We've taken on a lot, and somehow managed to stay in tact. Living life now as a family of 4!

Well, this week has certainly been exciting. Last week of school, the heat (weather) has returned, and the heat (in the house) is being installed, slowly but surely. Everyone, our house is turning BIONIC. It has hoses and pipes and black thingies (otherwise known as manifolds) everywhere. It's pretty incredible. These very poor-quality-in-the-dark-iphone photos will give you an idea.  This is the ceiling in the living/dining room. Awesome, right?  Looking into the kitchen. When we were watching them do this part of the work we were wondering if we made a mistake hiring someone to do this - seemed pretty easy.  But then they started installing stuff that looked like this, and I knew we had made the right decision.  THIS is our new boiler. I should have something there for size reference, but I will tell you it is hanging on the wall, and that red thing on the side is the expansion tank. I'm not even really sure what the expansion tank does, but it ...

As I sit writing, the floor rumbles under my feet periodically with the sound of a drill. Heat is being installed, and although we have a minor hiccup to solve (bathroom plumbing including future considerations), everything is AWESOME. More later, with pictures. JUST SO EXCITED!

You know what's kind of fun? Drugs! Especially the ones that knock you out and take away the pain. The only, extremely foggy, recollection I have of getting my tooth out is coming into semi-conscienceness and being aware that someone was REEFING ON MY FACE! Not that I could really feel pain, per se. I lifted my hand to say something, but they told me to put my hand down, so I did. Next thing I knew I was groggy in the dentist chair with gauze stuck in my mouth. Waking up all the way was HARD. Like walking through water. My dear friend Jess came to get me, and I thought I was fine, till I stood up. It was like being drunk, really. Could not walk in a straight line. Went to Jess' house and passed out on her couch in the basement. I tried to watch HGTV, my favourite, but could not stay awake. It was kind of wonderful. I spent most of yesterday in a bit of a fog, actually, with really strange and vivid dreams - the kind you have to think REALLY hard about to figure out if they ...

Three days in a row! I am awesome! Ok, Part One: Part of working for a large organization in which all the employees are unionized is dealing with the mess-ups that seem to be inevitable and more frequent than they should be (disclaimer: I, too, belong to a union (this is a requirement of my job, that I pay dues to TWO unions. Don't even get me started.) that will protect me to the death should I ever need it. However, they also do the same thing for employees who mess up in quite-large ways and I am not ok with that. Anyway, that is another post for another time). Today I spent a significant amount of time on the phone, compounded with stress and worry, trying to figure out my dental coverage situation because the ONE PERSON who could answer/fix my problem wouldn't return my repeated phone calls. Thanks to some help from friends and sleuthing requiring a trip to moma's to use a PC because my work email wasn't working on my Mac, I discovered that I am being deducted ...

For the past 2 weeks or so I have spent a lot of time staring blankly  into the fridge  at the ingredients in there. Peppers, spinach, lettuce, all delicious, all completely unappetizing. All of that stuff needed to be assembled for it to be good, and the thought of even cutting up peppers for a salad was too much to bear. I ate a lot of cheese and crackers and one late-night-post-ultimate box of mac'n'cheese (sidebar: when you don't have milk, you can use margerine + a little sweet-with-heat mustard from superstore and it is DELICIOUS!). Jake, too, has been struggling with this and we've both been defaulting to easy and repetitive solutions to the food problem: potatoes in foil on the grill, some kind of meat, asparagus or some other veggie thrown on there. Never quite enough for a leftovers-lunch, or conversely, too many left overs and then you overdose on a good ol' standby (I won't be eating baked potatoes for a while - how sad is THAT!?).  The other day I...

Remember this?  Modern scrap-iron-art #1? And #2? All those beastly pounds of metal hauled out with brute force?  Now our yard looks like this: And this: Yup. Gone. And not by our doing. Jake came home from work on Tuesday (or was it Monday?) to find the yards so clean you could eat off them. Nary a scrap of scrap was left.  Can you believe that? Brazen! In the middle of the day (our neighbors claimed it was still there around noon, and Jake got home by 4), what had to have been more than one burly-strong person with a burly-strong vehicle spent at least an hour loading up our metal. That was heavy stuff! More than one of those pieces would require at least 2 or 3 people (STRONG people) to lift/carry them. Jake called around to scrap yards to see if they had received a suspicious load (apparently they don't ask many questions, and this kind of thing is common) and discovered that scrap iron is worth 8 cents a pound. We figure...

This weekend didn't have the 'wow' factor of removing thousands of pounds of cast iron, but the work we did was no less essential. It was one of those weekends where a lot of time was spent moving things from one location to another, making room for the heat guys to move around the basement fairly freely. It was also a bit of a domino project - you know, where one project leads to another until you find yourself sorting crib pegs and consolidating all the tea lights into one bag. A significant portion of Saturday was spent pulling nails out of trim boards from the second floor which Jake had stashed in the basement YEARS ago. Neither of us thought that would be a priority (and in fact, we were both hoping to ignore that pile), but there was no avoiding it - had to be done. Both of our hands are so sore now, holding the drill today was not entirely pleasant. I also managed to clean out THREE rubber-maids - either re-allocated what was in there or got rid of it...I love when ...

I realized the other day that this renovation is pretty fun! It is a huge adventure, and is ticking along at a pace that makes it impossible to get bored of it. Things are changing all the time, and thanks to some great friends and family, we are able to get help for the pieces we can't do on our own. I am really kind of loving it. It's amazing to get to know the house this way - inside and out, every inch, nook and cranny. I always knew that this renovation would be something I could live with without too much issue - that part is all about your attitude which can be controlled. I am surprised at the genuine enjoyment I am getting out of it, though. Bonus! We sold the sink. *tear* Except that it is going to a couple that I think we could be friends with who obviously have more room in their kitchen than we have in ours, because they are taking a stainless steel sink out and putting our cast iron one in. Also, they live on the next street, a few houses up from us, so it...