Can't You Smell That Smell?

Welcome to our renamed blog! We had been talking about renaming it for a while, but the other day we finally got the proper impetus:

I was making dinner and Randy was washing veggies for me to chop. He grabbed something to toss it in the trashcan, and his wedding ring slipped right off his cold, wet finger and into the trash. Oops. After a few minutes of carefully transferring trash from one bag to the other, he triumphantly held up his ring.

"Ah," I said. "It's the stench of discovery!"

It is, natürlich, a Spongebob reference. There's an episode where he loses his Krusty Krab nametag, and he and Patrick have to dig through a dumpster to find it again. Just before they dive in, Spongebob says, "What is that stench?" And Patrick tells him: the stench of discovery. Of course, it turns out to be the stench of discovering that you've just been wearing your shirt backward and your nametag has been there all along, but still.

In other news, it has been coooooold here. The last few days have been in the 20s, and have actually felt quite pleasantly warm. We've also been getting - well, not a lot of snow, but a little bit of snow repeatedly. Just enough to have to repeatedly shovel the driveway, except for yesterday when we got maybe three inches, but the wind was blowing so hard that we ended up with drifts of six to eight inches that we had to shovel away. I think this is probably a much more typical Chicago winter than last year's - it is definitely colder.

We're also taking a ballroom dancing class. So far we've learned to foxtrot and most of the steps for swing - waltzing and the tango are ahead of us still. Even though I was looking forward to the class, I was nervous about how well it was going to go, since I have a notable lack of coordination. I walk into walls, door frames, and furniture; I trip over my own feet and also the air. But I think it's actually gone quite well - we're maybe not the best dancers in the class, but we are far from the worst. The class has been a lot of fun so far.

And, in house news, we finally figured out how to arrange our living room furniture. The people who lived here before obviously didn't use their living room much, and obviously didn't have any idea of how to best arrange the furniture. It is a little tricky because we have one room for our living room and dining room without any obvious demarcation between the two, and while it's certainly not a small room, it's not huge either. So I had been kind of half-heartedly pushing the sofa and loveseat around without ever being inspired by the way it looked.

But I came home from work last Saturday, and Randy had found the perfect arrangement. Somehow it just works now - we never hung out in the living room before, and I kept thinking it was because we still don't have any accessories (we're looking! it just takes time), but now we do hang out there. All he did was rotate everything 90 degrees to the left of where it was in the living room picture here, but now it feels like a place you want to be. Clearly Randy is some kind of heretofore unrecognized interior decorating genius, because I tried every single other configuration - parallel, diagonal, angled toward each other, angled away, whatever. Anyway, it's nice!

Tasty Morsels

* If there was any doubt about us being bona fide home owners, it can now be put to rest. We spent our Friday night at Home Depot and Menards, looking for a new bathroom light fixture and mirror.

* We went to see Children of Men last Tuesday evening, and wound up being the only two people in the theater. That made us wonder if they even bother starting the movie if no one shows up. We decided they must, because someone could always come a little late, and if the movie hadn't started, that would make the next showing start late. Anyway, the movie was very intense, but very good.

* On Friday the temperature hit 40°, the first time we'd been above freezing in two weeks. It was but a brief respite, however. Highs for the next 10 days range from 7 to 25 degrees.

* As you can imagine, people are very excited about the Bears being in the Super Bowl. There's a billboard somewhere in Chicago that we saw once, which said "Baseball will divide Chicago, but the Bears shall unite it."

* The past few weeks I've been working on replacing the old light switches and electrical outlets in our house. I'm very pleased, because not only did I successfully replace two 3-way switches, but I fixed two 3-way switches that had been installed incorrectly! Woo!

* We've been trying a few new recipes lately, with great success. Last week we made pasta with olive pesto, and it was INSANELY GOOD! Wendy got the idea from an event at work, where a restaurant catered the food and brought olive pesto pasta. They said it was their best-seller, and I now believe it.

* We also tried homemade pretzels, which were good. Ditto for a chocolate mint cake we had right after New Years. Also, Wendy used an Amazon gift certificate to buy a Muffin-Top Pan. I had never heard of these before, but I was blown away when she told me about it. Basically they let you just make muffin tops, ala Seinfeld. Today we had chocolate chocolate-chip muffin tops. Very, very tasty.

