We have Interwebs at the new house!

Woohoo! :) And all of our stuff...

So, Smarty is slowly adjusting to live in the new house...one that is substantially larger, with creaky steps and hardwood floors (not nearly as comfy as carpet!) The first day and a half she was hiding and when we'd pick her up to show her her new palace she was *shaking*... very weird. Unlike any behavior we've ever seen from her. At one point on moving day she was totally MIA for like 3 hours, turned out she was head first INSIDE the fireplace. She had soot on her little white chin :( Her new hiding place is a little safer & I assume quieter - in our closet (CARPET!) under our clothes.

(hopefully this image shows up... it's from my iphone and I've been working on figuring out how to use those images in blogposts...)

But, as this picture shows, she's slowly getting bolder and more curious... last night I was here alone and putting away our clothes and stuff and she kept kind of wandering in and out of the room...still very uneasy and freaking out at the smallest sound but at least not cowering in the closet! Progress!

This house is definitely *louder*... something that must be very different for Smarty. The creaky stairs cannot be understated...they're quite loud, and there aren't really ways to ascend or descend without sounding like an elephant. We hear this might be a challenge once there's a baby to wake up. Because, he/she WILL be woken up with these steps.

Another long day of unpacking ahead of us... I have to somehow fit schoolwork in today as well (something I've neglected for 2 days now...) I also have the goal of making dinner in the new kitchen tonight. Woohoo!

The work we've done:

Lord knows I don't have anything better to do... so I'll post some pics of our remodeling week. :)

Here's the obligatory first pic of us in front of our new home. :)
First up is the OFFICE.
Before:

After! The wall is Pinniped (Martha Stewart color...) and I thought it'd be more gray/brown, but it has a definite purple hue to it. But I'm ok w/ it, it's not too girly or anything.

Now... the Master Bedroom! Was boring white...


Now it's "Chive" :) It's the same color we painted the bedroom at our townhouse, but we really liked it and had a bucket leftover... even though it took two buckets. Oh well!


Guest Bedroom (downstairs)
Before:
After! It DOES still have the nasty brassy fan, but we're working on replacing that. Love the way this one turned out!


And lastly, the downstairs bathroom/guest bathroom. You'll surely remember this gorgeous wallpaper and drapery!

And... the AFTER! :) (I'm REALLY excited about how this one turned out, if you can't tell!


MASTER PAINTER! :) (Though, I did a lot of priming and coats of white in the bathroom too!)

Packing

Isn't our girl just the cutest? We feel so negligent... she's been spending so much time alone at the "old house" while we're spending our evenings at the new house. We keep telling her it'll be worth it, and she'll have so much space to herself, a screened in porch and a special closet for her bathroom, but she doesn't quite get it yet. When we get home late at night she's pretty much got a one track mind: FOOOOOOOOD! FEEEEEED MEEEE!

And she does love being inside cupboards, especially empty ones that have been packed up :)

(See, I'm packing!)

House Progress & I *heart* Jersey Mike's

The first weekend in our home ridiculously tiring and long... yet wonderful. Scott and I made some definite headway in our ambitious first week plans on the new house. We still have a long week ahead of us until the movers show up 9am on Friday, but I actually feel like maybe we can get there?

Our goal is to do one room at a time, and to COMPLETE that room before moving on to other rooms... like do all of the little and big improvements at once.

So here's the list and our progress. I'm hoping to get pictures up this week sometime...because I'm really proud & happy w/ how it all turned out!

-Paint the master bedroom (check), replace light switches & outlets w/ white (tonight), replace doorknobs (check).
-Master Closet: Replace brass knobs on built-in stuff (check), replace light fixture (tonight?), replace doorknob (check).
-Office: paint one wall (check) and do the outlets & doorknob (this week)
-Guest Bedroom: paint walls (check) and trim (half done), do outlets & lightswitch. We also need to do SOMETHING about the ceiling fan in there bc OMG it's so ugly. :)

So, long week ahead of us, but I also do feel that the more we can get done before all of our stuff gets there, the happier we'll be.

