So, this morning before work I went to go rent the floor nailer again. Hopefully, I can get a lot done before the rental place closes at noon tomorrow. If not, I'll be keeping it through Tuesday morning (at $35/day). Hopefully I can finish everything but the stairs (not likely, to be honest, given the limited time) and we can commence living in our house - we'll see. Installing the flooring on the stairs will be kind of tricky (and time-consuming), and I'm not even counting the bannister we have yet to install. We'll see how it goes.
Otherwise, D had a tough work week (she doesn't work until this afternoon, so she's still in bed right now), the new car is great, and I painted the dining room. All that's really left to paint is the hallway/living room/one entry wall, and I'm done, but that's waiting until the floors are in at this point (my tarp is pinned down with flooring stuff). Then, it's finish work - trim, a couple doors, etc. And, of course, the nursery. And the laundry room. And the 1/2 bath. Getting the garage organized, buying furniture, rugs, etc. OK, so there's still a lot to do. But all we're really focused on at this point is getting in our bedroom, and back in our bed.
Yesterday I got the bedroom floor all prepped and ready to go (pulled out remaining staples from the carpet, some nails that were left behind, and scraped up a buttload of joint compound). My goal for the day is to finish the bedroom. Basically, I have a row and a half in the hallway before I get to the bedroom, and then I'm in. We'll see how it goes. If I can finish the hallway today as well, then we're in good shape for me to finish the dining room (the only other major room to do) before noon tomorrow (assuming I wake up nice and early). I also have our bedroom closet and two hall closets to floor (the bedroom closet being about 3x the size of the others put together), but that's it (and, of course, the stairs).
There's a "cruiser bike" ride tomorrow (my fixie would be my cruiser) that is basically a pub crawl, but we'll have to see how the flooring goes before we see if I'm up for that. If I can get everything I want to done by noon, then I guess I'm in. Otherwise, I don't think so.
So, on that note, back to work for me! Later!
(Oh, and once I finish the floors, I promise pictures.)
Jesus, it took long enough.
So here's our new car, the Audi Q7--ours is in, as I like to say, Soccer Mom Silver.
It's certainly bigger than what I had imagined, but now that this kid has got me thinking about crash ratings and 3 rows of seats and having room for more than one kid and a ton of stuff, this car did make sense. However, if this were not a company car, it would NOT make sense. :)
I love how it drives, the vision out of it is outstanding, and it has plenty of nice little bells and whistles to make life comfortable. I particularly like the memory seat adjustment, so that if I've been driving and Mark takes over, we can just push a button and the seat will automatically switch to his set specifications. The heated seats will be great in the winter, and I never realized just how cool Sirius radio can be. I'm excited. It's a 3 year lease, so if it's just not working out for us, we can always switch it out before baby number 3 (hopefully) comes along.
We also decided to cut out the hassle of selling our old CRV ourselves and just sold it to the dealer. Certainly didn't get as much as we had hoped, but I'm happy that all of this is just done. I'm starting to get to the point where I'm big enough that I just want to make my life as easy as possible, so finishing out all the car stuff is nice. I'm about a week shy of being 6 months along, and I feel huge.
Which is funny, since Mark and I were at a party last night and more than one friend/mom came up to me and couldn't believe how small I was for being so far along. Just reminds me that the next three months are going to be fairly uncomfortable.
Since there isn't an Audi dealership in Steamboat, we drove to Fort Collins, a town of about 120,000 or so an hour north of Denver. We had a much better experience at this place than at the Audi dealer in Denver, and Fort Collins is a really fun college town (Colorado State is there). On the recommendation of a friend, we stayed at this great B&B called the Edwards House, and much to our pleasure, found out that we were in walking distance of a ton of fun restaurants. Great experience all around. And the last half of the drive from Steamboat to Fort Collins took us through Rocky Mountain National Park, which was just beautiful.
I'll let Mark do the updating on the house. To sum up, it's still a mess and we're still sleeping on the full bed in the guest room. It sucks. We were hoping to do a housewarming party mid-August. It's going to be at least another month.
But all in all, things are well and we've been super busy as always. And I'm getting HUGE!
Congrats, Mikey - you look great.
So this weekend (including Friday afternoon and evening) I probably spent about 30 hours painting. I probably have about 5 left until I'm done.
