Halloween on Ice

Thanks to a tip from our friend Amy, Steph recorded the very end of Halloween on Ice last night -- the finale was Nancy Kerrigan skating to "Defying Gravity." Even though Nancy isn't my favorite skater, I have to say that I was impressed. Her program was different from mine (because she's a much better skater than I am, so she has more elements to choose from and also a longer cut to work with), but there was one spot (the "close my eyes and leap" part) where we do the exact same thing, and that was fun to see. It's not very often that I get to see an elite skater do a program to the same music I skate to.

Halloween on Ice will be rebroadcast on Tuesday morning on the Style network.

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Gilmore Girls quote

"If I wanted to play ping-pong, I would kill myself." --Emily Gilmore

50 Things...

Today I found the list I made of 50 things I could do when my roommates moved out. I made this list in early August of 2002.

1. I can park in the garage.
2. I can reach my coffeemaker (without having to move all the crap in front of it).
3. No more cat pee in inappropriate places!
4. [Roommate #2]'s brothers won't be around (really, I do like them, just in small doses, and they have hardly been here at all this summer)
5. No more playing musical cars to rearrange the driveway order so everyone can leave in the morning.
6. Guest room!
7. I can have people over for dinner and have parties.
8. I can always replace the bags in the trash cans so that no one else throws the trash directly in the trash can (and then if it's something messy it gets all over the trash can and is yucky to clean up). Besides, I spill it more often than not when pouring it from the trash can into a bag.
9. I don't have to buy expensive toilet paper because [Roommate #2] has a sensitive butt!
10. I can leave fun and cool soap and stuff in the shower and no one else will use it up. Corollary: I won't run out of shaving cream because [Roommate #1] forgets to buy herself some and uses mine... for six months at a time.
11. I can shower whenever I want.
12. I can talk on the phone whenever I want.
13. I can use the Internet whenever I want.
14. I can cook whenever I want.
15. Fridge space.
16. Freezer space.
17. I can put my fish teapot (really, it's quite cute) on the shelf in the kitchen and no one will decide that it should go in the basement because they don't like looking at it or something.
18. I can use my grandmother's dishes without worrying that someone else will break them.
19. I can have clean counters -- no clutter! Corollary: No sticky spills on the counters from other people not cleaning up stuff that spills.
20. Kitchen cabinet space.
21. I can eat at my kitchen table again without having to move piles of stuff that isn't mine. (I may have my own pile of stuff on the table, but it will be my stuff and I can put it away when it annoys me.)
22. I will always be able to find a pencil or pen when I want one. I can put one on a table or in a drawer and it will still be there when I look for it the next time. Same for a pad of paper.
23. I can do laundry whenever I want.
24. I don't have to fold other people's laundry in order to use the dryer.
25. I can do dishes as often as I want! No more stacks of dirty dishes in the sink!
26. No more icky sponges that smell like mildew because they weren't squeezed out when other people were done using them.
27. No dirty dish towels and laundry at the bottom (or worse, only halfway to the bottom) of the basement steps.
28. I can watch whatever I want on TV.
29. No wet dish towels in the sink. I really don't understand why that happens. They get all gross and yucky. What is so hard about hanging them up?
30. I can talk on the phone anywhere in the house without disturbing anyone or being disturbed.
31. I can watch skating videos in the living room.
32. No one else will reorganize my mail. I *still* haven't found last year's November property tax form.
33. I can buy soap and/or candles without having to hear about it when I get home. (I admit that I have too much soap and too many candles, but I am not five years old and I don't need a lecture on how much soap I have!)
34. No old Band-Aids in the shower. Yuck.
35. I can turn the A/C up so it's not as cold.
36. I will always be able to find a blanket. I leave blankets in the living room when it's cold and they disappear. There are a couple that I haven't seen for
*years.*
37. The futon will be folded up into a couch most of the time. I hate having it folded down for days at a time, but I do like being able to fold it down so that guests can sleep on it.
38. I will be able to see the top of the coffee table because there won't be a lot of clutter on it. I can put a candle there, and books I'm reading, and I will still be able to find them the next day.
39. I can use my new glass coasters without someone else dropping or otherwise breaking them.
40. I can hang stuff I like on the walls.
41. I can put plants in places other than my room. (Olivia [one of the roommates' cats] eats plants.)
42. I can bake stuff whenever I want.
43. My food won't disappear.
44. I can put up my own Christmas tree.
45. (When I find one) I can have my girlfriend over whenever I want.
46. I don't have to be quiet when I get up in the morning.
47. My scrunchies won't disappear (when I want a certain one because it matches the skating dress I'm testing or competing in).
48. I won't forget to shut the downstairs windows when I leave nearly as often as they do.
49. I can park next to the porch when I want to. (If I do that now, I'm in Roommate #2's way somehow.)
50. I can leave the outside lights on when I want to without being griped at.

