Feliz Navidad!

A few shots of 2010's Holiday Tableaux. We also have a whole wall of great cards from great folks! Thanks for adding us to your list. Please note that Penny is so embarassed by her Santa suit this year that she effectively refuses to show her face in it...hilarious.

Thoughts to Ponder

"Every consistently played fantasy sooner or later explodes into life."
- VonDoderer

My wonderful book-reading friend, Caitlin, suggested David James Duncan's The Brothers K to me right before our wedding. I devoured it in Mexico and vowed that our first son would be named Kincaid after the book's protagonist. Chris has hemmed and hawed about this for awhile but purchased me a copy of my own for my birthday, a move that I see as acceptance of my demand for nomenclature. I found this line in a chapter heading on Friday. It hit me like a ton of bricks. What we are living now is exactly what I have always imagined - our current life is my consistently played fantasy that has now exploded into existence. This line is like a tiny, fortune-cookie love letter to Chris and Penny that explains the depth and breadth of my committment to our family. This is my fantasy and I am lucky enough to watch it explode every day. From here, the are other, tinier fantasies that we are only beginning to consider, so keep an eye on our ever expanding American dream...

xoxo e

(I nearly posted this on my classroom blog...oops! Getting rid of my klutziness may be the one fantasy that never explodes...)

The House is Warmed

This would be the place to put all those pictures that I took at our housewarming party that we finally had on Saturday. Right. Except that I didn't take any because I was running around like a crazy person. Oops!

It was so nice, though, to have all of our friends and family have a chance to see the house. We love it here and we hope that others do, too!

It was interesting to get the perspective from other homeowners about the homeowning process. The one hint we keep getting is that the work never ends. It's true. I may have new, less dangerous stairs, but I'm balancing my legs underneath my hips right now to avoid resting my feet on the freezing, uninsulated kitchen floor. One thing at a time, right?

The other sad news is that Chris' CFA exam materials came yesterday (which was also my birthday). He'll go back into his Fortress of Solitude to study again starting this week, coming out only to eat, work and take the exam in June. I know this is good for our future but I've really grown accustomed to having him around. For example, I went to close the living room blinds on Sunday and they crashed down on my head. Instead of spending the next hour fiddling with them, I shouted, "FIX IT!" and Chris lept into action. They're sitting on the couch now, lifeless, but at least I'm not entirely to blame for their demise...

Winter is settling in. The animals around our house have gone into hibernation and the trash is safe, for now. Penny's fall coat is shedding out and her winter coat is glossy, red and beautiful. I've had the piano tuned in advance of some jamming while Chris studies and I've re-invested in the gym, looking towards a 10k race in April. This weekend we will buy and set up our fifth Christmas tree together. All is calm, all is bright.

And most of all...I love sitting on our freezing cold porch with Chris in the glow of our Christmas lights and the strange ozone smell of that giant Santa.

In lieu of pictures of the party, I will post some of Penny with her new favorite toy. My sister bought it because it was called a 'backyard pest' and she found that humorous. Penny has yet to be separated from her loving possum.

Who Are Those Jerks with their Christmas Lights Up Already?

Chris' parents gave us a relic from his childhood...their 4' Santa! We hooked him up and, regardless of a sketchy electrical plug and a quick whiff of ozone, he works! We've officially become the crazy folks with the Christmas lights up before Thanksgiving. 

Happy Halloween!

From our little pumpkin to yours!

Finished Stairs!

It's been really busy around here...lots to do! The stairs, however, are finished and beautiful. And silent. Sigh. :)

Your Luck is About to Change

So...it's taken me awhile to get around to this post. It honestly still freaks me out to think about it. This all goes back to about three weeks ago when Chris and I ordered Chinese food for dinner one night and I got a fortune cookie fortune that said, 'your luck is about to change.' I had had pretty good luck so you can imagine how nervous I was. I then got into a major car accident which resulted in me spinning around in the midst of traffic, ending up facing oncoming cars. The words from my mouth in that moment were, and I'm not making this up, "Well, it's been real." I was convinced that I was faced with death.

However, I made it. The person who hit me also made it. I will say nothing about that person besides the fact that the accident was not my fault. However, even with this fact, it's important to point out that even when it is not your fault, you are responsible for a massive amount of paperwork, phone calls, and general headaches. I also ended up in the emergency room for a head check (so far, so good!) so that's another round of claim numbers and midwesterners to call.