Wes and his nephew came over yesterday (Tuesday) morning to help install the upstairs floors, but the rental place didn't have the right floor nailer - they ordered one and it should be ready for us to pick up this morning. The only problem is that I took a day off work yesterday to install the floor (or at least get a good start), and today have to work. And I haven't heard from Wes yet. I'll be giving him a call in a little bit to see if/when he's planning on heading over. Anyway, the house may or may not be ready for our first guests (Hutch and Mrs. Hutch), due to arrive "sometime" in the afternoon on Friday.
Will update later.
I'm breathing easily today. I feel like a toxic weight has been lifted from my shoulders. Unbound. I wonder, why could this be?
Sorry, no picture (man, have my posts been getting lazy like that or what?). Anyway.
Work has been a little insane this week. Monday, the hard drive failed in my IBM laptop (not to be confused with my ABN laptop), so I had to send away for a replacement. No problem, right? We got two boxes yesterday marked "IBM Hot Parts" (which I think sounds dirty), popped the new HDD in, put in the bootable disk, and all was well until I tried to install a new XP image on the drive. Long story short, I need to connect to the IBM network to install the operating system (LAME!), and I can't connect. Flipping wonderful, no? So, I'm waiting on some more disks, that I'm certain will not solve my problem. Sigh. I'll probably have to send in the whole machine. How lame is that?
Then Tuesday we had a hard drive fail on one of our servers, and we've had application problems all week as well. Gross.
As for the house, it's time to start ramping up again, and getting paint on the walls and floors installed upstairs (before our first houseguests, the Hutches, get here in a week). We should be mostly done by the time they get here. Then after they arrive, the next steps will be painting and installing our new doors, buying and installing trim (everywhere), and attacking the nursery. Hopefully, this time around the flooring won't be quite as testing as I'll have a helper and don't need to futz with glue. I still expect to be miserably sore afterwards, however. Today/tonight is prep work, I'll probably rent the flooring nailer Saturday.
As for the baby, D and I are discussing our options as far as child rearing go, but we decided to table the conversation until we have floors and are in our proper bedroom.
Phone call. Gotta run!
This is more addictive than it should be - they digitized all the old "At the Movies" Siskel and Ebert (and Roeper and guest bozos) and made them searchable online (but only back to 1985 - all the shows before then were taped over or destroyed).
Anyway, fun to see how they reviewed some old movies.
For those of you who are worried at our e-absence, we've been out of town on vacation. I wanted to get a post up before we left, but was swamped trying to get all my work done before leaving.
Quick bullet-list of our vacation:- Drove from Steamboat to Custer, SD on day 1,
- Saw Mt. Rushmore, then drove to Fargo, ND on day 2,
- Also stopped at Wall Drug and the Mitchell Corn palace on our way through SD. Don't bother with the Corn Palace,
- Did some [maternity clothes] shopping in Fargo before heading to Detroit Lakes, MN on day 3,
- Stayed in "the DL" for about 3 days, before heading to Bismarck, ND to visit Missy and DJ (and their kids, Edy and Betsy),
- Drove to Red Lodge, MT after a couple nights in Bismarck,
- Drove through Yellowstone (it's a Supervolcano, in case you didn't know) on our way to Jackson Hole, WY,
- Ate at the Jackson brewpub (Snake River Brewery) - yum!
- Took the 'scenic' route through Rock Springs, WY (really, no reason to ever bother) back to Steamboat.
All in all, a great trip. Actually, our first real vacation (as in, not wedding-related) since we've been married, which is a little sad. That's one reason we decided to extend it a day and go through Yellowstone to Jackson instead of straight through WY back to Steamboat.
Destroyed misconceptions:- Parts of WY are really pretty,
- (Few) parts of SD are really pretty (think: the extreme SW),
- Parts of ND are really pretty (think: the west, near Teddy Roosevelt National Park,
- Billings, Montana is a real dump. Think: Gary, Indiana (no, really. They have the same 'steel mill mixed with garbage dump' smell).
- Jackson Hole isn't great to visit. It's just gotten way too overdeveloped in the last 15 years. Kind of gross. Great microbrewery, though. Next time we might just camp at the Grand Teton National Park, about 45 minutes to an hour north.
[UPDATE]: Here's a link to a Google Maps version of the route we took.
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