A little about the new house

I've got 3 days until all my finals are due, so naturally I'm going to post on my blog rather than work on one. Really, I was brought here because a stupid spammer decided to comment on an old post and I came by to delete it, and then I realized I hadn't written in ages. And then I sit in front of any empty update window and remember the 15,000 things about which I thought to myself "I should put this on the blog," and remember only that I thought that and not what I intended to write at the time.
So let's see...the new house. The new house is just fine. It's kind of a lemon; in the past two months of living here we've had a mouse (Tika and Kali took care of that little problem on a doggie-date day), a shower drain that backed up and was barfing out stuff from our garbage disposal, leakage problems in the rooms downstairs, the kitchen sink's spigot spontaneously shooting off (fortunately that one just needed to be screwed back in), and a front-loading washing machine that occasionally doesn't drain fully. Fortunately most of this stuff, aside from the foundation leakage, just needed to be fixed, and I live with one of the fixiest people in the world. The nice thing about these little cruddy occurrences is we're not terribly attached to the house, so we won't be reluctant to leave when it comes time for that. Other than that, we like it. We hosted a halloween party with a zombie make up bar, and you can see some shots of the house in the photos:


Behind Sam is a view of pretty much the entire upstairs. The railing behind her is for the stairs leading down to the bedrooms. Behind that railing is where we watch tv. Directly to the right of Sam in the picture (you can see the cups on the edge of the table) is the "dining" area:

(Steve was half hick, half sociopath, all zombie-proof. Note his glorious mullet wig.)
Directly across from the dining area is the kitchen, which is pretty galley as kitchens go:

We're pretty much taking up all the kitchen space here. Daniela's elbow points to the stove, and mine kinda points at the fridge. (I was a 50's Zombie Housewife, and Daniela was a zebra.)
Pretty nice party space, aside from the wall to wall beige carpeting.
Alright...back to finals...maybe more on Colorado life once they're over. :)

Siphons, Moves, and Dreams

My husband is a genius. Seriously. He just seems to know everything you need to know when you need to know it, particularly when it comes to things that one builds or buys or modifies.

Today's example? You know how he built a wood-fired water heater that flowed into a hot tub? Well, we're moving houses (again, more to come on that) and we decided said hot tub will not be coming with us, so we needed to drain the hot tub. All of the valves had been sealed (we used it literally as tub and not a jacuzzi). How would you have drained it?

Tip it over on end? Cut a hole in the bottom? Bucket by bucket? Rig up a pump? Hire a large friend in padded suit to do cannonball after cannonball?

Well, because Steve knows everything you need to know when you need to know it, he created a siphon. Oh you know, he created hydrostatic pressure through a hose which once started allows you to drain a "reservoir" of its liquid contents provided the walls of the reservoir are no higher than 20 feet and the exit point of the hose is lower than the other end of the hose that's in the water. No pump needed. No special tools, destruction, or large friends needed.

What, you didn't know you could do that? Oh right, me neither. Steve's brain is the exact opposite of a siphon; it never drains.

As for moving, yep, we're moving again. Our landlord needed to move back to Denver so he gave us 30 days notice. Being the supremely industrious and efficient people that we are, we had a new rental house lined up within 3 days of that notice. We take possession of it Sept. 1, and then we have 20 days to move into it. We met our current landlord today for the first time (we'd found this house through his agent originally) and he is a very nice guy in a bit of a crisis which we totally understand and thus we take no offense at his need to boot us out.

But.

WE HATE MOVING. WE ARE SO SICK OF IT. I'm sorry for the virtual yelling, but we wanted to stay in this house until we could figure out where to buy and how to pay for it, and then we wanted to buy and never, ever rent again, and probably not move for a long time. Years and years.

The longest I have spent in any one place in the last *SIXTEEN* years is ~1.75 years. Because I went to boarding school for high school (moving back and forth between school and home for 4 years), and then away to college (moving back and forth between college and home for 4 years), and then moved to an extremely expensive city in California, and then moved in with Steve a year later, and then Steve left for Toronto 1.75 years later, and then Steve came back 6 months later and we needed bigger space soon after that, and then I made a career change and we moved to Denver a little over a year after that, I have moved, on average, once a year, every year, for the last *SIXTEEN* YEARS.

Did I mention that I'm sick of it? I did? It bears repeating.

Steve and I were delighted to find each other, delighted to move in together, delighted to figure out careers and get jobs and get into schools and delighted to get married, but short of our first born child nothing, nothing, is going to make us more ecstatic than to finally buy a house, and settle down.

And not move for years and years.

I wish...

I wish I was an 1/8th of the poet Mary Oliver is. Seriously. Everything she writes is exactly what I wish I could write, and how, and on so many of the same topics.

This post brought to you by the following poem:

Breakage

by Mary Oliver

I go down to the edge of the sea.

How everything shines in the morning light!

The cusp of the whelk,

the broken cupboard of the clam,

the opened, blue mussels,

moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—

and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,

dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.

It's like a schoolhouse

of little words,

thousands of words.

First you figure out what each one means by itself,

the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop

full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

Attended a reading last night...