I am now on my second rental car after the first one got a flat tire. On a major highway. On my way to turn it into the third rental dealer in one day after being told that the first two had no cars to give me. I am now driving a silly Ford Fusion until my Corolla is healed, probably sometime around Thanksgiving. I have nothing against Ford, and I actually kind've like the car; I just prefer my own sweet ride. I'm convinced that car saved my life, as the cops/tow truck people on the scene spent some time trying to figure out how I didn't flip over. It was a steel suspension and a solidly built car, and Toyota, I thank you.

So if my posts are short and snippy lately...it's been a long couple of months. Combine that with the fact that Chris and I are trying to go until Nov. 1st before turning the heat on and I'm downright feeling unlucky. But hopefully writing about it will finally make some of this anxiety fade, right? Right?

Thank you, Clare and Dad, for sending flowers. Thank you, Mom, for the edible arrangement. Thank you Chris for taking a day off of work to make sure I was okay. Thank you to my co-workers who stepped in and helped my classes get by in my absense. Thank you to my sisters and friends for the constant texts and calls to make sure I was okay. I am so thankful for all of you. Moments like this make you think of all the things you have to live for...let's hope my luck is changing as we speak!

Sigh. I think I'll watch some TV now. I'll post about the car another time. For now, here's what it looked like last time I saw it:

Thank You, Uncle George

Over a year ago, Chris' Uncle George moved away and offered us some of his stuff. The only thing we took was a huge, unframed, chipped up mirror. I'm still not sure why we took it but we did. I had it professionally framed at Miter Biter in downtown Melrose and now it's really classing up the dining room! Thanks, Uncle George!

Before

After!

Stairs are FINISHED (Construction at least!)

Paint starts on Friday! Look at us, we have nice things!

Stairs as of 10/17/10

Missing some teeth! Waiting for the other set of balisters to be installed. :)

Stairs as of 5:10pm 10/8/10

Argh...so I can't get the pic on the bottom to flip, but you get the idea. They look great! 

Should be done very soon. Look at us! We have nice things!

Stairs as of 4:34pm, 10/1/10

Just heard from the construction crew - NO surprises! No rotten wood, no squirrels living anywhere weird, no problems! We're good to go for wallboard and finish work on Monday...and these guys we have working for us are amazing. They put up a tarp on the temp rail just for Penny! Clearly they know the way to my heart (and my wallet) is through kindness to that silly, toothless dog...

Stairs as of 9:56pm, 9/30/10

The stair project starts tomorrow. Get pumped for big changes. Goodbye, Jed Clampett stairs!

Job Benefits...and a squirrel friend

If you follow us at all, you'll know that I am a teacher. Well, without getting too specific, I'm a teacher in a vocational high school. We had an awesome professional day on Wednesday where we could choose to try out a technical area and see what it was like to perform some different jobs. I hemmed and hawed on this and decided to try my hand at masonry. The freshmen students do a really cool project in there with tile and I was hoping to pick up some tips for that pesky upstairs bath. Well...the best laid plans...

I got in there and was told that we were building a patio. Awesome! Just my luck! And you'd be amazed to know that a patio is on our short list for next summer...so let's do this. 

My teammates and I decided to choose the most difficult pattern for our patio: herrinbone. I was so surprised to see how easy it was once you got going. Now I'm not heading towards anything with a diamond tipped wet saw anytime soon, but this was really straightforward and easy to manage on a small scale. Hopefully Chris and I can figure it out...and if not, at least I'm buddies with the masons at school now!

 I know you're sick of Penny's birthday, but she deserves a birthday-food-eating pic post:

Ben and Jerry's...only the best!

We also misplaced her favorite orange squeaker on her birthday (damn that lawn extention!) so we had to go out and find her a new favorite toy. She now has Squirrel Friend that goes everywhere she does. She loves him and snuggles him and sometimes tries to rip his feet off. That's love. 

BFFL

Happy Birthday, Penny

A year ago today, we brought home an incredibly shy and neglected dog not knowing whether or not she would ever really fit into our family. A year later, we can't imagine life without her. I am a total believer in the idea of having an animal being better for your health. Chris and I are happier and healthier sharing our lives with this furry little girl, and all the years we get with her will be lucky for us. She waited a long time to be loved and we are so happy to do it. We love you, Penelope.

Penny on her way to her new home, 9/26/09

Penny after having lost most of her hair after whelping. She looked greasy. 

