mirty and mixty

Well, I had in my head that tomorrow was the second Tuesday of the month and therefore, Show Us Your Books day.  I was all set to write about what I have been reading, and even stayed up late last night trying to finish "Educated" so that I could share my thoughts.  I felt like I was cramming for a final.  

Unfortunately, it turns out tomorrow is actually the third Tuesday, not the second, so, whoops.  Meet you back here in September to talk books!

In other news, and in case anyone is wondering, (no one is wondering) Old Blue passed inspection on round two.  I picked her up and did the drive of shame back home the day she failed due to her front brakes and rotors being completely shot.   

Matt bought new brakes and rotors and headed outside bright and early the next morning to change them.  He had asked me if I had noticed any unusual noises while driving and I said no, but when he went out to change them, he pulled my car into the street and backed it into the driveway. He came back into the kitchen and said "Come outside, I will show you what bad brakes sound like so you know for the future."

He pulled the car forward in the driveway and when he applied the brakes he said, "Do you hear that noise?" as we listened to a sound I can only describe as slow, airy pressure.

"Oh that noise? Yeah," I said, "I've been hearing that for months."

Turns out this was a case of the boy who cried wolf, or the girl who cried strange car noise. 

And the husband who dismissed the complaint until said car failed inspection.

Anyway, Matt changed the brakes and rotors in my car.  And then he mowed the lawn, put some finished touches on a concrete step he poured himself, and then came inside and made a cheesecake from scratch for my mom's birthday dinner.  We had my parents and my uncle for dinner on Saturday night.  We kept it easy and just did cheese steaks (which Matt cooked because he is a SHOWOFF) and we had such a nice time.

I have been working on my mom's present for months and months.  I won't share her age but it rhymes with "mixty" so I thought I would make her a special gift.  I made her a cross stitch, and each stitch represents a day on her life, and the color corresponds to the high temperature that day.  For example, the nineties are red, the eighties are orange, the seventies are peach, etc.  I used the archives on the Weather Underground website to find the temperatures, and worked on a year at a time.  It took me eight months and I've been burning the midnight oil the last few weeks to finish it.  I considered quitting somewhere around 1981, but I stuck with it and I am so glad I did.


I think she loved it.

This past weekend was my birthday and Matt and I went to the beach.  We both left work at lunch on Friday so we were at the beach house by 3:30.  Matt decided to take a bike ride and I headed for the ocean.  I was all by myself in my beach chair with my feet in the sand, reading my book by 4:00 Friday afternoon.  I cannot even tell you the last time I felt so relaxed.  I was so happy I could have cried.



I won't share how old I turned either, but it rhymes with "mirty" and I had some mixed feelings about it if I'm being honest.  But, we went out to dinner on Saturday night and I ordered a pina colada and the waitress carded me.  When she saw my license she was shocked that it was my mirthieth birthday.  Or at least she pretended to be shocked.

 


Either way, she got a good tip.

And I got another jar of Olay Regenerist.

unfortunately this blog post took an unexpected turn

Well, I'm here to report that no car windows have broken this week, but my car Old Blue is currently at the mechanic for her annual inspection and I am about as nervous as I could be.  It's ridiculous really.  I just hope she passes.  I hope they are nice to her.  I parked on a hill so I hope they remember to release the parking brake before driving her into the garage.  I hope they know sometimes the turn signal skips a beat but it always gets back into rhythm after a few seconds.

It's that time of year when all of these moms are talking about dropping their kids off to school and how a little piece of their heart is walking away from them and through those school doors and I'm over here thinking 

(PAUSE.  HOLD PLEASE. THIS IS A TEST OF THE EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM.)

As I was typing the sentence above, my phone rang and it was the mechanic calling to tell me that Old Blue needs front brakes and rotors to pass inspection.  

I called Matt to give him the news.  He wondered aloud when he last changed my brakes.  Since I just so happened to have my blog open, I searched the word "brakes" and found that they were changed in March of 2013 because I had written a blog post about it.

Every cent I've made off of this blog is now worth it.

That would be zero cents.

(throwback photo!)

Anyway.  I dropped the car off after work yesterday.  I had to stop at the grocery store first and bought a few things, including a lemon. It had been a long day on top of a long week and when I got to the self-checkout and it was time to pay for my lemon, I clicked the "unpackaged produce button"  on the self-checkout screen, then the "vegetable" button, and then the "L-N" button. 

