over this way a little closer and gives us another soaking.  The lawn is looking a little better — the weeds are getting higher and in need of cutting.  But the grass could still use a lot of help.  I’m sure it’ll start coming down in buckets as soon as I drift off to sleep, jerking me back awake in surprise.  Just like the phone will right just as you take a bite of food and the movie will start just as you realize that you need to pee.

Tomorrow we’re heading down to Savannah for a haircut date.  Justin’s scheduled a haircut and we’ll get dinner and then go see the Green Lantern movie.  We’ve got a couple other errands to run while we’re out, too.  But mostly it’s haircut, dinner, and a movie.  On Sunday, two of our friends are going to be in town for a conference on Hilton Head Island.  They’re going to crash here for the night instead of driving the 40 minutes back home and then back again for the conference the next morning.  So it’s going to be a fun-filled weekend!

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Christmas is nearly here!

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010

And you know what I haven’t finished yet?  Buying and mailing presents.

Wanna see what I have been working on?  (WARNING:  picture heavy post)

Poinsettias made of felt

Homemade wreath

Seriously - $3.50 for this thing

I cut out many, many of these

We have no snow, so these hang in the windows

My cactus might bloom soon, but not by Christmas

Look! More poinsettias!

Christmas tree!

Our tree angel is pretty

This is Justin's favorite ornament

Mom made this for me a couple years ago

She made this for me last year (LOVE IT!)

The bird cages were on sale at Michael's for $0.50

The wise men are on their journey and stopped to warm themselves by the fire

Penguins! (Or, as Grandma would say, "Penquins!")

Tiny little stockings on the tv armoir

More snowflakes!

Look familiar, anyone? (Yes, they are in the right order.)

Dad gave me this last year. Sadly, there are no cookies in it right now.

Maybe not the best way to treat a Tiffany vase . . . .

But since this is as far as I've gotten with presents, maybe I should get back to that.

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Weekend recap

Monday, December 13th, 2010

Thank you all for your encouraging comments to my last post! It really meant a lot to me. And I had fun conversations with a handful of you over the weekend, and that was wonderful, too!

Friday didn’t go exactly how I had planned. I thought I would work until about noon, go home for lunch with Justin, and then head out to Michael’s and get some crafting things to decorate the house. Instead, I ended up working until 5:00. By the time I got home, I was tired and hungry (I didn’t bring a lunch or snacks because I wasn’t going to be there very long – fortunately, I did have a can of emergency soup for lunch and an orange, but that was pretty much it for my day) and I scrambled into my pajamas and sat still for a while. We had online game night with friends, and the two girls I’m making friends with from nearby joined us and it was a lot of fun.

Saturday, we rested away the morning and then cleaned away the early afternoon. Then we showered and went to Savannah so Justin could get his hair cut. We were going to hit a movie, too, but decided we didn’t really care that much to see anything that was in the theatre I have free tickets for, so we had dinner, walked around Target for a few things, got some ice cream, and went home.

Sunday, Justin had to be at church early for set-up, but I lazed around the house before heading to the service. Afterward, we hit Target again for a battery (more on that later), and then went to the tree farm to get a tree. We’ve gone back and forth on the tree thing, trying to figure if we could really get one this year, but it’s such an icon of the season, we decided that we’d just go ahead and get it.

When we got home, I went to the front door to open up the house so Justin could bring in the tree and my key didn’t go in the door. I couldn’t get it to fit. Justin came over and tried with his key and with mine and neither one of them would work. He finally determined that there’s something wedged in there and nothing we did was going to work. So we knocked on the neighbor’s door, asked to borrow their ladder, and Justin broke into our house by climbing in through his office window.

Fortunately, everything after that went just fine. We drove back to the high school to collect Justin’s car and it wasn’t locked into the parking lot. When we got back home, we set the tree into the stand and because last year we had such a fight getting the tree to stay in the stand, we went out and bought a really good one. This time, it took less than 10 minutes to get the tree from outside the back door to inside the house standing on its own. It’s amazing. And then Justin took the battery that we got at Target and put it into the key fob for my car and now my keyless entry/ignition works again! I’ve had to pull out the key to open the door and turn on my car for a couple months now and it was really annoying. Justin fixed it!! I’m very excited about this.

