Party

Happy birthday to Jay

Yesterday was Jay's birthday, and he turned 27. I keep thinking I'm 27, too, but I'm not. I made Jay a veggie lasagna. Turns out that Kate made Pat lasagna for his birthday. There must be something about lasagna that screams "birthday meal." I was also going to make a pineapple upside down cake, but ran into many obstacles. First, as I was perusing the internet for recipes, there were just too many recipes. I didn't know which one to pick! So I chose one, and as I was copying down the recipe, I said, "Eeeeeeeeee, too hard!" Then at the grocery store, I decided I'd just pick up a box of pound cake mix and some pineapples. Crose enough! But when I went to add the milk into the mix, I realized the milk went bad. I felt like the guy in the song "Someone Left the Cake Out in the Rain."

But I made some kick-ass bruschetta, which made me happy.

So nothing too exciting has been going on at Indian Spring... We are, however, having a little party on Saturday for Jay. Feel free to come along if I know you. (Although I don't think many people I don't know would ever even read this. But maybe.)

Valentine's cheese

I made a cheese platter for Jay for valentine's day, because he really likes cheese. My plan was to go to the Cheese Shop of Concord on Monday (Valentine's Day) to get the freshest, best cheese. But they're closed on Mondays. (Nice way to plan ahead, Reardon.) So I ended up just going to Bread and Circus, and I asked the nice man behind the cheese wheels how to make a cheese platter, and he just picked out five kinds and handed them to me. Okay, then! But Jay seemed to like it.

p.s. Go see Jay's new Blog! It's at www.jasonrbailey.blogspot.com. It's called Mayaloge.

Strange footprints...

As Jay and I were taking our little dog Abe for a walk in the backyard the other day, I noticed that there were footprints in the snow that went out to the little spring that runs through the yard. I asked Jay if he had walked out there for something, and he said no... and I certainly hadn't trekked through the snow over there for any reason. Upon further inspection, it looks like some random trespasser came on our property from the road, walked to the spring, took a bunch of leaves and sticks out of the grate, removed the grate from the plastic irrigation pipe, and walked off. Hmmm... I don't know if it's some angry neighbor whose yard floods because of our negligence to the spring, or if it was someone from the DPW. Don't know!

The floor! The floor!

Some pics of the new kitchen floor! We're still working on it. Jay's doing a great job with it!


Abe got in on the action, too. (Actually, he just got jealous that Jay was paying more attention to vinyl tile than him.)

Recent news

Happy birthday, Pat!

The recycling thing actually worked. I saved cans and glass jars and cardboard, and I put them all in the bin as best I could, and the nice men in big trucks who take all that stuff actually took it and left an empty bin! We're very proud.

Jay's been recently working on putting down a new kitchen floor. Fancy, you say; yes, but we found a sneaky way around ripping up the old linoleum:

Ooo, that's nice. Jay's dad suggested we not rip up the old two (yes, two) layers of linoleum and try to level out the floor ourselves; he suggested this stuff that's like wood but it's not, and you just nail it down on top of the old stuff in order to make a nice smooth clean surface for the vinyl stick-down tiles we got. Brilliant!


Jay finished putting all the wood-material stuff down, so probably this weekend we'll put down the tiles. So exciting!

Also, we've finally started sort of planning the wedding (don't you love how much I say "sort of" and "kind of"?)... This morning (Sat.) me and Jay and Chris Cuddy are headed to the Sturbridge Host Hotel to check out the accommodations and maybe set up a wedding. Weeee! Sort of.

Recycling, here we come!

I had the day off today, as I am a nonessential state employee and all nonessential state employees in the eastern-most courts had the day off. So I ran some errands.

I cashed some checks, prepared a slow cooker soup, ran to the insurance agency, got Jay an oil change, faxed some documents, and I actually went down to the Ashland DPW and picked up some recycling bins.

Now, I've never EVER recycled anything in my life. The closest environmentally conscious thing I've done is rip apart six-pack plastic holders so that sea-faring birds don't get their necks caught in them. As if really helps... So I feel very good about myself that I made that first step towards a better tomorrow. Now the real key will be to actually USE the bins. Baby steps, is what I say. Baby steps.

