Nervous Butterflies
Until today, I’ve really been pretty proud of myself for not freaking about about the impending bathroom renovation. But for some reason, it really hit me today — we leave tomorrow; by tomorrow afternoon we’ll be doing demolition. I now have some serious butterflies in my stomach. What if we pull down the walls and find serious water damage? What if the plumbing work turns out to be more extensive than we imagined? What is the tub faucet/shower kit doesn’t arrive in time? What if the tub refinishing looks terrible? What if we discover we’re terrible at putting in drywall? That last one would really be shamefull for Joel — he IS French Canadian, after all! 
At least I haven’t completely lost my sense of humor…yet. Anyway, now you know my secret. It’s fine, I’ll admit it — my name is Susan and I’m a Worry-er. It’s okay — I’m in recovery.
So we’re packing the car tonight and leaving in the morning. I’ll try to post an update sometime during the week, but I might not be able to. Bear with me and I’ll share details when we get back…IF we get back… Pray for us.
21 July 2005
Happy Birthday, Elizabeth!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LIZ!
For those of you who don’t know her, Liz is my oldest and dearest friend — we’ve known each other since the good ol’ days of Freeport Middle School (that’s about 20 years!). On this, her 31st birthday, I’d like to honor her by sharing some of our fun/funny/special moments:
- in 6th grade, in addition to our regular nicknames (Lizzie and Qusie) we chose boy names for ourselves and referred to each other by those names — she was Harvey and I was Wilbur
- one time she scared the crap out of me by mailing me a HUGE chunk of her hair — turns out she had just shaved the bottom half and left the top long
- in the middle of the night, we used to pilpher her older sister’s cigarettes and sneak out to smoke them on the beach near her house
- we sang part of Kenny Roger’s “Through the Years” as a duet at our 8th grade graduation (hey, I never said these wouldn’t be corny…)
- she lived 4 hours away during high school – we begged our parents to drive us to meet in the middle so we could still spend the weekend together once in a while
- we used to go to the Clam Festival every year and ride the Zipper together — to this day, she’s the only other person I know who will go on that ride
- we used to play Indigo Girls at top volume in the car and sing along…in parts
We were cheerleaders together, played field hockey together, auditioned for “Oklahoma!” together; hashed out family problems together, mourned relationships together, struggled with college decisions together (whether to go, what to study, whether to stay/transfer/leave); kept in touch through too many moves to count (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Boston, Seattle, Maine, Seattle, etc.). More recently, she was the maid of honor in my wedding in Maine, and I sang in her wedding in Seattle. I look back on my life and I know it would look very different without her in it.
Love you, Liz — hope you have a fabulous birthday!
19 July 2005
It’s all starting…
…to come together. This past weekend, our new refrigerator for the Maine house was delivered!! It’s the most beautiful freezer-on-the-bottom refrigerator/freezer I’ve ever seen! You wouldn’t think this would be such a big deal, but we’ve been using one of those small square refrigerators (like people use in college dorm rooms) for about 10 months now, so we’re pretty excited. We also took two more trips to…wait for it…Lowe’s, of course. The good news here is that we seem to be developing a trend: each trip gets shorter and better than the last! For the first trip, thankfully my brother Thurlow was generously on hand with his new, big, badass truck to help us transport drywall and other long items from the store to home. On the second trip, we were accompanied by my very cool cousin Keri, her very cool husband Matt, and their most adorable daughter Madeline. Thanks to Matt (thank you thank you thank you), we finished buying all the foreseeable plumbing materials needed for the upcoming bathroom renovation. Special thanks also to Keri and Maddie for keeping me out of Joel’s hair for at least a little while anyway…
After Lowe’s we retired to Keri and Matt’s house for lunch, where we were joined by another cool cousin (I have LOTS of cousins, and they’re all way cooler than me), Keri’s brother Rob. We had sandwiches (”yay, sandwiches”), chatted for a good long while, and watched a video of Rob’s recent 17-story bungee jump in Las Vegas. It was a very relaxing afternoon of simple pleasures — the best kind.
