Adventures in Domesticity

Happy Halloween!

We attended the Memory of Monroe Scottie Rescue Halloween party again this year, but had a really hard time coming up with a costume idea for Phoebe.  After much racking of brains, we settled on a lawyer costume.  I cut up one of Craig's old suit jackets and a dress shirt, and tacked the two together. 

As any Halloween-minded college student with limited funds knows, the key to a good costume isn't the costume itself, it's how you sell it.  So we went all out.  Craig handed out little business cards that said "Phoebe, Attorney at Paw," and gave her phone number (1-866-SUE-CATS).  We even gave her an opponent to lunge after - a little stuffed lawyer guy that says things like "Pay up, you deadbeat!" and "I'll see you in COURT" when squeezed.  (Thanks to my mom's penchant for fun gifts, we actually had this around the house.)  Phoebe loves that thing, and she kept snapping at it and trying to kill it.  Such a legal shark...

I'm not usually big on Halloween decorations, but I was overcome this year by the desire to have Really Cool Pumpkins.  I bought a little battery-powered pumpkin saw from Michael's, and dove right in to a project that was way over my head.  It took over two hours and all the wine left in the house, but I ended up with these:

The spider was actually pretty easy.  I probably could have done it with just a knife.

The Celtic knot, on the other hand, was ill-advised.  Martha Stewart's website has helpful templates and pretty pictures of these, which lulled me into a false sense of capability.  After looking at the website again, I saw that she called for one of those permanent foam pumpkins, which would have been much easier to carve, and not nearly as tempting for the teenagers of the neighborhood to smash.  Seriously, if this gets smashed, I may fall into a puddle of tears or go on a homicidal rampage.  Probably both.  I had a really hard time working through the varying thicknesses of the pumpkin, and ended up using a drill for parts of it.  It is a consolation, though, that jack o'lantern is a fairly forgiving medium, and it still looks pretty cool in the dark.

Saving a Big Chunk O'Money

I've dithered about our landscaping plans and what they're going to cost in the blog before.  This time, we've finally bit the bullet and decided to get it done, hopefully sometime next summer.

This is one of the things we're not really comfortable with doing ourselves, so we're going to have to save up the cash for a landscaper.  From what I can tell, we have reasonable quotes, but this sort of thing just adds up.  I'm not going to name the total sum, but it has more than four figures and less than six.  For some people, it's probably not a huge hurdle.  For us, though, it's a chunk.  We don't have it just lying around and we refuse to take out a loan for this sort of thing, so we need a plan.

I'm the money person in our household, and I like to think of myself as a reasonably frugal person.  I'm not dumpster diving or eating rice and beans for every meal, but 80% of the movies we see come from the library and I religiously save my Cool Whip and yogurt containers for future use.  We have a budget.  I come from a family known to speak in reverent tones of someone who put cardboard in his shoes to cover up the holes in the soles.  My grandfather the Ph.D. got his clothing from the church rummage sale, but only on the last day, when everything was half price. 

I've got the basics down, but I've got my issues.  I'm willing to eat out at the drop of a hat despite having a freezer full of food and a meal plan, and my nascent crafty side thrills to the siren song of fabric and yarn.  Magazine subscriptions just seem to multiply.  Craig has toned down his purchasing sports memorabilia a lot, but will still shell out for little pieces of cardboard with pictures of men on them.  (They just have to be the right men.)  I long to be able to practice the kind of "cheerful frugality" that Meredith at Like Merchant Ships demonstrates.  I know it takes time and effort, but it just seems like so much fun as I lurk around similar blogs.

The bottom line is that this is something we KNOW we can do, we just have to set our mind to it.  We can reach about 75% of our goal simply by putting away a piece of each paycheck.  It's just that last 25% that's going to be hard, especially as we continue to work on the basement and contribute to our other savings.  We both have enough work with our full time jobs and neither of us wishes to revisit the retail hell of our college years (even for a few months), so we're going to have to get creative.  Selling off stuff, paring down bills, everything is fair game.  It'll be an adventure with a barbeque at the end.

As of today, we've saved $250 toward the goal.  Ready, set, GO!

Who wants honey/As long as there's some money/Who wants that honey?

As silly as it sounds the Smashing Pumpkins album Siamese Dream is a really important album to me.  I'd never really listened to all that much music until I put that cd on and the opening drum rolls of Cherub Rock (the lyrics in the title are from that song) came on.  Ever since then I've been hooked not just on the '90s alternative rock that first grabbed me, but all good music.

