lewis and clark had a journal. you, beth-annie, have a diary.

Thursday, March 31, 2005
Great gobstopping guest stars!
Which of course would be the cue for most of you to tune out. But stupid little things make me just plain giddy sometimes. Like Julie Bowen (Carol on "Ed") guest starring on one of the best shows on TV, "Lost," and several episodes of "Jake in Progress," Josh Randall (Mike on "Ed") having a multi-episode stint on "Scrubs," one of them possibly also with Tom Cavanagh (Ed on "Ed"), and, biggest and bestest, supposedly dead and brilliantly evil spy mama Lena Olin, The Ungettable Get, returning to "Alias" at the end of the season. Never thought it would happen, my friends, but I plan to treasure it while it does, since, you know, it probably never will again.
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Wednesday, March 30, 2005

Beth-Annie pet peeve #168: gratuitous quotage.
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Monday, March 28, 2005
People are WAY too nice...
So we promised that even after we moved two hours away on March 4th, we would stick with our church's bell choir and vocal choir through Easter to make things easier on them during a very busy musical season.  And so yesterday was our last day at our old church, and we really didn't expect much in the way of attention on that front (except from a few key people, anyway), seeing as it's the busiest and most tiring day in the church year -- musically especially (we were there from 6am to 12:30pm).  But despite all that, both groups not only took the time to thank us and say goodbye, but to also present us with cards, balloons, treats, and, completely shockingly, a total of $120 in gift cards to Menards and a Madison restaurant.  I mean, really.  You could have knocked me over with a styrofoam packing peanut.  Plus, our bell choir director and his wife invited us to Easter dinner (as they've done the past few years), and our friends Rich and Naomi offered us a place to sleep the night before so we wouldn't have to leave home at 3:45am.  Methinks I've got a few thank-you cards to write...

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On a completely unrelated note, Annika won her fifth straight tournament -- and the first major of the year -- yesterday, tying the consecutive-wins record Nancy Lopez set in 1978.  She won by a whopping eight strokes and is now 3-for-3 on the season.  Dat is crazy, yo.
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Tuesday, March 22, 2005
HGTV alert...
Of the ten light fixtures that came with our house (on the inside), five of them no longer have their original lights, soon to be six.  The light that had been in the dining room is now in the kitchen (replacing an uglier-than-thou flourescent one), the chandelier we brought from the old house is now in the dining room, we've replaced both vanity fixtures in the bathrooms (they had been the ugly dressing-room-row-of-lights kind), and we found our discontinued previous bedroom ceiling fan online and put it up in our new bedroom.  The $4.95 plain white globe light over the stairs to the second floor is perfectly unobtrusive and perfectly unnoticeable, which is fine but I also find perfectly boring.  I'm of the opinion that inherently boring things like hallways and stairways don't need to be boring, so I decided to replace it with an outdoor lantern-style light that can hang down on a chain from the ceiling so that it will be more visible.  We're not going to switch that one out until we've painted the walls, though -- otherwise it would get too much in the way.

Which brings me to my painting dilemma regarding said stairs:  the problem with stairs is that they cause you to have walls at certain points that are roughly twice as tall as regular walls, and to boot those walls are over a very uneven surface as opposed to a regular flat floor on which you can put a stepladder.  So how do you paint such walls?  I mean, even if you can reach to the top with a roller on a long pole, how do you tape off the ceiling so that you have a nice, neat line where the color starts?  And do you continue with your plan to paint those walls red -- a color that will need at least two coats and make it much more obvious if the line isn't neat -- like you really want to (remember, I like making boring things like stairways as interesting as I can), or do you paint it a lighter color that will only need one coat and wouldn't need to be as neat?

I've decided on basic paint colors for the living room, entryway and front hallway, both bathrooms, and at least part of the dining room and kitchen.  I've bought cheap pillows I'm going to rip apart and use their fabric to recover the dining room chairs, because it was absolutely perfect -- in fact I'm basing the whole room around it -- and I bought eight yards of a lovely, somewhat unique fabric (that perfectly complements the chair fabric) from which I'm going to make curtains and a valance to frame the patio doors -- to which I have also successfully added sheers to somewhat disguise the vertical blinds.

There's so much I want to do, and it's frustrating that I don't have time to do any of it yet since I have to go to work with Josh the whole rest of this week (which means leaving at about 7:30 in the morning and not getting home until after 10pm).  Of course, in a week when I finally have the time to do it, I'll be complaining that there's so much I don't know what to start with.  Oh, you know I will.  ;)
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Monday, March 21, 2005
The good news.
Comments are back!  Woo hoo!

The bad news.
Both of our cars decided to get coolant leaks at about the same time, one of which was actually leaking coolant into the oil, which could have become a VERY serious problem -- serious enough to need to replace the engine -- but it thankfully didn't get to that point.  The cars between them also needed gaskets replaced, belts replaced, a water pump replaced, sparkplugs and ignition wires replaced, and a sensor replaced, and all in all we get to fork over roughly $3000 in car repairs over just a few days.  The good side is that since we've owned them (3 1/2 to 4 years), we've really had to put very little into either of the cars maintenance-wise, despite putting tons of miles on both of them, so I guess it's to be expected.  Also, in getting so many repairs done at once, we saved ourselves a lot of money in labor compared to if they'd been done separately, and also got some things replaced that needed to be before they actually became a problem.  And now we can rest much easier knowing that there just aren't that many things that could go wrong with either of them now for the forseeable future.