Part of Saturday’s cleaning was to pull the Christmas decorations from the attic, but we didn’t decorate, so Sunday afternoon, I worked on that a little. It’s not done yet, but I’m not letting myself feel rushed or pressured about it. The tree is still naked, but we’ll do that together sometime this week.

Today I’m back at work and, if the schedule holds like it is right now, I’ll be on vacation starting Friday. With any luck, I’ll not even have to come in on Friday, but I’m not counting on that one yet. I have a lot to accomplish before then.

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Thursday, November 25th, 2010

It’s just before midnight and I should be sleeping.  My feet are aching and my head is still going, though, so here I sit.

I had the day off from work today — actually used some of my vacation time to stay home.  And since I had the whole day free when I wouldn’t have normally, I figured I should try to squeeze as much out of it as possible, right?

So I slept in a little bit, woke up slowly, but got started not long after Justin left for a meeting on the Island.  I cleaned the house from top to bottom — the kind of cleaning that’s putting things back in place and not actually dusting or wiping things with cleaners.  But we just did that a little while ago, so it just needed a good tidy.  And then I worked on getting my office back in order because it was getting really bad in there.  I pulled out all my sewing projects while I was at it, and after things were tidy and the laundry was folded and there wasn’t any more cleaning to be done other than vacuuming and Justin promised to do that, I took my sewing downstairs and worked on that.  I fixed a handful of things, a sweater, skirts, and finished up a craft project I’ve been working on for a few days.  I made these!  Except I did maple and elm leaves and I didn’t do the interfacing because that was just too much work.  But I’ve got 12 of these double-sided things around the house — four of them are hanging from the light in the dining room.  They’re adorable!  Plus I rolled a few napkins for tomorrow with twine bows and a little fall decal.  And we collected a bunch of pine cones lately and I’d soaked them and set them out to dry and put them in a variety of places around the house, like in glass vases and a bowl-centerpiece with a candle.  Did you know that when you soak pine cones they close back up?!  I didn’t know they would do that!

Anyway, I went to a chiropractor appointment and back home and started on the rolls for tomorrow and the pies.  And just hit problem after problem the whole way.  The milk for the rolls had to be room temperature.  The shortening for the pie crust needed to be chilled.  The pumpkin pie recipe called for 2 cans of evaporated milk.  And then I realized, after running to the store, that it was for two pies and I only was going to make one.  So I put out the milk to warm, I put the Crisco in the freezer to chill.  I eventually got the rolls going and they rose just great for the first half of their rising, and didn’t rise at all for the second half.  I didn’t put enough water in my pie crust and when I went to roll them out, they kept breaking because they were too dry.  I had to bake the crust for the French Silk and it just didn’t go as fast as the recipe said it should.  But that whole pie is a shambles because halfway through folding the whipped cream into the chocolate mixture, I dropped the whole bowl onto the floor.  It landed right-side-up so I was able to finish and put what was left into the pie.  But about 1/3 of the bowl ended up in a splatter across the floor, the cupboards, and up my pants legs.  I figure, we’re going to just fill in the rest of the space with whipped cream tomorrow.  And while I’ve rolled out the crust for the pumpkin pie and it’s sitting in a cake pan in the fridge because we only have one pie plate, I gave up on trying to make that one and just sat down with Justin to watch some TV and relax.  I’ll do that pie tomorrow.

We have people coming over tomorrow — a couple people we met through the gamer geek group here in town.  People whose families are far away, too.  So it should be a fun day.  I just have to not freak out too much.  Our Thanksgiving meal track record isn’t great.  I know once, we ate at 10:00 at night.  And it looks like last year, we didn’t eat our Thanksgiving meal on Thanksgiving day at all!  I can’t remember why that was the case . . . .  Anyway, I just really want it to go well.

But I hope you’re all doing great!  I hope everyone’s traveling safely and that you all have a wonderful time together.  Sorry we couldn’t make it up this year.  Money.  Plane tickets.  One of these days I’ll figure out how to make those two things work together better.

Anyway, I’m sure I’ll talk to you all soon.  Be safe!  Have a great day!  And I love you lots!

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