I've been fortunate to see the Pumpkins in concert in both 1996 at the Target Center and in 1998 at the free outdoor show in downtown Minneapolis that drew over 100,000 people.  On Tuesday Carl and I headed to Roy Wilkins' Auditorium to see them for a third time, but the first without original band members James Iha and D'Arcy.  I was a little concerned that without them the show wouldn't measure up, but it did.  They played a ton of old stuff to go along with some of the new stuff off Zeitgeist (an album I don't own and haven't actually heard most of), and Billy Corgan (while not aging gracefully) still rocks.  The crowd wasn't fabulous, but that is too be expected when those of us who weren't in diapers when Siamese Dream first came out are a little old to be crowd surfing and in mosh pits.  We don't want to break a hip, you know.

If you have the chance to see them, do.  Below is the set list if you are interested:

1. United States 2. Rocket 3. That's The Way (My Love Is) 4. Neverlost 5. Drown 6. Bring The Light 7. Stand Inside Your Love 8. Tonight, Tonight 9. Tarantula 10. Zero 11. Glass and the Ghost Children 12. 1979 13. Perfect 14. To Sheila 15. Bullet with Butterfly Wings 16. Hummer 17. Home 18. Superchrist 19. Doomsday Clock 20. Heavy Metal Machine 21. Cherub Rock (first encore) 22. With Every Light (second encore) 23. Today (third encore)

Apart from the concert I just completed my second week at my new job and things are going very well.  My coworkers are great and I'm loving the chance to be a "real" attorney.  I actually had my first court appearance on Wednesday and even though it was a default motion where the Defendants didn't appear it was nice to get that out of the way.

Anywho, that's all for now.  It's almost time to watch the Hawkeye football team get blasted again.

Craig

 

Baby Steps in the Backyard

What was intended to be a break from the basement that lasted a month or two turned into a full-fledged summer vacation.  Summer was what summer should be - gardening, long family weekends, vacation, grilling, and baseball.  We didn't ignore the house completely, though.

I should also note that this summer's CSA experience ended with a whimper rather than a bang.  Things got really busy in August, so we weren't cooking as much as I might have liked.  Our CSA farm also suffered extensive flood damage as a result of heavy rains in SW Wisconsin, so the boxes got a bit smaller.  There's really nothing to say about the last few weeks, so I won't.  We're probably still on board for next year, though.  (And they might be starting a cheese program - that's my kind of community agriculture!)

In preparation for what we hope will be next summer's big patio, fence, and regrading project, we made a couple of changes in the backyard.  Be forewarned - they're less than glamorous.

One of the trees in our yard suffered an untimely death last summer.  We went through a week of temperatures over 100 in July or so, and all of the leaves dropped.  You could almost hear a "whoomph," it happened so fast.  The arborist we had investigate said that the roots had curled around themselves, essentially choking the tree to death.  So that's a cautionary tale - make sure to break the roots up and spread them out really wide when you're planting trees and shrubs.

Here's the tree, as it looked this summer.  Dead indeed.

So we bit the bullet and had a tree service come out and cut it down.  This had the unanticipated benefit of slowing the stream of guys coming to our door and asking if they could cut down our tree.  Maybe we're just over-cautious, but letting a total stranger with no references come onto our property and operate heavy machinery just doesn't sound like a good plan.  There seem to be plenty of people who think that they'll make some money that way, though. 

The yard feels pretty naked now.  Eventually we'll have a privacy fence put up, and we plan to plant a few lilacs close to the fenceline.  For now, I just feel exposed.  The stump will be ground down in a few weeks, so at least we get some free wood chips out of the deal.

We also had our air conditioner replaced and moved to the corner of the yard.  I don't know quite when the old one had been installed, but it had olive green plastic trim, which makes me think it was at least as old as I am.  The real problem, though, was that it was installed right in the middle of the back of the house, making any sort of patio installation a problem.  When we had our landscape plan drawn up, the designer placed a patio on the corner of the house.  That was great, except that anyone sitting on the patio in summer would have loud AC noise directly behind them.  When the system started to take six hours to cool the house by about 4 degrees, we decided it was the perfect time to get the darn thing replaced and moved.

There's a lot of painting and tidying up that will need to be done, but at least everything is in the right place now.  You can see the location of the old AC unit just to the right of the hose.  The new location will be much better for everyone.

So, things still look a bit patchy, but we are READY for the men with the bulldozers to come and make our backyard an inviting green paradise, a sylvan glade in the city, a refreshing private oasis!

Now, about the cash for the men with bulldozers...