Pics of the big snowstorm

How much snow did you get? We got lots here in Ashland. It accumulated about a foot before we even went to bed last night, which freaked me out. I had dreams last night about shoveling the driveway with trash bags on my feet and legs because I don't have boots or snowpants. I actually did shovel a bit with grocery bags on my feet, but they didn't help at all since the snow was up to my knees.

Our first homeowner malady

(Well, besides the huge lake that appears in our backyard when it rains.)
On Thursday morning, I had just finished showering and was sauntering downstairs to the laundry to find nylons for myself. I noticed there was lots and lots of water in the corner of the basement, right by the bulkhead. Oh, no! I thought. Rainwater must be leaking in through the damn bulkhead! But I noticed water dripping from above. I look up, and there I see the end of a PVC pipe with lots of wet hair hanging from it, and the pipe that should be attached below it is just off to the side, unattached. It was the bathtub drain pipe! So I realized that all this water that pooled in the corner of the basement is Erin shower water. Which shouldn't be icky, but it icked me out.



Flash to the present: I was on my way downstairs right after I wrote that last part to take pictures of the pipe to post. Alas, there was much more water in the basement than had been even when the Erin shower water was there!!! Could it beeee? Could this basement REALLY be flooding?? So we just finished cleaning up THAT mess. We still can't really figure out what happened... there was lots of snow melt yesterday with some rain, and yes, the huge lake in our backyard was the worst it had ever been... but the basement flooding? That's the worst. So we'll keep an eye on it. Waaaaa waaaaa...

Ah, homeownership.

By the way, here's some really crappy night shots of the lake in our backyard.

We finally got our internet up and running

Thanks, Matt, for setting it up!

I now proudly post this next picture. It should go with the post entitled "A Dog with a Job."

the dead mousie is in a plastic trash bag, which is why he's surrounded by white. you could imagine he is surrounded by puffy white clouds in heaven... but it's just plastic, people.

Corner Pub rulz!

Last night, Matt, Jay, and I went down to the Corner Pub for some Celtics action. (We were getting cable TV at the house, then suddenly we weren't.) The Corner Pub is the home of the 'personal pitcher', a fantastic invention. You get a wee pitcher of beer for yourself, and it holds about two glasses. It's great. Decent pizza, too. For all you Jaigermeister fans out there, they also have Jaiger on tap right next to the Red Bull fridge. I guess they have dollar drafts of Pabst. Weee! I think we've found the Worthen of the Ashland. (I think we all know what the Worthen of the Clinton is...)

Abe: a dog with a job!

That's a horrible rendition, only because I'm at the law library in the courthouse and they only have Microsoft Photo Editor on here. I can't cut and paste very well... But anyway, Jay called me Wed. morning with news that Abe saw a mouse in the kitchen and let it get away. (He tried to gloss over the whole "mouse living in our house" thing with, "Guess who was almost a Dog with a Job?" because he LOVES that show.) Abe just sort of looked at it and tilted his head as if to say, "Wha's daaat?"

But when I got home that night, Jay was proudly walking around, gloating about how Abe is now truly a Dog with a Job, because he caught the mouse and killed it! Jay said, "Now I now how parents feel when their kid wins a soccer game!" I guess Abe was playing around with it, doing the little Abe dance where he lowers the front of his body onto the ground and lifts his butt up and wiggles it, then looks back and forth wildly. Then he took the mouse in his mouth, gave it a few quick whips of the head, and it was dead! We're very proud of our cat-like dog.

In other Indian Spring news, the desk on the porch that Mr. Hawkins left us is no more. We tried moving it into the back bedroom, but it wouldn't fit. So we tried to stand it on its side and move it in sideways, but since it was made out of particle board and not real wood, it just snapped on its one wimpy side. We had fun demolishing it, though.

New color for family room!

The family room is now orange!

Weeee! I don't think Jay likes it very much, as he keeps saying things like, "We could put lots of stuff in there" [meaning "to hide the color"], or, "Stuff to mute the color would be good," or, "I hate this color!" No, he didn't say that last thing. But he picked out the color for me because I like it a lot.

We'll be finishing moving today, hopefully, and then we'll slowly but surely put stuff where it belongs, put the finishing touches on the home improvements, and we'll be set!

And on the Sixth Day, God made floods.