The random thing we did.
On Thursday night we went to see the touring production of Thoroughly Modern Millie at the Milwaukee Theatre.  Obviously, it wasn't quite on par with the Broadway production we saw in New York last year, but it was close (and it sure was cheaper).  We've listened to the album so much that we practically know all the songs by heart by now, so it was fun to see them performed live again, but it was even more fun to see some of the other non-musical parts that I had forgotten because they aren't on the CD.

We walked out of the theatre to a picture-perfect snowfall, the kind with lots of huge flakes floating down and that makes the whole world just feel more peaceful.  That was, until we started our drive home.  Luckily we were coming from Milwaukee, not Racine, which meant we could take interstate almost the whole way.  But once we got west of the Milwaukee metro area, the only thing that made driving on the interstate any better than on a two-lane highway was that we didn't have to worry about ramming into oncoming traffic because we didn't know where the lanes were.  The interstate was completely covered in snow, with no lines or lanes to be found.  We drove between 35 and 50mph most of the way home (in a 65mph zone), and it felt like one of the longest not-that-long drives I've ever experienced.
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Monday, March 14, 2005
Snap, crackle, pop.
That's what our house does.  If it's reasonably quiet, and especially if it's at all breezy outside, we just hear these noises that make our house sound like a big ole bowl of Rice Krispies.  I don't know if it's the house settling, the vinyl siding expanding/contracting or just ticking against itself for no reason, or what.  Is this typical for a brand new house?  Will it eventually go away, or is this something we're going to have to live with for twenty years (assuming we're still in this house twenty years from now)?  I need answers, people.

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Last night's FOX premiere of "Kelsey Grammer Presents:  The Sketch Show"  was far funnier in its 22 minutes than "Saturday Night Live" has managed to be all season combined.  We were skeptical, as the commercials didn't make it look particularly good, but I'll give anything with Mary Lynn Rajskub a try.  It reminded me of a more modern "Monty Python" in a way, with lots of really short sketches -- some only a few seconds long -- and a few longer ones, as well as a running gag or two.  I'm hoping subsequent episodes will similarly not disappoint.

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Speaking of funny people, the Sierra Mist rock, paper, scissors commerical with Michael Ian Black, Jim Gaffigan, et al. is a beautiful thing.

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Now, on to the dirty business:  as I'm sure many of you have noticed, we've been experiencing many a hiccup with our changing internet service providers, and anything previously on mred.sytes.net has been affected.  We knew about some problems, but not others until they were brought to our attention (thanks, Alex).  Most notably, our pages have loaded ridiculously slowly or not at all, and comments haven't been showing up.  Now we've switched our web hosting -- you might notice everything is now www.notnothing.net-based, and we would encourage you all to change any links to reflect that (it will forward to the new address, but it's just cleaner not to have to) -- so if anything the pages should actually load faster than they ever have.  Comments are showing up on our home computer, but they aren't for Josh at work, which is our only other judge of whether this is all working unless you can tell me it's working.

So, please, if you see the normal comment links at the bottom of each post, leave me a comment saying it works for you.  If no one leaves me any comments, I'll obviously assume the whole comment thing is still broken for some reason and must be punished.  And tell me also if the pages still load slow.  Bad pages...
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Monday, March 07, 2005
Well, the hard part's done.  Ish.
Even though we were using movers this time (which I highly recommend, especially if you don't have to pay for it yourselves :-P), Josh's dad and Kaly and her boyfriend Paul came up this weekend to help us move and just plain share the experience (stuff like this is always more fun with other prople around).  The movers loaded the truck Friday morning, and we loaded the three cars we had there to the brim with things we either needed immediately at the new house or to clean the old one and everything we didn't want the movers to take, cleaned the house, and left it for good around 5:30.

Saturday morning they unloaded and left us with a dining room and kitchen full of boxes, which for the most part are still there.  We had to go back to Racine yesterday for church stuff (left at 5:40am to get there for bell choir rehearsal at 7:50), and last night finally started moving boxes so we could even get at the kitchen cabinets, cleaning them out (can't put anything away until you vacuum all the construction dust out), and putting a few things away.  I've got a lot more of that ahead of me today.

It only took Josh 2:10 to get to work this morning.  Definitely better than the 2:30 Mapquest predicted.  Tomorrow (and the next day) I go with him, which will greatly slow down our unpacking process, but at least give us four extra hours to spend with each other on those days.

I don't like not having a deadbolt or a peephole.

I don't like having white walls.  First priority after getting everything unpacked will be painting -- especially since pretty much all our window treatments are a white or cream color in anticipation of contrasting with colored walls, so right now not only are the walls white, but the window coverings match and it's all just icky.

I do like having a 2-car attached garage, a refrigerator with water and ice, and an electric stove.

More updates later...
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