More Thanksgiving

There're still some leftovers. Come on over. Bring your appetite. No, seriously. There are still leftovers.

The Thanksgiving Review

Happy post-Thanksgivingness, everyone! What did you have for din-dins? We had: 

• Roasted chestnuts
• Squash cakes (think latkes only with yellow squash, served with sour cream and salsa)
• Wild rice soup  (with sherry)
• Turkey/gravy
• Stuffing (with toasted pine nuts)
• Cranberry-raisin relish (the leftovers of which I am currently consuming)
• Sweet potato balls (with bourbon)
• Camp Hilary cornbread
• Green bean casserole
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower 
• Pumpkin stuffed with sweet stuffing
• Apple pie (with Cool Whip)
• Pumpkin cheesecake (with cognac) 

To date, the only leftovers finished in this household are the soup and the cornbread. Dan thought he finished the turkey this morning, but tonight I found another container of it. To be fair, we did also finish off the leftover gnocchi from friday night, and the hot and sour soup from wednesday.

I are full.

Something Interesting About My Life

So... I was going to post more often. Really. I meant it. Thing is, there's nothing much to talk about. I can't tell you about the house project I recently finished, because I haven't finished any. I can't tell you about the exciting project at work, because they are a) all proprietary, and b) not terribly exciting. I could tell you about my dinner, as requested by Dearest Uncle Paul... it consisted of ravioli from Costco with a tomato-cream sauce which I did make myself and a glass (or two) of cheap wine. I ate it out of a bowl. A blue one. Later I'm going to run the dishwasher with the bowl in it.

Yeeeeup. That's pretty much it. I put fertilizer on the lawn a couple of weeks ago. That was thrilling, lemmetellya. Last week I bought a new dining room table. It's for the formal dining room, which I might paint sometime next year. Why do I need two places to eat, anyway? So I can have two tables upon which to put piles of unopened mail and papers I should file someday? I eat at the coffee table more often than not, anyway. It's hockey season, after all. But I have a new table, and I'd show you a picture of it, but it's in boxes still.

Ah, posts without pictures are so dull. There has to be a picture around here somewhere...
Ah. Here we go. This is from a recent sunday morning while I was puppysitting. It was chilly that morning... about 45 degrees and rainy... and Karma (left) and Pasha (right) and I had ourselves a good long snuggle in bed, followed by breakfast and some more snuggling in bed, then a walk and some snuggling in the living room while watching football. That's the stuff!

Juli 1, Weeds 0

Gradually... slowly... finally I finished the strip of garden next to the garage. When I moved in, it contained two rather random-looking small trees or large bushes, a big hole, a large leafy plant, and a bunch of weeds. As of this past saturday, it contains two rather random-looking small trees or large bushes, four hibiscus...es... hibisci... um... hibiscus plants, all with different colored blooms (which I may have to wait until spring to show you), and a rather unhappy-looking azalea that was hiding under the leafy plant before I ruthlessly pulled it from the nourishing earth.

I just realized you can't see the azalea in this picture, but that's ok. It probably wants to take some time to freshen up before you see it. But look! MULCH! Landscape fabric and MULCH! Like a growed-up would do...

The hibiscus plants, from left to right, are peach, bright yellow, a color that I can only describe as what you would get if you mixed hot pink and fire engine red, and pale orange (not the same as peach). If the azalea allows and I can find, there might be a white one next year, too.

Sorry

I know. It's been a while. A long while. But the only interesting things that have happened since my last post have been time consuming things. Like the water leak. Oh, yeah. The water line coming into the house came apart. Literally. Two pieces of pipe. Not connected. Pond in Juli's yard. My friend (and for a brief time, till the novelty of running water in my house wore off again, a minor god) Michael is a bit of a plumber, so he said, "Let's take a look." I wasn't sure I should let him get involved in my problem, but aren't other people's projects always more fun than one's own? Of course they are. I would be cruel to deny him a weekend of avoiding his own chores. So we started digging a hole where the water seemed the worst, which was right where the line comes into the house. We got about six inches underground when we discovered a repair job - I use the term loosely. It was a lousy repair job. Really lousy. They had used couplings instead of joints and cement, and one of the pipe ends (they use PVC down here where the ground doesn't feeze) was cut at such an angle that the "lower" end barely touched the coupling. No wonder it came apart when the ground was dry and shifting during our drought!