* Lest you think we gorge ourselves on decadent desserts, we've also been trying some recipes from The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen. I found it on Amazon, and was intrigued because it had over 50 reviews with an average rating of 5 stars. Everyone says that the recipes are great, even for non-vegans, and so far, yeah, we agree. Spaghettini with Walnut-Garlic Sauce and Herbed Scalloped Potatoes, Provencal Style are a few of the tasty dishes we've tried.

Recapping the New Year

Wendy and I made the usual rounds over Christmas, visiting each of our fams for several days, and having a delightful time. Fortunately travel went relatively smoothly for all involved, despite the blizzards in Colorado and storms in Dallas.

In Tulsa, we got a chance to have lunch with our friend George, which was cool. And we also made our annual trip to Bill & Ruth's, a local sandwich shop that has super-tasty 3 cheese and avocado subs. If you're ever in Tulsa, stop by and check 'em out. In Wichita, we got a tour of the new house Wendy's parents are having built. It's rapidly coming together, and Wendy and I are both jealous because it's going to be very nice when it's done!

When we got back home, we were surprised to find the oak trees in our front yard had been trimmed. We had a company come out and give an estimate for it, but we never agreed to have the work actually done. After talking to them, we found they had made an honest mistake, and after a bit of haggling we reached a fair compromise to settle the issue. That's just part of the fun of owning a home, I suppose.

We also said goodbye to the college football season by watching nearly all of the final bowl games. Sadly, OU lost its bowl game to Boise State, 43-42 in overtime. It is, however, being called one of the greatest games of all time. OU fell behind by 18 points in the 3rd quarter, then staged a miraculous comeback, only to see Boise State stage an even more miraculous comeback. The way I look at it, though, is that Boise State ran, quite literally, every trick play in the book, and they still barely managed to pull out a one point win in overtime. At least it was a good game. And now the countdown to next season can start!

And, finally, our blog has been updated to a new version, so you'll notice a few things may look slightly different. We can now label posts, which is super-handy, and the Archive links to the right have been made a bit more useful. And for those of our readers that use RSS feeds, you'll find links on the sidebar to subscribe to posts and to comments. Enjoy!

Back in Blogland

It's been five and a half weeks since our last post. What could possibly have kept us away for so long? Well, here's the answer, in reverse chronological order:

-- We had an A/C guy come by and add more refrigerant. The air is much cooler, now, thankfully.
-- Abby flew back to Kansas. We had a nice time during her visit.
-- We all went for a walk at the McHenry dam one evening. It was very pleasant, except for several swarms of bugs that we had to fight off.
-- We visited the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. There were many cool exhibits ranging from Leonardo da Vinci, to submarine warfare, to slices of body parts, to virtual reality. On our way back we drove along the lovely Lake Shore Drive.
-- We took a trip to the beach at Lake Michigan. It was sunny and hot (mid-90's), but the water was still very cold.
-- Wendy and Abby did lots and lots of shopping.
-- We "trained our brains" every day, by playing Brain Age, a super-fun game for the Nintendo DS Lite.
-- A plumber came by and fixed a leaky toilet.
-- We went for a nice two-mile jaunt at the nearby Chain O' Lakes State Park.
-- We embarked on a sacred pilgrimage to the Holy Land of Suburbia, otherwise known as IKEA. If you've never been to one on the weekend, it's hard to describe how insanely busy it is. Although we didn't buy anything, we did get some good ideas on how to organize our house.
-- We saw the Prairie Home Companion movie. It was very enjoyable.
-- I went to Meijer late Saturday night on June 10th, and at 12:01 AM Sunday, June 11th, I bought a Nintendo DS Lite. It's a new, improved, and slimmer version of the Nintendo DS, and that was the very earliest you could buy it.
-- I searched all the nearby stores for a DS Lite prior to June 11th, after reading that some places accidentally started selling them early. I did manage to find one several days early at Sears Grand, but it rang up as "Do Not Sell" at the cash register. Thus, I waited until June 11th.
-- Abby came to visit us!
-- We had an insulation guy come by and add more insulation. We hardly had any to speak of, but now it's like our house has a nice thick blanket that keeps all the cool air in.
-- We unpacked a lot, but there are still plenty of half-empty boxes lying around.
-- We spent almost all of Memorial Day Weekend cleaning the townhouse we rented the past year.
-- We moved!
-- I got sick.
-- We packed and packed and packed. And packed.
-- Wendy got sick.