Penny as of today, driving into her future!

Honestly...

Penny and I chillin' on the porch

New Year, New Directions, Lots of Links

(No, Ashley, this is not a Glee reference.)

Every teacher knows that September, not January, is the real start of the new year. And we were hoping to start this new year off lounging on our deck at the end of a hard days work, enjoying the luxurious new backyard while Penny frolicked in the safety of our newly fenced in yard.

Well...

The money keeps rolling out in all directions. We're experiencing some technical difficulties in the new bathroom that need fixing. The basement windows are a blog post in their own that I'll get to. The bedroom paint is still a mess. The lawn is growing in spottily at best and giving Chris nightmares. One tree leans threateningly over the kitchen roof. Penelope's one-year visit to the vet looms. The stairs are still being dramatic and demanding to be fixed. Yet...

We've never been happier in our deck-less, fence-less home.

Exciting news this week, at least. We can finally afford to have the stairs fixed! Chris' dad suggested we use the contractor that built his house in Gloucester and he is a great guy, a real professional. It's amazing how much better things go when you use an actual professional. The guys we used before got the job done well, but the hassles and the waiting and the mess...I'm hoping to leave those behind. This guy has fantastic ideas for our old staircase.

Some facts about our stairs:

The railing is really old and beautiful. And totally out of code. Standard code is a 36" railing from the ground; ours is 29". Off by a mile. Going to have to go, but it will be while I kick and scream about losing it.

The existing treads are EXACTLY the color I want on the floors eventually. I'm hoping that we can keep the color on the new treads. Hoping.

You'll remember that we had some issues with these old stairs during closing. Their nasty habit of swaying back and forth prevented occupancy for awhile. And we were so excited when the bank 'fixed' them for us in order to get occupancy. Well, they did this:

which fixes the swaying, but not the structural integrity. Turns out that you need four 'runners' underneath a staircase, and we have two. And one is rotten. Fantastic. So the stairs are old, rotten, and LOUD LOUD LOUD as can be seen in this video of me walking:

So hopefully, we'll have new stairs soon! He may also take down the trees out back...Chris and I are sleeping on the numbers to decide about tree work and finished painting from the crew. (My vote is yes, his is no: guess who does the painting around here? Humph.)

Quick note about the basement windows: We hired a very well-referenced handyman company to come and fix them as Chris and I weren't sure what to do. They have done nothing but be unreliable, messy, and stupid since we hired them. One window was put in so shoddily that Chris could have done it himself (and done a better job), and the other window was ordered in the wrong size so that we still have a wooden window, just on the other side. They also left a giant bag of trash in our yard. They still have yet to finish the job and I still have yet to write them any checks. We'll see how this goes. For now, it looks like this:

But you know...things are great. It's great that we're lucky enough to have the jobs we do to have the money to do these projects. It's great that we have each other to lean on when we feel like we're taking crazy pills. It's great that we have friends and family to crash with while our stairs get rebuilt. It's great that the leaves are turning and my students are just sweet as pie this year. Life just seems a bit more beautiful today especially after the arrival of Madeline Lee Witts-Linsner...welcome to the world, darlin'. It's a wonderful place to be. :)

A New Rug

Chris and I got to Sunday of last week's tax-free weekend and both said CRAP, we haven't bought anything! After a lengthy discussion of why this was the wrong reaction to have, and how that reaction basically is what brought about our current global recession, we hit the stores and bought ourselves a new living room rug. The existing rug is still in great shape and on its' way to a new home, but we were looking for something newer that matched the room a bit better. We were sad to say goodbye to old rug, but new rug is so awesome that we can't be that sad!

PS: We bought this rug at Bradford Carpet One. They are super helpful. We bought this rug as a 12x15 remnant for under $300 which they then trimmed and bound for $75. They even made us a second rug from the extras to go under the piano! I've been going there for all my flooring needs since about a year ago, when they found a rug remant that was EXACTLY the size of our bare closet floor (3'7"x4'11"). They are miracle workers.

Anyhoo, old rug:

And new rug!

Back-to-school, sad dogs and other dramedys.

I intended to do a big backyard post again, but don't really have much right now besides this:

The grass, my friends, is growing. And growing with vigor. This is fantastic! It looks like everything we wanted for the yard. Awesome.

Blogger is also awesome, with great new features and a new sexy look. Enjoy!