...by my favorite blogger, who has just published a book. Another fan-girl from school was eager to go too, so we could be fanatical and geeky together.
My favorite blogger's husband posted a picture of the Denver crowd in which you can see Katie and me:

How awesome is that? His fan-girl radar must have been super strong that night.
My favorite blogger's website: http://www.dooce.com
Her husband's website: http://blurbomat.com
The photo in his photostream on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/blurb/3422120442/
Much like a concert is a way more amazing experience than listening to a cd, a reading is a way more amazing experience than reading a blog. When the band or the blogger are amazing to begin with, then the amazing is exponential.
Katie, I'm glad we went!!

For the record...

...I have been to hell and let me inform you that you better get some religion right now.
S and I are currently in Connecticut celebrating the happy occasion of my step-dad's 60th birthday. We were supposed to get into White Plains, NY's airport on Friday at 3:30pm, rent a car, and get to the house in CT at 5pm or so.
We got on our flight in Denver at 7am MDT and got to our connection in Atlanta at 11am EDT with no issue. We get on our flight to White Plains on time at 1:15pm EDT. The flight is uneventful until we get to the airspace above White Plains.
And remain there.
For an hour.
Because there's not enough visibility to land.
Then get diverted to Newark, NJ. And land.
But they won't let us off the plane because the clouds over WP might clear up at any time.
We hear this many many times over the next FOUR hours as we sit there, waiting.
And waiting.
And waiting.
This would simply be obnoxious if it weren't for the fact that because I'm dehydrated, and by about the time we land in Newark, I'm developing a headache that is about as close to a migraine as you can come and not be a migraine. I'm nauseous. I'm extremely sensitive to smell, light, and sound. My head is pounding.
And we're trapped on an airplane for FOUR hours. They've even turned the stupid air off. We're just sitting there, by the runway, stewing, with the pilot coming on the intercom about once an hour to say "really, it's supposed to clear up any minute."
The *only* thing that gets AirTran to finally go to a gate and give us the option of getting off the plane is the fact that there's a woman with epilepsy in the front row who hasn't eaten over the eight hours since we first set foot on that plane and if this continues, she'll have a seizure. So they taxi to a gate to let her off, and then the mutiny begins. Passengers with New York accents and deep male voices are beginning to yell "HEY LET US OFF THIS PLANE." The crew is beginning to care very little for regulations.
Finally, they let us go. In Newark. About two hours further south than where we're supposed to be. About 5 hours after we were supposed to have arrived.
At this point, I'm not kidding, I'm weeping from pain.
S escorts me to the nearest kiosk where they have a whole beautiful bottle of excedrin migraine and cold, delicious water.
We go to the car rental counter to see if we can transfer our reservations, get a car and go. But the Hertz at Newark won't let us transfer our reservation because we have to return the car to Newark; we can't return it anywhere else.
So we go to the only car rental company that will allow us to do this, Avis, and the line is 20 people deep.
That's when I call my step-dad and step-brother who are at the new Yankee stadium for the first game. They agree to come pick us up when they're done. Fortunately for us, they've put the second string in by then so the exhibition game is much less exciting, and they kindly decide to leave early.
An hour after I've taken the headache medicine and we've finally gotten to eat a meal at McDonald's, which is the only thing open at that hour, my migraine-in-training finally, blessedly, subsides. We stand out on the curb in the fresh air and await my step-family and rehash our experience over and over, pointing out silver linings (at least it wasn't our first flight that got diverted, otherwise we'd be nowhere near home; at least the 12 year old girl who was flying alone started crying before I did) and terrible decisions (or lack there of, like the one they should have made hours and hours earlier to get us on a bus to White Plains, which is what they were threatening to do when we finally left them on the plane, or the decision we made to use AirTran and fly to WP when we could have used any other airline and flown to Bradley, which was fine).
Remember how we were going to get in at 5pm after a 2 hour flight and a one hour drive? We got in at 1am, after a four hour flight, four more hours on the plane, an hour or so of waiting at the airport, and a 2.5 hour drive.
Here's the beautiful view of Newark from the plane:

Gorgeous, no?
If a migraine on a plane that's sitting by a runway in Newark not moving and full of angry New Yorkers and crying 12 and 29 year olds doesn't qualify as hell, then I'm going to say that Dante unknowingly took a detour and missed a circle.
It was that bad.
However, I've learned that when the chips are down, my husband can invoke the patience of a Saint. When my headache cleared there was much venom and frothing to be shared, but when I was a wreck and we were in the thick of misery, he was an angel.
Steve for the win.

Man's Best Road Companion

Spotted outside the breakfast joint we hit up earlier this week:

In case you can't make it out, he was tied in with a leash. My guess is he loves the feel of the wind in his curly canine hair...

Someone screwed up but good

Spotted on the walk from the pool hall to the Mexican restaurant we went to afterward for dinner:



Not even advertising agents pitching their wares in huge font written on glass can seem to escape the it's/its trap. Nonetheless I ate my enchiladas with a heaping side of utter disdain. Tsk tsk...
(By the way "LoDo" is short for Lower Downtown.)

