Moving day
I’m going to be moving over the next few days. Not me physically - keys would have to be pried from my cold, dead, decomposing fingers before I’d leave our house behind - but this site. I’ve had a Dreamhost account for a while where all sorts of work stuff is stored, and I figure since I’m paying for it I might as well use it for a site that gets the traffic to warrant the cost. That, and I’m sure Matt would like to check his e-mail on a regular basis since my site is hogging all his server space. Sorry, Matt! In any event, I’m moving. And there will probably be a all-CSS redesign launching in the process that will include my Flickr badge. Thanks, Hubby! And I might just finally make the switch from Blogger to WordPress. We’ll see.
That movie
I take back the props I gave to Lowe’s, and Jason has resolved that we will never shop there again. After going in three weeks ago to place a custom order for furniture - on the advice of a helpful cashier - and having not one but THREE people helping us place the order in a computer that allowed us to place the order and even charged us for the furniture, and after getting multiple phone calls from “the home improvement store which shall not be named” letting us know our merchandise had arrived AND having Jason call back to confirm that our merchandise had arrived, including a table and four chairs… Well, we showed up on Sunday with a helpful SUV-owning friend to pick up the furniture only to have a woman we’d never seen before tell us that, actually, you CAN’T special order furniture. We followed her around the store for an hour looking in every possible location for the furniture. She even tried to sell us a different set - you know, because even though we custom ordered the EXACT set we wanted, we looked desperate enough to take the ugly stuff off their hands - and was, in general, unresponsive to our obvious frustration. She failed to grasp that, because a total of eight different people had found no fault in our ordering furniture, we stopped looking for furniture elsewhere, and now every store in the free world has clearanced any furniture that could possibly be placed outdoors. Finally we just asked for a refund - which would have been so easy if Jason hadn’t put it on his credit card and then responsibly paid off the jasminelive balance in full since THREE people told us the furniture was sitting at the store waiting for us. So we had to call the bank to make sure we could cash out a credit back to Jason’s card, and now we have to call Lowe’s back and arrange the refund. Because apparently this is all our fault. I need to work up some righteous indignation and call management to get a free fancy propane grill (complete with side burner) for our troubles.
The custom pillows we ordered with the furniture did manage to arrive, so I suppose we can arrange those in a circle and sit on them until next summer.
We also saw War of the Worlds this weekend - that was some mighty impressive destruction. I can see how some critics have drawn 9/11 parallels, what with the running through clouds of ash and all. Did anyone else notice Spielberg’s recurring “circle” theme? The shot of Ray through the broken house window, again later through the broken car window… and I think there was one more shot that was similar. It stood out to me, but I could just be weird.
The headline
That was the headline I saw on the Denver Post this morning as I picked up a hash brown and a Coke at McDonald’s on my way in (late) to work. It was 105 degrees in Denver yesterday, a record high (the last time the mercury reached that temp was in 1878). I managed to stay indoors at work all day yesterday, but poor Jason takes a pair of shorts with him to work so he can change before the drive home (the Focus spends the entire day in an asphalt lot with no shade) and avoid uncomfortable sweat. Today’s high is supposed to be around 98 (and I’ve heard reports putting the estimate over 100), and our usual afternoon rainstorms have been away on vacation or something and aren’t expected back until next week to cool things off.
Since painting the living room turned out to be much more taxing than we anticipated, Jason and I took last weekend off to veg and do housework and actually leave the house for something other than paint or groceries. I had preordered my copy of The Half-Blood Prince ahead of Saturday morning’s release from the Boulder Bookstore, an independent we like to frequent, and I somehow managed to convince Jason to head up to Pearl Street for the release jasmin live party. in capes, teenagers in shirts that read “Dumbledore’s Army,” yadda yadda. I picked up my book voucher and we strolled the Mall, eventually ending up at the Lazy Dog for buffalo wings and fries. My friend Malinda called, and she and her husband and brother happened to be strolling on the Mall as well, so they came into the bar and we went downstairs and watched the boys play air hockey (Jason was a goner for a bit, but he made a stunning comeback). Then we strolled back to the bookstore and went inside to browse (and giggled a bit too loudly in the erotic books section while a group of in costume sat watching the third Harry Potter movie not twenty feet from us). Malinda and her men eventually headed off, and I got in line upstairs to wait for midnight. The countdown came, everyone cheered, and by 12:05 we were in our car waiting to get out of the parking garage.
On Saturday, we headed into Denver to get some shoes and see a flick - essentially killing time until the start of Drums Along the Rockies. Jason actually had some friends who were in Blue Knights when he was in college, and it had been a while since either of us had been to a drum corps competition, so we were pretty jazzed (and we had awesome seats). I managed to fill my camera’s memory card AND kill the battery - inconveniently, both things happened in the middle of the Blue Knights’ performance, the last of the night. The Cadets won, but I couldn’t get into their trippy, abstract show (Asian schoolgirls and a giant door? huh?). I was rooting for Crossmen and Phantom Regiment (and their guard of 10 million costume changes). But, alas. All in all, it was a good time.