Photo Extravaganza

Well, we've been keeping busy the past few weeks with cleaning the house, painting the family room, mowing the lawn, and getting all of our utilities and services switched over. I'm fairly certain I've been to Home Depot more times the past two weeks than the past ten years combined. Life is different when you're a homeowner.

Wendy is currently in Kansas, attending her sister's graduation. Since she left, the weather has turned cold and rainy -- we've gotten just over 2 inches of rain in recent days -- and the forecast is calling for even more.

So, to pass the time on a rainy weekend in May, here are photos of our new house:

The Whole Thing (front)

Lots o' grass to mow

A pond in the distance

Ye Ol' Dining Room

A mighty white kitchen

Family room, pre-painting

Family room, post-painting

"Clean me!" cries the deck

El Backyard Gazebo

The Whole Thing (back)

Purple and White Flowery Things

Up close

And personal


Our first visitor

We have a house!!

The Girl's A Super Freak

If you wake up at 6:41 a.m. Sunday and your immediate reaction is a sense of almost-unbelievable relief at having been able to sleep that late, followed by the thought, "Wow, seven hours of sleep in a row," that is probably a pretty good indication that you have not been sleeping all that well. Friday (and closing) can't come soon enough for either of us. I think we're both still slightly worried that everything will somehow find a way to fall apart before we actually manage to take possession of the house. And I know we're both more than slightly worried that the house itself will somehow find a way to fall apart right after we actually manage to take possession. Right now it feels like the best we can do is cross our fingers and hope desperately that we haven't made some kind of terrible mistake, while still secretly suspecting that we really, really have.

In other, less freaking-out, news, my mom was able to come for a visit this past weekend on her way back from a business trip in Washington, D.C. It was great to see her and it was nice to spend time together, even though we didn't have a whole lot of it, since she arrived Friday evening and had to leave Sunday morning. We were able to show her the house Saturday morning, and she and I spent the afternoon looking around at house-y stuff (fabric and curtains and sheets and rugs and so on), but we didn't actually buy anything because I'm too superstitious to think it's a good idea to buy accessories for something we don't yet own.

I guess the take-away message of this post is that buying a house turns me into a neurotic mess. With luck, we may someday have something actually coherent and non-house related to say again. But definitely not until after Friday. In the meantime, I think I have to go freak out some more.

Mega-Post!

Well, there's been a lot going on recently, and it's high time we filled everyone in with the details. This is my take on the past month and a half, see below for Wendy's take. And be warned that this is a very lengthy post, with many tangents and side trips.

We started looking for a house in earnest around mid to late February. We're not always the quickest decision makers, especially when it comes to major decisions like buying a house, but thankfully the deadline for notifying our landlords that we were moving out loomed large enough on the horizon that we finally scrambled into gear. So, we got in touch with a realtor that we met during our move here from Colorado and began scouring the internet mercilessly, looking for house listings and getting an idea of what was available and what the price ranges were. It didn't take long for illinoisproperty.com, zillow.com, and maps.google.com to become our most frequently visited sites.

Then we began driving all around the neighboring towns (McHenry, Wonder Lake, Woodstock, Crystal Lake, and Island Lake) to get a feel for what they were like. We put a lot of miles on the car during this time, and at one point we got to watch the odometer roll over the 100,000 mile mark (but don't worry, we still kept an eye on the road).

One day during this "exploring the area" phase, we decided to meet for lunch and drive around a neighborhood in Island Lake. It turned out to be a nice neighborhood, and we decided we were interested in one of the houses for sale in it. On the way back we stopped at a gas station to buy some drinks, and as I got back in the car, I heard the unmistakable sound of a camera taking a picture. It took me a minute to realize it was the camera phone in my pocket. "Oh," I said to Wendy, "I think I just took a picture of my pants." So I opened up the cell phone and discovered, that, in fact, I had taken 26 pictures of my pants! The camera's entire memory was full of dark blurry pictures of my pocket, which amused us both. Apparently, I just like pants.

And while we're talking about pictures of pants, it seems only reasonable to segue into pictures of dogs. Coton de Tulears, to be exact. Unfortunately, though, this is a somewhat sad story. As Wendy and I were heading out one Sunday afternoon to drive around neighborhoods in nearby Woodstock, we saw a small white dog running around the middle of the road, holding up traffic in front of us. After a moment the dog got safely to the side of the road, and we all went on our way. A couple of days later, though, lost dog signs were up in the vicinity and an article appeared in the local paper. Apparently someone pulled over, put the dog in their car, and drove away. As the days passed, we kept exploring more neighborhoods, and we started noticing signs everywhere with a picture of the missing dog. People were even handing out fliers at the nearest major intersection. There's still no news yet, but there is a reward being offered, and there are now large signs that I see everyday saying "We can't hurt anymore. Please let Star come home, no questions asked". Hopefully Star will be safely returned. We'll keep you updated.