One awesome discovery of the weekend: I love Jersey Mike's. And Scott is eating his heart out bc at random times over the past, oh, 6 months he'd be suggesting places we could go get dinner and say Jersey Mike's and I'd be like..."meh". I'd eaten there once and just thought it wasn't that special. Well, for some reason I agreed to go there Saturday and wouldn't shut UP about how good my sub was. I think the only thing I said the whole time we were eating it was some variation of "Oh man, this is so good." Just so you know, a #7, Mike's Way? Life changing. (Or maybe we were just really hungry!) We totally had the same thing for lunch the next day.

TIRED!

One day in and we're totally drained... this could be a very long weekend! Or... 30 years.

Yesterday went well, we signed the obligatory 893 papers and initialed here, here and here. We spent the entire afternoon and evening at the house painting and getting paint on the bottoms of our feet and tracking it around the upstairs. Good times. Our new neighbors Cara & Steve brought the Welcome Wagon pizza & beer over in the evening, which was just what we needed. (I should make it clear it's not an official WW effort, they are existing friends that now happen to be our neighbors! Woohoo!)

Some highlights:

• My feet are KILLING me today because I was walking around barefoot on the hardwood. Didn't realize that would happen...
  
• We painted the master bedroom the exact same color our current master is, and somehow needed two buckets for this room where as the old room only needed one. How fun. ;)
  
• We're trying to replace the lightswitches & outlets... but we have aluminum wiring. Does anyone know how to do this w/ out burning down the house and/or electrocuting yourself? Seriously, if anyone has any advice, please email me!
• Yesterday we worked hard, we really did, but we also were dumb in that we didn't stay hydrated and well fed... must stay on top of that today.
  
• Today we get our fridge! Making the above point a little easier...
  

Today we're heading over there in a little... grabbing some paint for the guest room/Quiggy Suite (as it is now called)... We're also addressing the very important issue of the wallpaper this morning. I have this wallpaper tool that's been loaned to me that looks a little scary :)

Thanks for all the well-wishes & posts on facebook! :)

Tomorrow!

Tomorrow we sign on our new house! :) Sorry I've been a bit MIA this week... lots going on. And of course, my old stand-bys for blog topics - books & recipes - not so much doing either of those things lately! We've boxed up a lot of our stuff, and the plan is to get in there tomorrow and paint, paint, paint!! We're moving our stuff the following Friday, the 27th. Or I should say movers will be moving our stuff (and no, not the ones who asked our size in my last post!)

Of course, we're super excited. I keep telling myself this is really happening... it all happened so fast. Which is good, bc I'm generally not a patient person.

Hopefully I'll have some fun pictures after the weekend to share.

While searching for movers...

I found this little gem...

I'm checking out the form, browsing over the information they require to quote us for a move. I'm just curious about why the care what SIZE the RESIDENTS are? I mean, excuse me, I'm not going to just put my size out there. And upon scrolling down, it asks how many ROOMS we fill up? :) Oh education system, how could you not educate the movers of our society...

Well, it amused me.

Oh, also their slogan made me laugh, because they're concerned about my (plural) backs.

It is truly hard for me to look at these websites. Truly...

Approved!

On to closing!

You want to talk about an arduous task, try applying for a loan when you both have jobs and good credit. Maybe someday I'll write about the insanity that was our loan hoop-jumping! I'm afraid the loan industry has gone from offering hundreds of thousands of dollars to anyone with a pulse to making it overwhelmingly hard for qualified people. :)

But for now... Yay! Time to pack, buy a fridge and mooooove!

You are an obsession, you're my obsession

(...now that song's in your head!)

I'm obsessed w/ blogs. I just love them! Bear in mind, I'm in the final throes of a project detailing how to blog for corporations (I know my readers are really interested in that... totally). But I've been doing lots and lots of research and have found some interesting blogs. They're not even blogs about blogs!

Jobless and Less - The Blog for the Employmentally Challenged. It's a guy blogging through being laid off and looking for a job in this crap economy. It seems really funny, though I did just find it. It's also interesting, since so many people are going through this now.

