Well, I finally did it. It took mental toughness and all of my emotional reserves, but I did it.

And, by “it” I, of course, mean “drove my truck all the way to Malden Center.”

Sure, it’s all of about four miles from my house… But it’s a hell of a lot farther than the grocery store that’s only a half mile away. When I proudly related my “accomplishment” to Kristian last night, he pointed out that I’ve driven farther than that before.

Yeah I’ve driven farther. Once. And that trip ended in tears. And Kristian picking my sorry ass up because I literally couldn’t drive another block.

This trip ended with me sucessfully picking our friends Marcus and Vaden up at the T and bringing them to our house for dinner. The fact that I had to practically grab Vaden’s ass every time I shifted above third was just an added “bonus” (small truck + three people = tight squeeze).

In other boring news, Kristian and I spent the weekend insulating our enclosed front porch. It’s the type of work that is both very fulfilling (we worked hard and got a lot done) and also feels kindof meh (it looks exactly the same as before we started). Although the tangible outcome of our hard work is that the insulation is partially sound proof and now I don’t have to listen to the people across the street screaming at each other.

Also, our awesome next door neighbor loaned us a pneumatic nail gun. Any day that I get to use power tools is, by definition, a good day.

I have big plans for that porch, but what room in our house do I NOT have big plans for? My big idea was for me to build a day bed that will double as storage for our recycling. Kristian thinks that this is a fantastic idea and he sounded fairly shocked to be agreeing with me.

Methinks that I have set the bar awfully low.

All we have to do before I can put my plan into action is to gut our third floor, hire someone to put in skylights, insulate the entire floor and then we can tape and mud the sunporch (the previous owners put up drywall and then just left it that way). We should be ready to build my daybed in approximately 2012.

And they said that this home improvement stuff was hard!

Well, it appears that another coworker is now expecting a child. That makes 6 pregnancies and 7 babies in the coming 6 months. I’m starting to suspect that our department has been secretly doping us with fertility drugs. I probably should have taken it easy on the free breakfast at our staff meeting this morning

In related news, Kristian is now completely in support of my desire to get a puppy. I suppose that he figures that someone small and cute for me to lavish love and attention on will distract me from all of the squishy toes and sweet-smelling baby heads that I will soon be surrounded by. And, he’s probably right. But, you see, I don’t actually want him to be in support of my puppy wish. It’s so much easier to talk about how I want a puppy and wouldn’t a puppy be great and, oh look, here are 17 adorable puppies on petfinder.com let’s imagine that we adopted them and they became my best friends than it is to actually go out and get a puppy and then worry about actually feeding, sheltering and taking care of it.

What I really need is for Kristian to say “no, we can’t get a puppy, that’s too much responsibility.” Then, I could whine and whine and whine to my heart’s content and never have to worry about pooper scooping.

This is why we now have conversations like this:

Hope: “I want a puppy”

Kristian: “So get a puppy”

Hope: “But they’re so much work. I want a puppy.”

Kristian: “So get a puppy.”

Hope: “But they cost so much money. I want a puppy.”

Kristian: “I haaaaaaate you.”

The thing is, I think that we would be great dog owners. And I do think that it’s a good thing that I’m thinking about all of the downsides and not just saying “Look! Puppy! I bet he’ll love me forever and never bark or nip and he’ll share the litter box with our cats and we’ll all be friends for ever and everything will be easy and we’ll live happily ever after the end because OMG PUPPY SO CUTE!”

Still, it is hard to be the one who says, “I’m not sure if it’s a good idea for us to get a puppy.”

Especially if you’re the one asking for a puppy in the first place!

We are a one department baby boom up in here. I have one coworker who is about to have twins, one coworker with a very pregnant wife, two coworkers with wives who are due in March and another coworker who is also due in March. For you folks playing along at home, that’s six babies in six months. Personally, I will not be drinking the water and will be tripling up on my birth control. 

I am totally excited. I love babies and now I’ll have this whole population of them that I’ll be able to play with and then hand back to their parents when they poop themselves or start crying. 

Now if you need me, I’ll be on my phone with my gynecologist to discuss additional birth control options.

Well, because I still haven’t figured out a good way to process all of my pictures (I need a hell of a lot of hard drive space and a good program for processing RAW files. Anyone have a spare copy of Adobe Lightroom kicking around? Aperture? No? Bueller? Bueller?). So, I don’t have a whole lot to talk about. Why not bore you all with the trivial details that comprise our quest to fix this place up.

The second biggest news is that we hired an electrician to come in and bring our basement up to code. The likelihood of us dying in a horrible, horrible electrical fire has now decreased dramatically. He was a friend of a friend, so we got a pretty good rate. He was a little scared by the mess in our basement. I mean, when an electrician says “woah”  and starts snapping pictures with his camera phone to show his electrician friends…. well, you know that your wiring is “not good.” To put it mildly. We had a lot of knob and tube wiring. That someone had spliced romex into. Without any junction boxes. I’m told that this is bad. Really, really bad.

Yeah, our basement was a giant death trap. We might as well have had a zombie infestation down there. At least then our cats might have taken them out.