Getting back to houses, we then started looking at the insides of them with our realtor. After three rounds (the interested ones, the maybes, and the it'll-take-some-fixing-up options) we hadn't found any that seemed right. Actually, what we did find is that none of them felt right at the time, but as we thought about some of them more, they became more appealing. Every single time, though, right when we decided to take another look, the house would go under contract. Frustrated and stressed, we knew we had exhausted all the options on the market at the time, and now we had to sit and wait for something new to come up.

Happily, it didn't take long. A listing appeared one Monday morning that looked promising, so we met during lunch and drove by it (no pants-pictures this time). We liked the neighborhood (it's not that far from where we are now), so we set up an appointment to view it that evening. The inside of the house turned out to be nice, and we both knew it was at the very top of our list. So, after sleeping on it, and taking another look at it the next day, we made an offer! They accepted, and we have since been subject to a whirlwind of inspectors, mortgage brokers, and attorneys.

And speaking of inspectors, it's time to talk about ladders. Specifically, the Little Giant. If you haven't seen the infomercial, the Little Giant is 24 ladders in one compact, easy-to-use design! It actually looks like it could be really useful, and I mention it here because our inspector had one. Being first-time home buyers, there are a lot of things we don't have that we'll need to buy, with one of them being a ladder. And seeing that a professional home inspector uses the Little Giant may have convinced me to get one. Incidentally, Wendy and I smiled when we saw the inspector using a Little Giant. Sometime last year, after seeing the infomercial, Wendy was telling me about it and referred to it as "The Mighty Dwarf" when she couldn't remember the real name. The Mighty Dwarf is such an absurd name for a ladder that it stuck.

There are several other things that have been going on recently not related to houses. One of them is the beginning of spring! Yep, we have officially made it through our first Chicago winter, and the general consensus among the natives is that it was a very mild one. I can say, though, that it got much colder here than it did in Colorado. The snowfall seemed to be about the same, but it wasn't nearly as windy here as I thought it would be.

And not only is it the spring season, but it's also the tax season as well. For the first time, we took our taxes to a tax preparer, and wow, it was incredibly easy! The entire process took about an hour, the people were nice (it was interesting to see that most of the preparers were older women), and they even offered us homemade cookies while we waited! It was a bit expensive, since we had income from two states, but it was totally worth it, and I have a feeling we'll be doing it again next year.

As Wendy mentioned below, we became trained weather spotters! We went to a 2 hour presentation on weather spotting and learned all about things like shelf clouds, scuds, and gustnados. It also covered the formation of severe storms, what to look for, the best position to be in when watching a storm, and what type of information to provide when reporting severe weather. It was cool! Oh, and also they had a picture of one of the two known photographs of a tornado in McHenry county. So they're definitely not as common here as they are in Oklahoma and Kansas, but Illinois has definitely had severe tornados in the past.

And finally, a couple of Friday evenings ago Wendy and I met our good friend Sir Austin of Tahlequah in downtown Chicago. He was attending a law conference and had some free time, so we took a train down and met him. It was a milestone for Wendy and I in that we took our first cab ride together. We had planned to eat at Pizzeria Uno's, but 7 o'clock on a Friday night does not make for short lines at classic Chicago restaurants. So we went to California Pizza Kitchen instead (no waiting!), and then spent the rest of the evening chatting at a nearby Borders. By the time we got back on a train to head home, we'd taken a total of four taxis, so we feel fairly confident that we can handle it now. It was cool to see Austin again and we both enjoyed hanging out and catching up with him.

The Details, Part 1

So, if you are young, and looking for a house, there is one question you should be prepared to answer repeatedly. Your real estate agent will ask you. ("Are you thinking of starting a family?") Your inspector will ask you. ("Going to start a family next?") Your mortgage broker will, too. ("And are there children in your future?") Coworkers. Friends. The woman who cuts your hair. There is no one who won't ask you this. "Well, we'll see!" has been our standard response - consider this a public service announcement so that you can all be prepared with a politely vague answer of your own. (Unless, of course, you have a politely specific answer you would prefer to use.)