And now for the furnace...

The furnace isn't working. The igniter seems to be the problem, and I'm currently waiting on a repair person. It's only 62 in the house, but when I got home, the dog was shivering, so I wrapped him up in a down domforter and held him on my lap until he stopped shaking. Poor little guy.

No renter after all

My renter backed out, so I'm back to square one. (However, I'd rather she do it now than three months from now.) This evening I had three appointments to show the house and only one of them showed up.

Overall, I have had an unbelievable number of no-shows during this process. It's more than a little inconvenient to drive over there, make arrangements for someone else to be there with me (my realtor doesn't want me to show the house alone because I might get hacked up and buried in the basement or something), and wait in a nearly empty house. If I were waiting at home, I'd have stuff to do, but my old house is pretty darn boring these days. I don't mind when someone has to call to reschedule, but it's really inconsiderate to just not show up. I never would have done that when looking for a place to rent.

I have a cold

I think it's time to admit that I have a cold. I don't wanna be sick. I have lots to do -- work, house stuff, fun stuff.

Stuff I can get done with a cold: Read e-mail, watch stuff on the DVR, finish reading my book club book, sleep.

Stuff I may not be able to get done with a cold: Work, skating lesson, put a bunch of stuff away.

What the cats said

Huckleberry and Annabelle were lurking near the top of the stairs looking suspicious as I was going into the bathroom to feed Lucy.

So of course I said to them, "Are you two in cahoots?"

Steph, speaking for the cats, chimed in, "We would tell you, but we don't know what a cahoot is."

Trees and branches

Our neighborhood association is paying for the rental of a wood chipper this weekend. Steph offered to help transport tree limbs and branches for people who don't own a truck, and we drove up and down several streets and alleys and picked up about eight truckloads of them. We may do more tomorrow.

A possible renter!

It looks like I might have a renter. She's coming by Monday to sign the lease, and I hope it all goes well. I'm quite relieved and very tired. Today I caulked several windows and doors and also the boards at the bottom of the posts on the porch.

National Coming Out Day

We celebrated National Coming Out Day by eating dinner at English Ivy's, a gay-owned restaurant/pub downtown.

I'm a lesbian, in case you hadn't figured it out by now.

Weekend update

We had a busy but productive weekend. On Saturday, Steph worked on installing edgers around the flowerbeds while I puttered around inside, and we went to my house to show it. On the way, we discovered that the Steak & Shake near my old house was being torn down. (Lisa, it's okay -- the last time I was in there, I overheard some of the employees talking about plans to knock it down and rebuild it. Besides, there's one downtown not too far from our new house.) The prospective tenant didn't show up, so we packed some garage stuff into the Honda and went back home, stopping to take pictures of the destruction of the Steak & Shake. It was supposed to rain, but the weather seemed to be holding, so we decided to go to the Fishers Renaissance Faire, which was great fun. Among other things, we watched a performer juggle knives and then sticks on fire, and we shopped a little and had a good time people-watching. (We also found my wedding dress, which I wrote about earlier.)

Then on Sunday, we showed my house in the afternoon and planted some bulbs in the front flowerbeds. The Steak & Shake was just a pile of rubble when we drove by. It was kind of sad.

eBay

I just listed my first eBay auction. Snow Moon is a BPAL scent that didn't work for me, so I'm selling it. I've been watching other Snow Moon auctions for a while, and this morning I noticed two others that went pretty high, so I decided the time was right. (It's getting colder out, and people don't usually buy winter-themed scents in the middle of summer.) Realisically, I'm just hoping to recoup my costs and maybe end up with enough to buy a bottle of Kindly Moon when it starts showing up on eBay. I missed it when it was up this month, and it sounds great.

I FOUND MY WEDDING DRESS!!!

Steph and I went to the Renaissance Faire in Fishers today. I wasn't looking for my wedding dress, but I found it. Or, rather, I found it in purple and the woman who made it is going to make me one in white.

The underneath part is sleeveless, and it has an overlay of sheer fabric with leaves and vines on it (they will be white). I don't know what the sleeves are called, but they're really big, and the dress has a simple scoop neck and is fitted through the bodice. It has a short train.






I saw one of the sleeves trailing behind a woman taking the dress into the dressing room, so I waited until she came out. She didn't buy the dress, so I tried it on even though I knew it would be too small. I showed it to Steph and suggested that it would be a good wedding dress if it came in white. By the time I went into the dressing room, the woman who made it had told me that she could in fact make it in white and that it probably wouldn't be that small on me after all. I knew as soon as I looked in the mirror that it was The One, and fortunately Steph likes it as much as I do.