We get back from hangin' at the Framingham Elks last night, the sixth day of being at the new house, and I look out the porch windows. I say to Jay, "Gee, our backyard looks really... reflective." We walk out, and the whole back half of the yard was under a huge pond! Seeing as how we just saw a picture of one of the ex-Elk Grand Exalted Rulers who was from Ogallala, Jay, Cuddy, and I dubbed the newly-formed pond "Lake Ogallala." It was seriously a huge body of water that went over into our neighbor's yard. But we woke up this morning and it had gone down mostly. Screw that spring!

We have no internet...

...so this post is going to highlight the fun things we've been doing. Also, we don't have our digital camera handy, so there are no pictures, unfortunately. We do have video, so at least there's something.

SAT: Ripped up carpet.
SUN: Ripped up carpet tacks; ripped down kitchen wallpaper.
Jay had bought a bunch of wallpaper-ripper-downer stuff, like chemicals and scrapers and scorers. So we said, "I wonder how stuck the wallpaper actually is to the wall," and we found that it practically fell off when we sneezed. So we ripped down the wallpaper in one fell swoop. We found baby-diarrhea brown underneath and we almost puked.
MON: Jay and Matt painted the kitchen. Jay rips off paneling in family room.
We got a lightish greenish color, but not minty. But on the wall it looks blue. It's verrrry nice. Three coats. Later in the evening Jay takes our new Wonderbar and rips off all the wood paneling in the family room.
TUE: Jay joint compounds the wall in family room.

Wednesday we both worked, didn't do much...
And today is Thursday, and I'm at work, but Jay's got the day off... we'll see what happens. I think more joint compounding and maybe some painting.

Oh, and last night we found out we have cable, although I'm not sure how. We got to watch the Celtics game, and that made Jay a happy boy. We also checked out Nick's Pizza Place in Ashland... the guy made us the wrong kind of pizza, so he made a mini one for me the right way and didn't charge us anything. What a country! It was tasty pizza..... mmmmmm.

Our first night at Indian Spring

Well, we survived our first night! We found out that the house makes lots of loud banging noises, which I'm assuming has something to do with pilot lights lighting things on fire here and there. Abe freakin' hates it so far... he's so freaked out. He's already pooped three times in the house and zero times outside, and we think he may have peed in the family room, or else someone spilled beer. We have to keep him in his cage most times, or else downstairs, but he just whines and whines. Poor puppy...

First thing we did was rip up all the carpets, because they were old, ugly, and nas-tay. We found old hardwood floors underneath, ripe with old water (and other fluid) stains, but we figure that's better than carpet any day. So we've been spending time crouched on the floor pulling out hundreds and hundreds of carpet tacks and nails. It sure is tough on the groin muscles, surprisingly!

So we still have more stuff to move; we'll do that today. Next up on the list of thing to do: rip down wallpaper, paint, get hardwoods refinished... then in the future: cut down pine trees that are 4 inches from the house, extend bathroom, and the most expensive: redo kitchen! Or a new roof... both are pipe dreams at this point. But we'll keep you posted.

A joyful event has turned somewhat sour...

Well, as Jay put it, we own the house but someone else is living there. Here's a synopsis: Last Sunday we got a call from the sellers saying that they want more time to move their stuff. We said.... no. You've known for a month and a half, and the closing date stays. Week goes by... we get a call Thursday saying that they still need more time. Thursday night's supposed to be the walk through, and we show up to "We need more time! Please!" from the wife and "Whatever. Just... whatever" from the husband. Oh, not to mention the large amount of CRAP still in the house! They don't seem to understand the, you know, legal contract, and the, you know, large amount of money involved with this... not to mention it's Christmastime and we can't realistically change OUR plans.

So we're giving them until noon Saturday to get all their crap out, but I highly doubt they'll be out. So that's the exciting news with the new house! Lesson learned: ummm, I haven't learned one yet. But it sure is frustrating when people just don't do what they're supposed to do! Stay tuned...

Welcome to Indian Spring Road!

In one week, Jason, Erin, and Abraham will move into this humble home. (The yellow explody-thingies aren't really there. Photoshop, people.) Please check back for more updates as we rip out carpet, tear down wallpaper, and enjoy the bottom-of-the-line stove whose warranty is good till 2007.