At this point, I believe, Michael's involvement switched from "casual task avoidance/helping a friend" to "righteous affrontery," that someone could do such a shoddy repair job. But something was not right. The water was shut off at the street, and still the meter spun... and spun... and spun. Turns out that my shut-off vavle was more of a trickle-through valve. We couldn't get the water completely shut off, no matter what we tried. That explained why the former owners had done what they did, but I? I called the city and told them to get their asses out here... I mean, I requested that someone replace the shut-off valve so that we could complete the repair. Two days later, the valve was fixed and my line was repaired. Joy.

I believe that I did promise you some pictures of the recently-painted entryway - the one that took me two weeks to paint, 4-8 hours per day, because of a little issue with latex paint not sticking to the underlying oil paint. Turns out primer didn't even help much. Anyway.












The floor hardly ever looks this clean. Don't worry; I'm still me.
















See... every bit of white is latex over oil, so I had to edge in the grey using, basically, an oversized putty knife to protect the white. I had to wipe it off every two or three lengths. It took forfrigginever. But doesn't it look NICE? It's the only thing in the house that looks the way I planned it.

Right... the Foot

Ok, I guess some of you actually managed not to hear about the burned foot.

I was grilling.

I was in a hurry.

I dumped the coals out of the chimney starter, and almost immediately managed to drop the thing on my foot. It was still just a bit warm.

There are pictures, but I'm not posting them here. For all I know, some of you read this while eating breakfast, and you do not deserve that. They're on my Facebook page (yes, I have one of those blasted things) for those of you whom I have enfrienderated. For the rest of you, I will accept requests for pictures to be e-mailed to you.

Genius is such a strong word...

I are brilliance.

Very busy lately. Home repair left and right. Fixing up things. Adding to them. Taking away from them. Generally betterifying them. Oh yeah, and dropping really hot things on my foot and burning it (I have pictures, but you have to ask for them. I'm not subjecting the general public to them).

Come to think of it, this house has been pretty hard on people in general. Both showers viciously attacked people this weekend. The light in the entryway has also claimed two victims. The porch door is hungry for knuckle.

But back to the brilliance part: Today I replaced the controls on the shower. It had the round aluminum ones with the lil divots to grab onto as you turn the handles. Hard to operate with my feet, and I had been considering my options, but I was getting the hang of it... until I burned my right foot. The left foot is not nearly so agile, and I was hurting for a comfortable shower with dry hair. I got up my gumption and some advice from competent friends, and I got a replacement kit with the kind of controls that have a long round handle on the knob - much more foot friendly. But did I have the skills to accomplish a feat such as this?

Yeeeeeeup. Looks like it.

Oh, I may have lacked a few tools and the necessary muscle to battle 20 years of accumulated lime buildup (thanks Mike!) but durned if I didn't read the instructions (yes, I did) and follow them and pretty much have things turn out as intended. I'll take a picture once I've decided for certain what position all the various knobs need to be in for maximum foot efficiency.

This comes on top of sunday's miraculous achievement: electrical work. On saturday, Jen and Jake installed some outlets in the garage for me, and I learned a few basic moves from them. One of these was the very trick I needed on sunday morning, when I clipped one of the wires to the AC unit while mowing. Durned if I didn't get that fixed, too (with some moral support from Mike; that will teach him to swing by my house for no particular reason). Not only was I flushed with the warm glow of satisfaction, but I saved myself a weekend call-out fee from the local AC repair company. Now THAT is a guesting gift!