I couldn't believe it, but it seemed that they had forgotten to add lemon to the options for L vegetables.  I scrolled and scrolled, and not a lemon to be found.  

There were leeks.  Several varieties of lettuce.  Something called a loquat.

But no lemon.

I stared at the screen for so long that the supervising cashier came over to assist me, and when I told her there was no option for lemon, she said, "That's because you're in the vegetable section.  A lemon is a fruit."

Of course a lemon is a fruit.  I know that.  But here is my proposal for grocery stores far and wide.  Put all produce in the same category.  Just lump it all together.  By the time I get to the self-checkout screen, I usually don't have enough brain power left to remember what produce is a fruit, and what is a vegetable, and that some stores call sweet potatoes yams, and I don't know 47 varieties of onions, I know yellow and red.  I don't know the difference between white and yellow, or what constitutes a sweet onion, or a vidalia, and that a tomato is technically a fruit but is commonly accepted as a vegetable and is therefore in the vegetable category.

Let's get back to basics.

I got myself checked out so it all worked out in the end, and now the only lemon I have to worry about is my car.

Just kidding.  My car isn't a lemon, it's just getting old.  

But with all of these lemons in my life, maybe I should make lemonade as the old saying goes.  I certainly know where to find the sugar in the grocery store.

well nothing is set in stone, and it's all gone out the window

When we moved into this house, our back steps were covered in old, rotting wood.  We removed the wood when we moved in, and underneath were concrete steps that weren't perfect, but were fine.

Earlier this summer Matt noticed that the bottom step was separating from the rest of the stairs, and they were all sloped towards the house which meant that when it rained, water was seeping into the foundation.  We proceeded to have 4372 conversations about what to do about these steps, including many technical details about water flow and slope and the mechanics of stairs and many other things I don't necessarily understand.

All I know is that at one point Matt threw out the idea of removing the whole staircase, and then instead of putting in a new one, creating a "gently rolling hill" out the back door and down to the patio/lawn.  I told my mom that idea and she said, "Did you remind him that he has a mother-in-lawn, and she isn't going to be rolling out the door and down to the patio?"

So, back to the drawing board.

In the end Matt decided to caulk the cracks and just replace the bottom base step.  A few weeks ago he took a sledgehammer to it, and then meticulously built a base for the new bottom step while I said encouraging things like, "Don't you think we should just hire someone?"

You know how people say you never use math in real life?  They've never lived at our house.

Matt dubbed this weekend concrete weekend.  He watched a bunch of YouTube tutorials about how to pour concrete, and then hit Home Depot as it opened on Saturday and came home with a concrete mixer and the last of eighteen eighty pound bags of concrete.  He'd been buying it at little at time so he didn't overload the bed of his truck, because for those of you playing along with the math at home, that's 1440 pounds of concrete.

(I just said to Matt, "How much concrete did the step take? Eighty pounds?")

I knew there were eights involved.

Here's what you need to know about concrete mixing.  It is no easy task.  Especially when it is 85 degrees and 97% humidity and you have no shade, and oh, you've never done it before. 

After a few hours the base was poured.  The concrete mixer had to go back to Home Depot but the concrete needed to be "floated."  I drove the mixer back to HD in Matt's truck while he stayed back and floated.  Matt has an old F-150 and while I do love being up high, it is really large and much heavier than my tiny Ford Focus, which can stop on a dime.  

Especially when you're hauling a concrete mixer in the back.

Anyway I got it there and home and parked in the road because ain't nobody got time to park that big old boat in the driveway.  We were going to grill for dinner but decided at the last minute to go out.  We couldn't decided what restaurant to go to so we settled on my personal favorite, Bertucci's.  I have very sophisticated culinary taste.

As we pulled into the Bertucci's parking lot, I pressed the button to close my window and heard what can only be described as the terrible sound of glass falling and a loud crunch.  We parked and Matt inspected at the window and quickly determined that some sort of internal mechanism was busted.

That's a technical term.

We enjoyed our dinner along with added suspense of whether or not someone was going to steal our car, then drove home with the wind in our hair.

I asked Matt if he wanted to cover the window in plastic overnight but he said no.  I had a terrible coughing fit around 5:00 this morning and went downstairs to get a drink of water.  When I got back to bed Matt asked me if it was raining.  I said no, but I guess he didn't believe me because he peeked out the window, and then I could not believe what he said.  Matt does not curse, ever.  

