new sidewalks!

Last week, we were the lucky recipients of brand-spanking-new sidewalks. Yipee! (If only we didn’t have to pay for them… remember how I already whined about this? Paying for new sidewalks when the old ones are perfectly good is, apparently, one of the joys of homeownership… just one of the lessons we’ve learned re: homeownership in the last couple of months.)

Anyways, I give you the old sidewalks:

And now, the new ones:

The only problem is… now the walkway leading from the sidewalk to the front door looks old and sad. Guess we should have ripped up that concrete and replaced it with brick pavers also… oops. Another project for another summer, I suspect.

Dry Laundry

Yes, I am going to mark my 2-day absence from blogging with a post about laundry. So exciting!

Our dryer broke last week. It tumbles, but doesn’t heat. Being the cheap thrifty resourceful little internet hunter that I am, I immediately thought, “we can fix this! I’ll just consult the internet.” And so, I borrowed the multimeter from work and we took apart the dryer based on the suggestion that we could most certainly fix it ourselves for MUCH cheaper than calling someone.

Jason at work.

Barley helps.

Yet, a week later, the dryer is still tipped over and taken apart. Guess we’re not going to fix it. Time to call someone, I guess…

Not even 20 minutes after we discovered the broken dryer, I was vacuuming and the vacuum just shut down.  I took it as a sign that I was not destined to clean the house that day, and sat down in front of the TV instead (with my laptop, designing paper goods for our wedding).

Here I am, fixing the vacuum the following day.  I just wanted to prove that I also can fix things.  The vacuum is back in action.  This is a. good because I can have a nice clean house, and b. bad because I’m the one who has to clean it.

In related news, I had recently subscribed to some personal finance blogs because I decided that I needed to learn more about personal finance strategies, etc. And, one of last week’s money-saving strategies was to hang laundry outside instead of using the dryer. Excellent timing! It’s like they read my mind.

Our neighbors even commented that they liked our outdoor laundry line.  Excellent!  It looks like we are being so earth-friendly!  ha ha!

The get-fit house

Before we had even moved in, Jason called this our “get fit” house. Why? Because we live less than a block from a really nice parkway and 3 blocks from a lake.

We’ve been so good about walking around here, and many times when I’m walking, I find myself thinking about how lucky I am to live here. I love it.

(this is where I note that Jason has been doing 25-mile bike rides along the parkway in an attempt to get in shape for the wedding. impressive!)

Anyways, who would have thought you’d find this beauty within the city limits?

My cousin, Jim, even had a race on the lake near us a few weeks ago.  (His boat is on the far left).

And his team won! (and we got to visit with Catherine during the race, which is always fun.)

I love it here.

pictures of pictures

I’ve been informed that some of you are going through “blog withdrawal” because of my lack of recent posting.  Apologies!  It’s just that I’ve been busy writing boring sciencey things for my real job (if you don’t believe me, go to pubmed and type in my name – not all of them are mine, because I have a very. popular. name. but you’ll get the point.), and sometimes, I go through all of my allotted words for the day and don’t have any left for blogging.  Other times, I am just lazy.  Or busy planning a wedding.  Or selling a house.  Or remodeling a house.  Or annoying Jason.  Or pampering the dog.  You see?  I am BUSY.  But I promise to never leave you, to continue to blog, even if I am just blogging about cleaning.  Which brings me to today’s post:

Sunday I went on a manic cleaning spree – I even washed the wood floors and baseboards by hand (typically I rely on my good friend, the swiffer to handle these sorts of things).

Jason did miscellaneous chores – including hanging pictures! Yay! I unpacked some of our decoration-type things and put them out, and now our house feels much more like a home. It makes me so happy. I can’t wait until we can start painting and installing new light fixtures and closet organizers and – oh my! But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Some pictures:

Our living room.  Do you like my curtain tiebacks?  They are only temporary, although, at the rate we’ve been going on the INSIDE of this house, the length of “temporary” is questionable.

More living room.  Note my large stack of work on the couch.  I am currently avoiding said stack like the plague.  Also, I do not like that lamp.  But!  We left all of our lamps in Kentucky and need some sort of light in the room.

The TV (in the living room, of course).  I pulled out a little basket for Barley’s toys that he’s afraid of because they squeak, and I think it works nicely here next to the TV.  I also dug out these vases and the wooden tray on the TV cabinet.  The tray makes me really happy because I can’t stand how the mail and other miscellaneous crap always accumulates there… the tray sort of hides the mess, or at least makes it look more organized.  Faux organization is my style.

View from the living room into the dining room.  Note the exhausted and overheated doggy on the floor.  Also note the ugly yellow extension cord on the floor – we have exactly ONE 3-prong outlet in the living room and it happens to be in the least helpful place (go figure).  So, extension cord it is.  That is, until Jason re-wires the outlets on the first floor.  Anyone have thoughts on whether we can actually rewire the outlets easily?

The dining room (view towards the front of the house).  We hung the little red picture, but I might hang some other pictures in that corner instead.  Really, something just needed to go up, and this was it (you can also see another picture waiting to be hung sitting on the chair in the background).

headed to San Juan

I don’t anticipate blogging too much this week, since I’ll be in San Juan for a conference (tough, I know!). But! I wanted to say a few things before I left:

1. Happy Father’s Day, Dad! Since I have no way of calling you, you’ll just have to look at this post when you get back from Canada (he’s on a men’s fishing trip this week in a remote area of Canada), and remember how lucky you are to have such a great kid (me).

2. Happy 6th month anniversary to our house on Tuesday! It’s been fun. And, we even survived our first power outage in the house last night (packing by candlelight is probably not a good idea… I have no clue what I put in my suitcase)! We promise to hang pictures on your walls soon, house (yeah, we’ve been here 6 months, built a fence and brick paver patio, but have yet to hang a single picture).

3. This week marks the 5th anniversary of meeting Jason! What a lucky girl I am to have met him and for him to stick around long enough to deal with my insanity! Ha ha!