More Homeowneriness... or Homeorneriness?

It was a good weekend. I got the rest of the cabinets primed (inside), I got a few things planted in the backyard, I got the grill out for the first time since I moved, I even touched up all those little spots in the bedrooms where the paint didn't go on quite right... but most importantly...

I CLEANED THE OVEN

This might not sound too exciting. Usually it's not. I would even go so far as to say that under normal circumstances I would HOPE that cleaning an oven would be, in fact, quite dull. But the oven was so filthy with that golden-brown-baked-grease-colored stuff that when the oven light was on, literally no light came through the window. I wish I had a "before" picture to show you. It was... bad. I decided last night to go at it with some steel wool. After a combined 5 minutes of scrubbing and 50 minutes of letting it sit with a damp towel over it, about 2/3 of the ickiness had come off. It really wasn't much effort, which made me a bit annoyed that the previous owners hadn't bothered to do even that much before they sold the place. But hey, it looked a lot better. Then I looked at the auto-clean instructions on the oven. Really looked. Read, you might even say. I've never had a self cleaning oven before, so I hadn't paid much attention to that feature, but... you push a button and slide a handle to lock the door... you set the timer... you turn the knobs to "clean" mode... heck, even I can do that!

So I did. With some advice from people who have had such an oven, I left the auto-clean cycle on for about 4 hours (or, as Jake put it, until the house smelled really bad). It got pretty darn warm in the kitchen (next time I will do this in the winter) but nothing caught fire. That's a good sign. I turned it off right before I went to bed, and when I got up this morning, I opened the oven door and saw this...Ok, there was a bit of white residue on the door, but I swiped it with a regular sponge and it was gone. This is when I started wishing I'd taken a before picture, but it hadn't occurred to me that I would end up with an after that justified a comparison photo. See that black bit on the top of the oven frame? It's outside the seal, so it didn't get auto-cleaned. That is what the entire window and most of the door looked like. That color, and that solid. Now I'm even more annoyed: the previous owners had this kind of magic in their grasp, and they couldn't be bothered to run it... ever, apparently. Not even once, right before they put the house on the market?

Well. I had a great time doing it, and I think I shall make this an annual event. In the winter, though, on a day when I'd be running the heater anyway.

Rain. We're getting a lot of it. It started yesterday, about 3.30 pm, while I was at work. I left at 4. I think I managed to drive home smack during the worst of it. Turns out there's less of that drainage stuff here than there is where a lot of you live. Could be because the soil here is pretty much packed clay... just a guess. Anyway. It was dark enough out when I left that I couldn't see the freeway outside my window, which also meant that it was pretty rough seeing where I was going. Luckily everyone (and I actually mean EVERYONE, not everyone except for two idiots) was content to drive home at about 30 mph. This allowed me plenty of time to process information such as "there's water pooling in the middle lane of this freeway," and "the car in front of me just made a 6-ft high spray of water. I bet I'm about to do the same when I hit that puddle."
According to Weatherbug, we got over an inch of rain yesterday (does anyone know a more-accurately reported site for that kind of info?). So far today, we've had just over 2.5". It's not soaking in. Go figure. That little raised area in my backyard? You can see it on the left-hand side of the photo from last week's post... with the birdbath full of spider plants. It's underwater right now. I went outside to clear the drains in the backyard, and the water was up to the bottom of my calves. The curb is underwater, too. You know what that means, don't you?

PUDDLE SPLASHY TIME!

I am not sure why I bothered to put my raincoat on. But my hair stayed dry, at least. You know how I despise having wet hair.
House update: I did indeed buy curtains and curtain rods last weekend, but only about half of them are up. The necessary combinations of rod/curtain were not all available. Today I did another homeownery task: I bought and assembled one of those grey aluminum shelf stands for the garage. NOW it looks like I live here!

Sorry...