Our basement is now up to date. The old outlets that were upstairs have now been ripped out and replaced with modern ones. And we (finally) have a front porch light. We’re living high on the hog up in here with our motion sensing porch light and basement that’s not so likely to kill us. Now we just need to patch up all of the holes in our walls.

The biggest news is that we need to tear out our third floor. As in gut the place. Tear it all out. With shovels. And crowbars. And maybe my bare fists if I get mad enough. Why do we have to tear out our third floor? Because the walls are comprised of crumbling horsehair plaster covered up with something that’s basically glorified cardboard. With lots of holes in it.

Apparently this is a bad thing. Having your walls come tumbling down. Our third floor is a Jericho in the making. 

We could have patched things up and propped things up and maybe used a little duct tape and then crossed our fingers and hoped that the walls stayed up. But, we knew that they were going to have to come down eventually. Why use all that spackle and primer and paint when you know that you’re going to have to rip it out anyways? I love spackle, but it ain’t cheap. Besides, the third floor isn’t insulated at all… which is probably not such a great thing what with the upcoming winter months and rising heating prices and blah blah blah extreme climate change.

It sucks, because it’s going to mean a long ass wait before I actually get to use the space (so much for using my craft room this winter). But, hey, it will be that much nicer in the long run. And I have a nice, long winter of daydreaming about my craft room and mentally decorating it ahead of me. I like mentally decorating. I find it to be a cheap and easy means of (internal) self-expression.

We don’t have the, ummm, resources, to do the whole project at once, so we’ll be spreading it out over the course of the next year or so. We plan to do the demolition in the next couple of weeks. Then, after I’ve worked a few more side jobs, we’ll buy some skylights and put them in (the third floor has exactly two windows. they’re small). Then, we insulate.

After the insulation is done, we seal the space up for the winter and I pretend that we don’t even have a third floor. It’ll be rather hard to do what with the doorway that leads right straight up to it that happens to be located right across from our bedroom. But, I’ll do my best to forget. Eventually, we’ll blue board and plaster but that shit don’t grow on trees. 

If it did grow on trees, you better your sweet ass that we would go hiking a hell of a lot more. 

I already have the colors picked out. And the furniture. And the decorating scheme. And way more details than it’s emotionally healthy to have figured out for a space that we haven’t even started working on.

I may or may not have gotten slightly addicted to HGTV while we had a bunch of time to kill in hotel rooms out west. I think that if Kristian hears the phrases “accent wall” or “updated hardware” one more time, his head just might implode. At least the implosion won’t make a big ol’ mess. I’d hate to ruin the color scheme of my accent walls. 

On a positive note, I put up a bunch of pictures last weekend and our house is really starting to look a lot homier. And we have a few little projects that we can work on while we wait for the resources to make the third floor habitable. I have picked up a few useful tricks after all. Project number one? Patching up all those damn holes in our walls. And putting up some curtains in our bedroom.

I made a list today of all the things that we need to do. It was long list and more than a little overwhelming, but I actually found it comforting to lay it all out there. With the exception of the work on the third floor, most of the work is cosmetic. Cosmetic I can definitely deal with. I’m comforted by the fact that our list included items like “spruce up first floor bathroom” and not things like “jack up foundation” or “replace roof” or “kill the zombies in the basement.” 

If we did have zombies in the basement, I would have to paint them in accent colors.

How tired am I? Let’s put it this way… Kristian was asleep when I got home last night and he was still sleeping when I left for work this morning. And he hasn’t developed a sudden case of narcolepsy. 

I work 11-7 on Mondays. It’s pretty sweet to have a little extra sleep at the beginning of the week and a little bit of extra time to relax. What’s not so sweet is working 8-4 the next day. It starts to feel like you barely left.

It’s also completely my fault that I had to come in early today. It was my choice to schedule something for 4pm today, thus necessitating an early day. Which is why I’m starting to question my own sanity. Ha.

I had jewelry class last night from 8-10pm and then I met up with my Dad to watch the second half of the Red Sox game. I wouldn’t have traded my night for all of the sleep in the world. Not only was my Dad buying (Dad’s make the best drinking buddies, they almost always pick up the tab), we also had a fantastic time watching the game together. I had almost forgotten how much he knows about baseball. It’s a little scary, really. He’ll say something like “they’re going to pitch low and inside and the batter is going to ground into a double play.” And then I’ll laugh at him and say, “we’ll see” and then…. lo and behold…. a low, inside pitch and a ground ball double play. Like I said, it’s a wee bit scary.

He even called the squeeze play last night (the one where Varitek tried to rundown the guy on third base and ended up diving head-first at him and barely got the out). He also spent the rest of the evening bitching about the fact that “If it’s a squeeze play, you have to bunt the damn ball. Grumble. Grumble. Grrrrr.”

My Dad is a Yankees fan.

He hates the Red Sox.

I try not to hold it against him.

Where was I? I have no idea, I’m tired. And getting all rambly. Which I think is my cue to wrap things up.

Remember, the comments are still open on my last entry about merch. Please leave some suggestions or I will have to screw up my sleep-deprived little eyes and cry. You wouldn’t want to make me cry, would you?

*sniff*