Anyhoo, it's getting to be back to school time. Sad. I had planned on spending this entire month supervising the deck/laundry room addition and yet it's strangely quiet around here. Truth is that the bids on that project came in way over where we had thought they would, and we had a moment with ourselves to think, hm. If we're going to spend THIS much money, maybe we should spend it on changes that are necessary - not ones that are fun. So, the deck has been abandoned for another season. I really hope we get it eventually. I also really hope we win the lottery.

We're going to have someone come out to talk to us about a couple of inside projects - 1) fixing the stairs, and 2) re-doing the floors in the living and dining room. The stairs are off-center and really creaky - they need to be rebuilt before I can paint and finish that hallway. That's one thing. The floors are trickier. One of the things that people always say when they come into our house is, "Ooo, look at those floors! How beautiful!" In reality, these floors were beautiful at one point in time. The flipper who bought the place, however, ripped up walls and patched together the actual floor with cheap, matching laminate, then attempted to varnish the whole thing himself. That's why walking barefoot in our house means that you constantly have little flecks of varnish on your feet. I've actually peeled up whole foot-sized sheets of it on really hot days. He ruined the floors, which is sad, but it's another opportunity for us to make our mark on this house. I want to put down something much lighter than what we have.

Before we do that, though, the floors have to be leveled...I don't even want to think about what that's going to involve. Stay tuned, folks. This old house had all her beams replaced in 2007 but she's still a little droopy. Just cross your fingers that this is something Chris can do with hydraulic jacks and chutzpah and not something that involves an architect and a structural engineer. Updates on all that soon!

I'll leave you this week with a note about Penelope: she's prepping for back-to-school as well. I've been leaving her home more trying to get her ready to have me gone all day again. When we left yesterday, we backed down the driveway and saw this:

Penny, standing on the couch, balancing on the windowsill. Waiting for us to come home. It would be cute if it wasn't so pathetic!

Our New Backyard!

When we bought our house, the backyard was a small section of the actual yard. It was a nice carved out piece of lawn. However, beyond the lawn, it looked like this:

A freakin' jungle. Ugh. It had puddles of water for mosquitos to breed in, trash and lawn refuse, all sorts of nastiness. The people next door had also been using it as their own personal dumping ground (and continued to do so after we moved in until I had words with them) and it just generally felt like a big chunk of our property that was going to waste. It was on our 5-year plan to have it leveled and filled to make our yard bigger. Then, our other-side neighbor dug out a 3-car garage and was left with a gargantuan pile of fill. Thinking, no time like the present, we began the process of filling and evening out the yard.
Trees needed to come down first - the black cherry and crabapple trees came out to make room and light for the big maples in the back.

Lovely lovely!

And now...it's more even, without the worries of bringing in bad fill. Because it's the same fill that was in our yard already! Just moved over a couple of hundred feet. Awesome.
And this is how it looks today. We're watering like crazy and hoping that this grass all grows. Hopefully in a couple of weeks we should have a really nice yard to go with the possibility of a new deck!

We've Been Busy...

This is probably the longest I've gone without blogging in the last year. Last July, I had 11 posts. This July, I had zero. Oops. But I can tell you that we've been busy, and I can prove it photographically as well...

We've been landscaping! We're hard at work at the backyard project which is almost done. We also spent some time moving our neighbor's un-needed dirt into some flower beds around the house. This was a LOT of wheelbarrow's worth of dirt, a truck full of supplies, and a good day's hard labor, but it looks great and improves drainage! Hurray!

We've been grilling! Tom and Ashley got us a grill and we've been firing it up when the weather allows. It works really well and we look forward to lots of experimentation...

We've been playing with Penny! When she returned from her two weeks at Camp Chenelle, she was so happy to see us that we just haven't been able to leave her alone. She is such a love and we can't believe it's been less than a year that we've had her around.

We've been traveling! We spent 8 days in Mexico and it was wonderful, even for the rainy season. We sat on the beach, sat by the pool, and did some adventuring as well - we visited Chichen-Itza, which is one of the seven wonders of the world, and Tulum, another Mayan temple site. We also zip lined through the jungle and swam in underground caves. It was an amazing journey together!

And oh yeah...we got married. :)

It's strange to think that just a year ago, we were just buying this house, stressing out about all the issues going on, not even thinking about a dog or a wedding or our brand-new shiny life together...and it's been the best year I've ever had. We are so thankful for our friends and family who make all this hard work worthwhile and look forward to keeping everyone updated on our latest and greatest projects!