We compensated for all the excitement by sitting around doing very little on Sunday. I did manage to order our tickets for Wicked, but by the time I showed up (it wasn’t even lunchtime, and the tickets had gone on sale that morning) there wasn’t a ton available. I did managed to find us some decent tickets in the center of the balcony, near the front, on a Wednesday night - the only tickets available on a weekend were off to the side. It’s not a huge theater, so the seats should be swell.
Let's paint the walls
Props to Lowe’s! Their floor stock selection in the stores we went to was pretty measly, but they had this lovely catalog filled with all the furniture they sell and - get this - you can special order anything in the catalog. RAWK. So we ordered a wrought iron table and chairs and some cute striped pillows to go in the chairs, and now we’re only lacking an umbrella. And a firepit with some lounge-y chairs to go around it. And a grill. steps, right? The furniture arrives at the store in a couple weeks, so for now we have a sprawling empty patio with some cute solar lights around the chaturbate rooms perimeter.
We spent the holiday weekend working on our living room, the only room downstairs (if we’re not counting the powder room as a, uh… room) that we haven’t painted. And because the piano is in there and it’s fancy and all, we got a little ambitious. Red paint - which almost universally requires primer and multiple coats and is a pain in general - along with a chair rail and panel molding. Most people prime and paint their trim before they put it on the wall to make things easier, but not us! No, I decided we should put the trim on first so I could caulk around all the edges so it looked more “attached” to the wall. My pointer fingers are regretting that choice (it even hurts to wipe my tush), but every time we peek in the as-yet-unfinished room, it all seems worth it. Because it looks friggin’ AWESOME. Unfortunately, a three-day weekend was not enough time to finish (and it didn’t help that we spent most of one day trying to sand the knockdown texture off the wall below the chair rail), so our evenings this week are being spent painting and caulking and taping and painting some more in an effort to finish by this weekend (the room was primed Monday, so tonight we put on the first coat of red paint). Two weekends will still clock in substantially short of the six weeks it took to paint the dining room. And because we did that room first, it looks practically ghetto compared to the rest of the house - paint on the ceiling we haven’t touched up yet, roller marks that are still visible… our painting skills have come a long way.
Well, we finally got our balcony furniture
The furniture had been picked out for months, but we wanted to wait until it went on sale before we snagged it. So it goes on sale a few weeks back, we go to the store, and… there are none in stock. The helpful stock guy even called several other stores in the area for us, and none of them had the set. So we got a rain check for the sale price and went on our merry way. And then suddenly, two weeks later, Target decides to put ALL their patio furniture on clearance. We swing by Sunday night and, of course, there are three sets there for the taking at a $120 discount. And all we have to get the furniture home in is a Focus. So I get mildly upset, Jason says we’ll find something else, and we pick up our groceries while I try not to pout.
Monday morning I’m feeling a bit more persistent. I called seven area Targets to get a stock update. I convinced a friend to ask her brother to let us use his truck. I call Jason and tell him the plan. And after work Monday, we get the furniture. It has to be removed from it’s gigantic box to fit in the truck (and the door of the bed doesn’t close), but we get it home and it looks fabulous and all is right in the world.
Well, except for our backyard. Because it seems that not only has Target put their patio furniture on clearance (the stock guy told us it was to get ready for back-to-school time), but every other store in the free world seems to be clearing out their inventory too. Some places have tables but no chairs; some have chairs but no tables. Everybody seems to have the ugly stuff, but we’re not fans of the ugly. Am I wrong in thinking that, even in a “cold” state, there are at least three to four months left of enjoying the outdoors? And that maybe people might need to pick up some attractive-yet-moderately-priced furniture to take full advantage of their brand-spankin’-new backyards?
Nice weekend
The long weekend was a much needed break from the 9 to 5, although I can't say it was terribly "relaxing." We enjoyed the time, but we were pretty non-stop busy for most of it. Saturday we taped and painted my office, Sunday we did a second coat in there and painted the entryway and staircase, and Monday I shopped for knick knacks and artwork and whatnot.
My office, in Behr's New Green:
The entryway, in Glidden's Bonjour Beige:
And now that we're making good progress on projects, the kitchen feels really blah. So... we're gonna paint that soon too (after we do the living room in a nice, dark red):
Also on Saturday, I managed to fit in a three-hour sewing class. For Christmas The Other Mother bought me a sewing book and some "sew money" for a local machine shop that offered classes, and Saturday was the first class that was actually scheduled at a time I could attend. I learned how to thread my machine and do the bobbin thingy and sew in a line and do some zig-zagging... obviously a basic class. I have another one on the 18th of this month, and the teacher said it's pretty much all sewing. For the first time, I was actually the oldest person in a class; the three girls with me all wanted to be fashion designers and make their own clothes. I felt a bit silly introducing myself and saying, "Uh, we just bought a house and I'd like to make drapes and pillows."
Jason is working from home today since I have class tonight and it's a pain to coordinate the driving to and fro. So he gets to hear the melodic sounds of jackhammers tearing apart the back steps to our house in preparation for our fancy new patio and courtyard.