Afterwards, we went to Northern Mattress and Furniture, a family-owned, Maine business with unbelievable deals on furniture. Joel and I are thrilled about the living room set we picked out (we chose different lamps than the ones in the picture) — if we didn’t have so much to do in the interim, it would kill me to wait the 6 weeks until delivery!
So there you have it, it was a busy weekend — we got back to Medford at about 10 last night. In four days, we’re heading back up to Maine for 10 days of “vacation” (bathroom renovation). I sincerely hope we don’t kill each other…
18 July 2005
Lowe’s is our 2nd home
This past Sunday, Joel and I made another one of our marathon trips to Lowe’s — apparently this becomes your “favorite” pastime when you buy and begin renovating a 100-year-old house. Several weeks ago we went and bought all the new fixtures for our bathroom renovation — sink, toilet, tile, etc. So on Sunday, we thought we were just going to pick up paint, grout, plumbing stuff — just a few small things. Oh, we were so naive… One full cart of stuff and one major fight in the plumbing aisle later, we were finally done. We bought our medicine cabinet, the ventilation fan, drywall tape, spackle, plumbers putty, grout, grout sealer, 2 toilet ring kits, caulk, liquid nails, paint and paint supplies, and probably a bunch more stuff I’ve blocked from my memory. The good news is that we cut in half the time it takes us to get in and out of the store; the bad news is that we cut it down from 4 hours to just over 2! See what I mean about it being our second home…
P.S. Don’t worry — we kissed and made up later in the paint aisle.
13 July 2005
Crazy for Cockeyed
Sometimes you just need a bit of a diversion — maybe you’re having a really crappy day at work, maybe you’ve had the same commercial jingle stuck in your head for 5 hours, maybe you’ve reached saturation with political news, maybe you just want to “forget about life for a while” (oh man, I just quoted the piano man…it’s the beginning of the end). Anyway, sometimes you just need a bit of a diversion, you just do.
Here’s one of my current favorites: http://www.cockeyed.com/ I especially enjoyed reading about the pranks — I’m not sure this is how I would choose to spend my time, but that’s mostly because I’m probably not creative enough to think of this stuff! The article about all the different ways to spell viagara is also amusing (and depressing).
God bless Rob Cockerham! Enjoy!
07 July 2005
Waterworld
Let me tell you how hard it rained today: it rained so hard that, at the church where I work, the drains around the foundation of the building couldn’t handle the deluge. One of the window wells actually filled up with water — creating a sort of aquarium out of one of the basement windows — and the water was literally POURING into the basement. I’ve never seen anything like it…
On a completely different note: On NRO today, Shannen W. Coffin gives a very concise explanation for just how long of a summer this is going to be…
06 July 2005
Yay, new stuff!
You know your life has become boring when you cap off a holiday weekend by shopping for lighting fixtures.
On Saturday, we had our friends David, Melissa and little Emma over for a cookout — it was exactly the mellow friend-time we needed before the family craziness… Sunday we drove to New Hampshire for the big family shin-dig — Joel’s aunts, uncles, cousins and assorted family friends gathered at Mom and Dad’s house for TONS of food and fireworks. The next morning, the yard looked like a fairground!
We left to go home in the early afternoon with plans to stop at our favorite antique store and an unfinished furniture place — we didn’t find anything to get excited about. Then, on a whim, we decided to just swing through a Home Goods store — we even gave ourselves a time-limit of 30 minutes! Needless to say, we went way over our limit… Joel spotted an arts and crafts chandelier from across the store — the display was the only one left and I wasn’t crazy about it, but Joel REALLY liked it and it was such a good deal…next thing I know, we’re loading it into the back of the car. To make a long story short, after we got it home, Joel took the extension rods out and reassembled it, and now I love it! It’s solid brass and really fits the style of our house — it’s going to look great in our dining room! We also got a cabinet for our bathroom for half the cost of the one we were thinking of ordering from Pottery Barn. Thank goodness for discount stores. Now if we could just find a discount construction firm to build us a retaining wall…
05 July 2005