Almost a year to the day

Almost a year to the day that we first set foot in Wynkoop in Denver, we went back to the pool hall/brewery/comedy club (yeah, they have a good thing going) to celebrate another quarter of straight A's. I checked my phone's photos from last year and they were dated 3/20/08; we went this year on 3/23/09. That was probably the last time we played pool too. Steve and I split 2-2 (but admittedly only because he scratched on the 8 ball in the last game) but we were both quite aware of how rusty we were. Also the tables are utterly felt-less and thus totally fast, as we've become used to from pool halls. I can't imagine what it's like to play on a properly felted table any more!
I did indeed try chile flavored beer as you can see from the post below, and it was delicious. If you don't believe me, here's the blurb from the Wynkoop website: "Patty's Chile Beer: A light German-style beer made with Anaheim chiles and smoked Ancho peppers. A 2006 Great American Beer Festival Bronze Medal Winner in the Fruit and Vegetable Beer category and a Wynkoop specialty." You hear that? It won a medal. So there! It warms the belly and bites the tongue just a touch more than regular beer.
My first classes of the last quarter are on Thursday...10 more weeks and 4 more chances to rock the grades, and then summer...

Chile flavored beer is good - who knew?!

Oh, that smell...

Murphy's oil (for cleaning hardwood floors) smells exactly like saddle soap. The moment we opened the bottle I was shot back to days in the tack room learning how to take apart, polish, and reassemble saddles. Oh...yum.
I mopped today. I can't think of the last time I mopped...probably one of my apartments in SF, but who knows. So because I didn't have any strong mopping memories and the smell of the Murphy's Oil was ever-present, I remembered my days of sweeping the corridor in the stables, my riding boots clomping and stomping behind the broom's bristle, horses whickering and watching me with relaxed amusement.
I might just mop again soon for the sheer nostalgia it brought on.

Happy "Luck O' Th 'Irish T' You" Day

Right now on our stove a pot of corned beef is merrily boiling away. Parents of mine reading this will recognize the extraordinariness of this admission -- as a wee one, I loathed corned beef. I continued to loathe it, even after trying it again in my adulthood, until a year or two ago when that husband of mine decided he was going to make it himself to show me its delicious potential.
He was right. (I hate it when that happens. At least he was deliciously right!)
Why, oh why, is corned beef so often dry, salty, chewy and generally icky? S showed me it can be moist and even slightly sweet. I love his version of it. Throw in some cabbage and potatoes and I'm in hog heaven. Which is what we have planned for dinner tonight. I can't wait!
Lest we stray from the ethnic fare today, S. also cooked up some carne asada from flank steak this morning. It smelled so good I sat down with a fork and ate it plain, sans accoutrement. Oh the warm spicy happiness in my belly.
Now if only we were as creative and consistent about exercise as we are about cooking...
Cooking opportunity aside, today marks another very important event: the 7 year anniversary of one mom and one recently-upgraded-to-step-dad, or "3D" as Fred deemed him.

A long, long time ago in a Fish House far far away, two souls were blessed by the Luck o' th'Irish and have been divesting each other of creme brulee ever since.
Happy Anniversary Mom & Sabatini!!

Along with spring comes spider season. Let the squealing commence...

Two more things:
1) I just discovered google reader. I am never going to get any work done!
2): I've learned how to post using my cell phone, so expect some one line posts...but they should be more frequent. Maybe. I just tried it and I can only send it one text length at a time, so we'll have to see if I can fit my thoughts into such a small box! (Might make for a blog full of haikus.)

Since it's February and I haven't posted since December, let me say: Happy New Year!
I did my taxes early again this year. Taxes, for whatever reason, make me reflect more on the previous year than does the actual turn of the new year; maybe because they're tangible evidence of how the last year went. This year's tangible evidence: one federal tax return, two state tax returns, and a pretty decently sized refund all around, since both the Feds and California taxed me with a view toward a whole year of income, when in fact I had half a year of income. In fact, this is the first time in at least a couple years where California owes me. This will be the first year in four or so where I really really need the refund, so 'tis better for California to give than receive, much as I sympathize with their budget crisis. (S is dubious that I'll get my refund at all...I can't see how they could get away with that.)
That last statement -- "I sympathize with their budget crisis" -- is truly not hollow. Staring down the precipice of a job in social work, I see that much more clearly how essential state money is to the survival and well being of its constituents. So many of the Federal government's programs for funding to states are matching funds -- so the state has to be able to pony up money to get the benefit of Federal help. Given its Libertarian roots, Colorado in particular has all kinds of binding restrictions on taxes and budget surpluses, meaning that in times like these Colorado has its hands full -- well actually, empty -- trying to find a way to cover the predicted losses without cutting the budget into confetti.
Maybe it's just growing up, but I sometimes wonder how I got by for so long with my head in the sand about stuff like this. It feels much better to know about state budgets, poverty, oppression, policy, etc. and be mildly overwhelmed and sad than to be sitting at a desk job (albeit at a great organization, but still) having sent my inner Jiminy Cricket on sabbatical. Ignorance is not bliss; right now I'd say contribution is. I'll be spending my 2009 figuring out just how I plan to contribute my time and energy, and Jiminy Cricket will be right here beside me.