Now that we've found a house, though, everything has been happening so quickly that there's really not much time for idle questions anymore. I don't think I realized quite how speedily everything was going to happen - we got the listing for the house on Monday morning, drove by and liked it during lunch, and saw it after work Monday evening. Tuesday, we went back for a second look during lunch and made an offer, and we had a verbal agreement before we went to bed that night. By dinnertime Wednesday, we had a signed contract. Since then, we've also applied (and been approved) for a mortgage, had a home inspection ("solid as a rock," according to our inspector), a radon test (well within normal levels), and requested that the sellers fix a few things from the inspection report. It's felt like more, honestly. From now until closing (four weeks from today), though, apparently we pretty much just wait. And presumably pack.

But wait! There's more! Since we last managed to update:

- We've ridden the train down to Chicago to see Austin, who was in town for a law journal conference. We had a really nice time eating dinner and hanging out, and it was great to get to visit with him.

- I've managed to read most of The Count of Monte Cristo - I'm somewhere around the 950-page mark (which leaves a mere 300 or so to go), and the Count really is remarkably Batman-esque. I'm enjoying it.

- I am now a trained weather spotter! The National Weather Service held training at my college last night, and since I was working anyway, I sat in. Randy came, too - they will be mailing us official weather spotter certificates.

- We have been witnesses to a dognapping! I think Randy is writing about this in greater detail, but let me just mention that the missing dog is a small, white fluffy dog. The people whose house we are buying have a small, white fluffy dog. Can this be coincidence, or are they moving because they need to get out of town, quick? (Actually, I'm pretty sure that it can be a coincidence, and I'm very sorry for the people whose dog is missing.)

- Spring has, so to speak, sprung. Or it has at least begun to - this is a later spring than I'm used to, but the days are finally beginning to noticeably lengthen and it was warm enough yesterday to open the windows for a while.

I can hear Randy writing the rough equivalent of a novel for his post, so maybe I'll just stop here. I expect that between the two of us, you will be more than sufficiently filled in on everything!

A Very, Very, Very Fine House

We have a house! Or at least we have a contract, a mortgage approval, a homeowner's insurance quote, and an inspection report. We also have a fair amount of abject terror, but apparently that is all very normal and only to be expected. We'll each write our own post about everything in the next few days, so you can get all the details. Our closing is set for April 28; we'll keep you updated until then! (We do have pictures but are not planning on posting any just yet - if you'd like to see them, please feel free to e-mail us and we'll be happy to share them that way.)

Also, this is the one year anniversary of our blog. Happy Birthday to us, and thanks for sticking around!

And now for something completely different

On Monday of this week, the high was 55° and the weather was gorgeous. Today, the high was 4. Wind chills last night hit -35. Needless to say, that's really cold.

In the past, January and February have always seemed like the dreariest months of the year, and the kind of weather we're having today only serves to bolster that. But one particular sign has been very encouraging over the past few weeks: the days are getting longer, and there's now some daylight left when I'm driving home from work. Living in the northern parts of the country definitely makes you notice, and appreciate, the amount of sunlight that you get.

While we were making dinner this evening, I started to tell Wendy about a Rolling Stones song I heard recently that I'd never heard before, but really liked. She stopped, looked up, and started singing But don’t play with me, ’cause you’re playing with fire, which was exactly the song I was about to describe to her. It turns out that one morning earlier this week we were both driving to work at the same time, listening to the same radio station, heard the same song, which neither of us had heard before, and both really liked it. That cracked us up. As you can probably guess, the song is called Play With Fire.

In other news, we're looking into buying a house in the coming months! Housing prices in this part of Illinois are still fairly expensive since we're close to Chicago, but it's not quite as expensive as the Boulder area in Colorado.

And, finally, I finished reading The Count of Monte Cristo several nights ago. It was incredibly good, and I found it interesting to note just how much the Count is like a 19th century Batman (or more correctly that Batman is a 20th century Count): Tragedy befalls both of them in their youth, they disappear into the Orient where they develop their skills, they re-emerge into society incredibly wealthy and mysterious, they both have hidden caves, both are masters of disguise, some people think they're vampires, and, most importantly, they both have an unquenchable thirst for vengeance. Despite the similarities, though, I would venture to suggest that both characters are unique and unforgettable. Bravo Messieurs Dumas and Kane, on jobs well done!