Mark Cuban's Blog Maverick - I've also just started following this one, but it seems interesting. He's the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and a well-known entrepreneur & Web 2.0 enthusiast. He has bold opinions too.

FAILblog.org is also a great time... very random but they have lots of updates. And you can't make that stuff up.

Also, I don't know what I would do if not for my Google Reader. It's awesome... would it be bad to be a Web 2.0 Junkie?

Also, I'm debating Twitter (mainly in my head at this point)... I'm on the fence between thinking it's a lame outlet for the self-absorbed and potentially really fun and revolutionary...

Broad Street Run Training: Commence

So, it is time. I have been equivocating all over the place on my running intentions. I WAS going to run the Raleigh Rocks Half Marathon on the 28th, but seeing as we're moving that weekend I decided to scrap it. Which I am okay with, but like clockwork as soon as I made that decision, I dropped off the running bandwagon. All of the sudden stuff like "it's too cold" or "I just don't wanna" were excuses that I let myself use.

No more, my friends. I am rededicating myself to training. We are going up to Philly in the beginning of May for Ginty's wedding, and spending the weekend in Philly w/ some of my friends (like I did last year!) And I loved the Broad Street last year, so I'm officially officially doing it now. I think I'll be using the same plan I did last year: Hal Higdon's 15K plan. It worked well for me (and it's less intense than the half marathon training as it only requires 3 runs a week, not 4.) I think I'm one of those super fun and non-uptight people who need to have a PLAN at all times. (Scott's nodding his head because he's known this for years.) I'll be jumping in a few weeks into it, since I have run maybe 2-3x a week (okay, 2x a week) for the past few weeks. Anyway, I feel like I can handle Week 3 this week, and might skip Week 4 (it's for pansies).

It's good to have a plan :)

Add this to the list of things we're excited about in the new house:

Garage.

I wish I had snapped a pic before it was all scraped off... I had to use way more strength than I'd like to admit to open the iced-over door this morning to start the car. SERIOUS refreezing occurred last night.

But isn't Scott too sweet for scraping my car for me? :)

Crow Lake

We're actually discussing this book tonight at book club, and I have no idea what I'm going to say, honestly. Did I like it? Not really. But the thing I'm struggling with is articulating WHY I didn't enjoy it or feel it had value at all. I can't figure out how to approach it...

As a writer, and one who studies writing in school, I think the writing was baaaaad. We actually talked about "voice" in one of my classes this past week, and what makes an author's voice, what differentiates authors from one another, etc. Maybe that was a bad talk to have before picking up this book, because I felt like the storyteller and main character, Kate's, voice was just impossible to nail down. She was all over the place. She's a college professor (at...27 I think it was? Really? How easy is grad school in Canada?) yet she randomly slips into some sort of backwoodsy sentence constructions. But only sometimes. And not in such a way that you'd be all like "Oh, the inconsistencies tell you something about her character." In the way that made me think "Who edited this crap?" (Oh, I hope school has not ruined me forever...)

As a reader and a lover of books, in some ways it felt like a waste of time. It wasn't *boring* per se (though I will say I took 2 naps - something I NEVER do - on Friday and Saturday while trying to get through this book. It could have been the dreary weather and Spring Break fatigue... but Crow Lake certainly played a role in it!!!) Since there wasn't much interesting ON the paper to ponder, I guess I just let my critical mind wander and started wondering why the author didn't go anywhere new and interesting with the plot. It felt like there were a bunch of interesting and potentially conflicting roads she could go down, but she just didn't. The ending brought it all together, but I still was a little mad bc I wish the author had told me some of that stuff sooner so I could have been interested in the book before page 270!! I also happen to believe the ending was kind of an easy and unbelievable ending... the character's realizations are good, but the plot was just sophomoric. :)

Maybe I'll think of some positive things to say about it. I love books, I love reading, and I don't get to do much of it during the semester. I SO wanted to like this book, and I only say that because when I feel so negative about a book I question my attitude - like did I really give this book a chance? I TRIED... but oh well. Not every book can be awesome, and I'll try to think of it like cleansing my palate.