When I wear the dress for real, I will not be sporting dark blue underwear (which you can see through the dress in the pictures Steph took when I was trying it on) and tennis shoes.

Degrassi season premiere quote #1

"I'm all about fun. I love fun. In fact, if fun were people, I would be China." --Emma

The sign is out!

I placed the For Rent sign in my yard this afternoon. Anyone want to rent a cute three-bedroom Cape Cod on the east side?

$5-a-bag day at the library sale

We live near the Library Services building where the library book sales are held. There are sales every couple of months, and every six months or so there's a half-price day followed by a $5-a-bag day (presumably so they can clear out a lot of the books that didn't sell). Regular prices are reasonable -- $2 for hardbacks, $1 for trade paperbacks, and 50 cents for mass market paperbacks -- and I've bought my share at those prices, but I'd never managed to make it to a $5-a-bag day... until today.

I purchased two bags of books for $10. 50 books. (And eight cassette tapes 'cause my Honda still has a cassette player but no CD player.) That's twenty cents per book. Not bad. Four books are gifts, three books were overflow from Steph's bag, and nine books are earmarked for half.com. That leaves 34 books for me to read.

I'd better get busy.

Almost ready

I'm hoping to put the For Rent sign out this week. The bathroom is painted, most of the garden overgrowth is cut down, and much of the house is clean.

In other news, Steph and I played a game called Arkham Horror with Mike and Rachel last night. It was amazing and very complicated. Steph and I both felt like we'll never be able to play without Rachel, who's played the game ten or twelve times and is just now beginning to refer to the rulebook a little less. It's a collaborative game, but there's plenty of competition -- it's just between you and the monsters and the gates and the Ancient Ones.

Weekend

Thursday night (not really weekend): Painted my old kitchen. Second coat on walls.

Friday night: Continued painting my old kitchen. First coat on part above cabinets and above other side of counter.

Saturday (all day): Painted old bathroom. (Note: Painting bathroom with lots of edges and stuff to paint around takes 9 hours. And that's just one coat.) Had to paint without overhead light because fixture is failing and had to be taken down to paint underneath because base plate of new fixture is smaller. In bathroom were me, stepstool, ladder, two lights, paint tray, and my dad. Bathroom is not particularly large. I am wearing almost as much paint as the bathroom is. (I dumped the paint cup on my foot at one point.) Kathy finished trim in dining room as well.

Sunday (much of day): Despite upset stomach, finished up second coat on kitchen. Kitchen is DONE!!!!! I took a couple of pictures -- see the Flickr bar on the side. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. The color reminds me a lot of the color of the kitchen at my Aunt Dolores and Uncle Mike's house when I was a kid. Didn't feel well enough to start on second coat in bathroom.

Long weekend update

Over Labor Day weekend, I mostly labored.

On Saturday, my dad came to visit and we worked on my old house. We washed the kitchen walls to prepare them for painting, which took a lot longer than I thought it would, and I painted one kitchen wall and half of another. Kathy painted trim in the dining room. We also spackled and sanded quite a bit in the bathroom and a little in the kitchen, and my dad tried to fix the bathroom light socket that pops and crackles when a bulb is screwed in far enough to light. We also mowed the front yard, and I trimmed the bushes by the road. They look much better.

Sunday was my friend Jan's wedding. Jan is an old co-worker of mine. She married Dan, a guy she met through contra dancing. They had a Quaker wedding. I'd never attended one before, and I really enjoyed it. Everyone sits in silence, and anyone can speak if they feel moved to do so. It was interesting to hear people's memories and good wishes and thoughts on marriage. The reception was held in a historic barn, and Hogeye Navvy played. They used to play at the Aristocrat every Saturday night, and I went to hear them with Jan a few times. There was also some contra dancing, and I danced one dance, which was fun. It was really good to catch up with some old co-workers, too.

On Labor Day, my dad came to visit again. He changed the oil in the Honda, and Steph and I finished painting most of the kitchen while my dad washed the bathroom walls. My co-worker Robin put up the tile from the backsplash that had fallen down; he didn't have to do as much wall reconstruction behind it as I thought he might. My dad and I painted the bathroom ceiling and gave it part of a second coat.

The kitchen still has a few places left to paint, and some of it probably needs a second coat. The bathroom walls need to be painted, and some of the dining room trim needs a second coat. Then I need to clean up in all of those rooms, as well as the living room and part of the basement. It's coming along, but I'm impatient for it to be done.