If he is really, really, REALLY mad he says "rat's patootie."

But what came out of his mouth at 5:00 this morning would make a sailor blush.  He leaped out of bed only to return a minute later and report back that it wasn't raining, it was just condensation on the window.

He watched some more YouTube tutorials and then removed the door panel of his truck, only to discover the window regulator was all knotted.  Or something.  All I know is that it needed a new regulator and now it has one.

This weekend was brought to you by YouTube tutorials.

And math.

august is my birthday month, but i'm only turning 30, not 87

I talk to my friend Rose almost every weekday.  She is a stay at home mom with four kids, three of whom are under age 4, so we pretty much talk for ten or fifteen minutes here and there, and when we do she has to spell half of her words because she always has an audience with miniature, impressionable, and nosy ears.

We talked a few days ago while Rose was on her way to the podiatrist for her first appointment.  I've been to the podiatrist myself a time or twelve (shout-out to my orthotics!) so I told her what to expect and then to keep me posted on what the doctor said.

Rose called me twice yesterday and I missed her calls because I was with my niece and nephew in New Jersey, so I called her back this morning.  We caught up on the last few days and then hung up so I could get back to work and she could pick the kids up from story time.  About fifteen minutes later my phone rang again, and it was Rose.

I answered and she said, "I completely forgot to tell you how my podiatrist appointment went!"

So she filled me in, and then told me she had to go to the store after the appointment to get some new sneakers.  She went to a little local shoe store, and asked the woman working there for some recommendations on sturdy, sensible shoes, and the woman was no help at all!

And then she went to the produce market and put a ton of onions and apples and peppers and potatoes in her cart, and the guy at the checkout counter asked her if she wanted a bag.

OF COURSE SHE WANTED A BAG! IS SHE JUST SUPPOSED TO CARRY ALL OF THAT WITH HER TWO BARE HANDS?

We lamented that customer service just ain't what it used to be and then talked about the recipes she was going to make with all of the onions and peppers.

I told her I have a produce problem of my own, which is the fact that I have an overabundance of zucchini.  I mentioned I planned to make a recipe where you slice the zucchini into very thin strips, but it's tricky to do with a knife, but the vegetable peeler is too thin.  Rose said, "Oh you need one of those WIDE MOUTHED vegetable peelers" and we both burst out laughing.

Because we met when we were 22, we were both starting our new paralegal jobs at the same time and our desks were next to each other.  We were basically babies and knew nothing about anything, but we walked around that courthouse like we had been there for years.  We would also cover for one another in the courtroom periodically so that the other could go reapply her lip gloss.  We were very serious.

About makeup.

And I could never have predicted the day I met Rose, that together we would talk about our boyfriends who became our fiances who became our husbands, and go to each other's bachelorette parties and weddings and kids' birthday parties, and have our own birthday dinners and fall bonfires and "please tell me you can meet for coffee tomorrows" and talk to each other about the most mundane things in life, and also the really hard things that you can only talk to a best friend about.

My 22 year old, perfectly lip glossed self would not have predicted that that seven years later Rose and I would be having a serious conversation about vegetable peelers.

Anyway Rose laughed and said that when she was a little girl, she remembers sitting under her grandmother's kitchen table eavesdropping while her grandmother and her best friend sat at the table and talked.  One day she heard them discussing the best kind of strawberry for a particular recipe, and she vividly remembers saying to herself that she would never get so old that she would have conversations about produce.

And then in the span of 15 minutes, the two of us talked about the podiatrist, poor customer service, zucchini recipes, and vegetable peelers.

And we're only 29.

Imagine what we will talk about at 80.

Whatever it is, I can assure you we will be doing it wearing sturdy, sensible shoes.

the current view out my window is not nearly as beautiful

I took a bunch of photos when I was in Denver last week, so I thought I would put them here because I love to read old posts and look at old photos and I know I'll look back on these in the future. 

If I lived within view of the Rocky Mountains, I would never get anything done because I would always be staring out the window.

Also, my hotel room was directly across from this rooftop bar, which didn't open until the evening.  One afternoon when I got back from my conference I looked across to see a bunch of naked mannequins out there, that the staff then dressed in parkas and winter clothes.  The mannequins stayed out at the bar all night and were gone when I woke up in the morning.

I remain bewildered.

Anyway, on to the photos.