I see that it has been 2 months since I posted anything. Ooops. First I don't post because life isn't interesting enough to write about, then I don't post because life is too interesting to leave me time to post. You guys just can't win.

First interesting thing: I bought a house. My very own. Here it is:

Apart from being in Houston, it's pretty nice. And it is south of I-10, so I have really got it made, if I am to believe Sonny Landrith. He's never lied to me before...









The house has a really nice backyard. I just mowed it today for the first time. Here's the yard.





And here's the mower. Post-mowing, of course; it was too embarrassed to let me take a picture of it clean.

My yard comes with a pet hawk. Two, actually. Maybe even three, but so far I have only identified an adult and a juvenile sharp-shinned hawk. Or maybe they're Cooper's hawks. It's hard to tell; see Figure 1. If only they would stand still so I could measure them... They've been feeding very well, and they like to perch in my tree while eating. I have seen or heard them 5 days this week.


Unpacking and fixing things and settling in have been seriously delayed by a rather annoying amount of work that needed doing at... well, at work. But I have managed to do a few homeownery things, like vacuuming the top of the water heater, and hanging a rod in this here closet.


I really only have one room finished to my satisfaction, but it's an important one: the bathroom.

Today was supposed to be a day of accomplishments. I was going to buy curtains, for example, and hang them. That doesn't seem to have happened though. Buying the lawnmower and using it took a lot longer than I planned... possibly because that trip also included "eating at Fadi's," which is an important accomplishment in its own right, and buying dog food (for Mike's dogs; Mike was kind enough to haul the lawnmower home in his Murano - you didn't think I put it in my coupe, did you?). Now it is 5.30, and it is shower time. If I manage to buy curtains after that, I will be sure to let you know. In less than a month, this time.

It's Hockey Season, I Was Busy...

Yeah, I know it's been awhile. Not much interesting was happening. But now I have Interesting News to share.

First news is that my company exhibited at a big trade show again last week. NAPE (the North American Prospect Expo) is a pretty big deal around here. People buy and sell land and offshore oil prospects, equipment, and services for two days. And there's beer, but it's pretty lousy beer. We had a pretty awesome booth. Here's us in the booth.

We had a puzzle that we made of the Gulf of Mexico, and we got to put it together. Sometimes people stopped to help us, but we figured even if no one talked to us the whole show, we had a puzzle to keep us amused. I can't find a picture of it, so you'll have to trust me: it was cool.

The other exciting news is that I made an offer on a house (yes, it's in Houston. Your sympathies are appreciated) which was accepted, and I have a mortgage locked in. It still has to go through inspection, though, so no one's allowed to get too excited (or depressed) until closing day. I'll let you know when that is - don't worry!

What We Had for Dinner Today

Ravioli. We had ravioli. I made the ravioli. I got to use my pasta roller. Wow. It was so much easier than using a rolling pin. I didn't even break a sweat. That was a bonus. The dough didn't shrink on me, either. Bonus bonus! I don't know if that was the roller or the dough (left out the oil my previous recipe called for and used less egg), but either way, I am thoroughly grateful.
There was tomato sauce and creamy pesto sauce, plus bread with roasted garlic, green beans, and salad to go with the ravioli. For dessert there was a concoction of chocolate wafer crumb crust topped with vanilla pudding, berries, and cool whip.

I Are Special

I am all excited. A photo I took at the San Antonio Botanical Garden has been published in something called a "Schmap," which, as best I can tell, is an iPhone-based electronic guidebook for various cities. This is what my picture will look like on an iPhone (do I even know anyone who has an iPhone?).
I am not sure why they wanted to use it. It's not a terribly exciting picture. It's not particularly representative of the SABG. I just took it because I liked that plant, and I thought I might want to use it in landscaping someday, and this way I could go to a nursery and show someone the photo and say, "Sell me some of THIS." I certainly wasn't expecting anyone else to see the picture. But now I am able to say, in a properly pretentious tone, that I am a Published Photographer.
We'll see how long that fun lasts.