Emy is in town…

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Emy is visiting for the weekend. Hooray! We trundled downtown to the Mall to see the Natural History Museum. The Metro was single tracking which made it incredibly frustrating.

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There were 2 demonstrations on the Mall yesterday, one anti-health care bill and one bring-the-troops home. We saw people carrying signs for both on the Metro and we also saw something like 100 port-a-potties lining the mall, but we actually couldn’t see the actual rallies. I think there were only 1000 people at each one so I think they were easy to miss.

Jeremy spent the day at a high school science fair as a volunteer judge. We discussed the difficulty of judging a summer’s worth of research at NIH against someone who spent 3 weekends at home with stuff from Home Depot.

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Crocus.

Vince felt much, much better today. On his way home from school, he picked some crocuses for me. I asked them if he picked them out of someone’s garden and he told me not to worry because “no one lives in the house”. Hmmmm…

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Jeremy dressed up today. He wore what I consider his wedding/funeral shoes. He bought a pair of very nice black leather shoes for our wedding and I told him that I thought he would not wear them again until he died and then he would be buried in them. This was when we were employed in the Silicon Valley and having an ironed shirt was super fancy, I did not think that he’d ever have a job where he’d get to wear those fancy shoes again. He’s worn them many times since the wedding, but I still refer to them as the wedding/funeral shoes.

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Vince is sick.

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Puked six times last night; four times into the toilet, twice onto the floor. Jeremy and I are both a little stressed about goings-on at work and really are tired. Neither of us got up in the middle of the night to clean up puke. We waited until morning to strip the beds and clean the floor. I’m glad Ruby didn’t eat the puke (it has happened before). Poor Vince. Stayed home today and had some Sprite.

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The house is falling apart.

Ever since we moved into the house, we’ve noticed that some of the finish work in the house is a little slap dash. These are things that I figure, oh no problem, I’ll just watch some youtube videos and go to Home Depot and fix it myself.

Like the waterlogged grout in the master shower:

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Or the missing grout in the laundry room:

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But then a soap holder in a shower fell off and revealed an ominous hole behind it. There shouldn’t have been a hole behind the soap holder! And they didn’t use the water resistant drywall! Did they not use any water resistant drywall in all the bathrooms of the house?!? Are all the bathrooms going to crumble because of terrible tile work?

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This was a little too much to handle and we needed the bathoom without the soap holder to be back in service really, really quickly, so I had to call someone in. It was pretty much the best money I have ever spent. Took him 4 hours to do an awesome job and fix all the grout work that was broken. In the master shower he lifted off the tile and found a whole well of goopy crap that has not dried in the three years since the tile was set.

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Our handyman was super nice, super competent and very reasonably priced. In other words, a gem! Jeremy actually pointed out the drywall patching job that I did on the living room ceiling after the plumber fixed the broken pipe and I was so embarrassed. It’s like showing a professional baker a cake you made from a Betty Crocker mix and then frosted it yourself.

Lessons learned from knitting.

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I’m back on the knitting bandwagon. I’ve finished 3 projects since the beginning of February and in order to fit this habit into my day, I’ve dropped my other habit of reading books for pleasure. I’m trying to combine the two by checking out these weird recorded books from the library called Playaways and listening to them while I knit. They have a preloaded book on them and so you just provide your own earphones and hit PLAY! Since I don’t use an iPod, I thought this would be a good way to read and knit at the same time. Unfortunately, I think that hearing is my least sensitive way of gathering information. I am very good at not listening to anything. Just ask Jeremy. This afternoon, I fell asleep “listening” to Prep, the person who was reading is sooo soothing. I don’t know if this knit/reading thing is going to work out too well.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that with knitting, the more money I spend on the yarn, the better the final project turns out to be. It’s crazy, if you want to buy beautiful yarn to knit an adult sized sweater, you could easily spend $200 or more. So now, I’m going to buy nice yarn and keep the projects small so I don’t need to use too much of it. For example, this is sized for a one-year old. Now I just have to find a one-year old who wants to wear it. This yarn was given to me by a mom of one of Vince’s pals, she runs Three Irish Girls!

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Grumpy!

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I’m very grumpy this morning. Along with the time change, we have just managed to survive Vince’s 8th year-old birthday extravaganza yesterday – which was loud and raucous and made me glad that I don’t have 12 children (Dodecatuplets?). We hosted a bunch of boys in the house for 2.5 hours, there was some crying, wrestling, TV watching, pizza eating, dancing and a lot of yelling. The photos are all crap, but there isn’t much photo time when you are trying to keep the kids under control and to not destroy the house.

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Catching up with the week.

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On Thursday, I went to visit Edda at her school. I had no real reason to visit her school except that I always want to know about her day and since she can’t really tell me how her day was, I just want to go and be part of it.

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I don’t go shopping for Edda’s clothes, which is just as well because I have no taste. It’s all Jeremy, my mom, Jeremy’s mom and Donald picking out her clothes and then Eliana rockin’ with the dressing choices. Here’s Edda showing off this season’s turquoise and skinny jeans and sparkles.

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Getting into mischief.

So yesterday, I went into the office, planning on staying a little late to have fried fish and knit with my pals, when Jeremy calls me and asks if I have a minute to talk…

Jeremy was working from home yesterday and at about 4:30 in the afternoon he’s on a conference call. Eliana’s downstairs taking care of Edda. Vince, as usual, is running back and forth between the neighbor’s house and playing with kids outside and inside.

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As Jeremy’s talking on the phone, he notices from the 2nd story window that there appears to be a small fire in the backyard. He doesn’t see anyone around it and it’s near the huge pile of leaves and bushes and brambles that we have in the backyard so he goes downstairs (while still on the call) and grabs the kitchen fire extinguisher and heads out to the backyard. As he’s headed out, he can see that it really is a fire, tells the guy on the call that he’s gotta go and heads out to put out the fire.

When he gets there, he finds Vince and a few pals, kind of huddled around under a bush and yeah, trying manage their little fire. The fire they decided to build to make some s’mores! Right next to a pile of leaves, because, hey what burns better than some dried leaves!!! They basically had taken matches from the kitchen and headed outside to start the fire (oh, they also had a half full bag of mini marshmallows). Jeremy estimated that the charred ground was about 12-18 inches in diameter. We were very lucky that Jeremy just happened to look out the window when he did, otherwise, I shudder to think what would have happened if the fire had spread more than it did.

Vince was grounded today and got a stern talking to about fire safety. And we have to find a better hiding place for the matches. And we need to get a new fire extinguisher because the old one now is totally used up.

It is noted that when I tell this story to pals, all the boys or parents of boys all say, oh yeah, I remember when I or my kids did that. Actually, Jeremy was laughing a little when he called me at work because he clearly remembers almost setting their living room on fire when he was Vince’s age. And all the girls and parents of only girls were like, oh that’s funny, that never happened at our house… Ha! This has been a crazy week already, throw in a little (or big) fire drama and now I’m basically completely toasted.

What a crazy week.

Busy week! But it’s been so beautiful outside, I hardly can complain.

Green things coming up out of the ground:

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I’m still trying to knit, I have a few flesh and blood knitting friends and we actually are going to sit around and knit together. It’s more fun to knit when you have a (few) knitting friends.

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And I bought a half-dead orchid at Lowe’s for just five dollars. I’m hoping it blooms someday.

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