reflection.election

it seems ive created quite a quandary for you loyal readers, i assure you it was unintentional. but your little imaginations are going wild try to figure out the 'why' of my last post [ahem! instead of focusing on the problem assigned to you! ahem!], so in order to satiate your curiosities, ill finally [although briefly] sit down and catch you all up on the goings on of our recent history. 

last week.

when i last left you all hanging, we had just mutilated our newly procured appliances, and had made a feeble attempt at restoring the rightful function of our doors. 

post last post... weve gotten a few things accomplished. 

monday after work we went to the mens wearhouse where i was fitted for my tux for kimberly's [sister kimberly, not colorado kimberly] wedding. some recent news on that, i was upgraded from lowly usher to full-fledged groomsmen not long ago, so now i actually get the pleasure of walking my own bride down the processional isle. how exciting. 

tuesday karen had class as usual and i spent the time waiting for her to be done with school updating the photos on the entire blog [you may or may not have noticed this update], watching robocop2 on netflix online, and preparing a delicious meal for us to share when she returned to me. and when we were both finally ready for dinner, oh how delicious it was. turkey tacos - YUM!

wednesday after work we went to this cocktail party/informational gala for a charity event that karen's firm is participating in over the next several months. its a competition called CANstruction [which id never heard of] and its actually a really great cause. any aec firm in cincy [actually this thing is global, but im only speaking locally - oh and for those of you not in "the biz," aec = architecture, engineering, & construction, but i digress...] is eligible to participate if they choose and the task is quite simple, although extremely complex. they procure as many canned food items as they deem necessary and design a sculpture using only said canned foods, a little tape [no glue!], and a lot of physics manipulation that even sir issac is baffled by. they decide a winner and theres some festivities, but in the end all the canned food goes to free-stores for people who cant afford food and thats the real glory. if youre interested in more information check out the official website.

thursday after work, while karen was in class i watched the rest of robocop2 - man i love sci-fi movies that are ahead of their time, lol! - and umm... oh yeah.. i did paperwork for my student loans for hours upon hours... yay for the ability to go to college.... ::shudder:: and never get out of debt afterwards...

friday was really just a break for both of us. right after work we went to the depot and got a few more items for the weekends work excursions then headed home where we had a nice dinner, opened some wine, and watched tv all night. 

now then, i dont remember the exact time frames on everything house related, but heres the house specific update:

i do know that on wednesday i met both a furnace guy and the new plumber out at the house [at different times though, lol] where we got the furnace serviced and repaired and all that business - our furnace is good to go! the plumber came by, took a look at everything, and said hed get back to us with an estimate later that night.

at some point we got the official email estimate from the newest mason and boy it was a beaut, makes me smile just thinking about it. 

i finally contacted a roofer who said hed go have a look at the house and call me. 

and now for the latest:

we officially hired the new mason and have him scheduled to come out this weekend, so by sunday night we'll have us a new wall!

we officially hired the plumber and we're still scheduling when he'll do his thing, but hopefully soon. 

we havent heard back from the roofer... freakin roofers. i blame ike. its all his fault. theyve all got dozens of jobs replacing whole roofs after ikes little mayhem in ohio and no one will return my calls!

last weekend.

saturday we had a successful day. we got kind of a late start to the day. we slept in a little then had breakfast, then karen experimented with making some home-made orange marmalade [yeah... i'll let you know how that one goes in two weeks when its done, lol!] then we had to run errands to the bank and the post office and such. then it was time for a quick lunch before heading out to see about some new prospects from craigslist. this time around we were pursuing a dryer and a dishwasher, however while we were getting cash at the atm we got a call from the dryer guy and it was gone. one down - bummer. but! we did end up driving out into the super-suburbs [and i mean wow! crazy man, the little gated community was actually called the polo-fields if that tells you anything, lol!] and got a dishwasher! and, on the way to get the dishwasher we made a short stop at the local salvation army store and picked up 4 awesome hanging light fixtures for 25 bucks!!! pictures to come later, i promise. [and yes, oh yes, we're up to some modification mischief as usual, hehe]

after picking up the dishwasher we headed to the house where we unloaded and spent the rest of the daylight hours [which wasnt much at this point 3.5 maybe?] installing the rest of the new door hardware, and with the right tools this time around! and boy-howdy! it went so much more smoothly! ;]

sunday we did our usual church + shopping routine, although this week we hit the meijer [its like a walmart and its pronounced meyer, like oscar meyer, and yeah id never heard of it either before i moved here] and the target for some groceries and a few other essentials. after lunch we headed to the house and installed new weather-stripping to the doors and i repaired the window in the front door. by the time daylight was starting to fade we headed home for a lot more fun. we ended up doing our laundry [+ sheets & towels!], had dinner, and then cleaned the entire apartment. ugh, it was a long day. but overall a successful weekend! :]

and now, haha, the reason you guys are all still reading this, lol! [yeah, im probably guilty of stringing you along a little, heh. hey! its my prerogative! im the author! hehehe]

so at some point last week my brother calls me up - hes decided recently that he was going to buy a house, obviously im a great role model, and has been looking at stuff back home in the tx - and has decided he wants to build a house. and... drumrole, he wants me to design it! haha, so since then hes given me all kinds of specifics on the different things he wants and likes and whatnot and karen and i have been brainstorming. so if you havent already guessed, thats the prime reason we're feeling the crunch on deciding the name of this firm and seeing about getting our small business started. ive looked into llc's a little, the next step is definitely the name, lol! especially if we're going to issue drawings for anything, its kind of a must. 

so yeah, now you guys are pretty caught up, lol! its tuesday now and the only real news i have to report for this week is that we voted this morning. it was quite and experience, but it felt great! we got up at 5:15, were at the polling center by 6:15 and we're with the first 50 or so people though the door. it was a much more satisfying experience than my first vote - 2004, sigh... - and being that we're now in ohio, one of those highly publicized "swing states" its cool to know that your vote really counts. unlike in a state like say... the tx, where its already been called who will win the state before you even consider your options. 

alright, thats all ive got. its time for the wife and i to watch some election coverage before hitting the sack to try and recover a little of the sleep we didnt get last night, lol! 

happy election day!

alive.and.well

i know ive been quiet for almost a week now, definitely an oddity as of late. i just wanted to quickly let you all know that karen and i are both "alive and well" to quote my mother-in-law, but that things have just been a little hectic lately and its wearing on us both. i just havent had a chance to sit down and regurgitate all of our adventures just yet. im sure youre all anxiously awaiting my thoughts and embellishments, sitting on pins and needles no doubt, but youll have to wait a little longer im afraid. 

as a final thought i'll only say this:

go vote! for the love of all that is holy, i dont care who you vote for or what you vote for, just go and vote! its one fo the few rights we still have left, its our duty as citizens, and damnit its an oppurtunity! 

and please. please, please, oh please, TRY to be informed when you do so... actually, ill amend my previous statements - go vote, if and only if, youre informed. god knows we dont need a billion more idiots out there voting for something when they have no idea why. blind and ignorant following of any cause or man [and i do mean ANY!] is simply intollerable - please do not let yourself be a victim of it. if you dont know why youre doing something, its better not to do it. 

[these are just for fun, not to push one side or the other! oprah '08?!]

"alive and well"

the.populist

post.script: whats your political philosophy? comment and share! 

[click the link/title for each issue to find out more about it and figure out where you stand]

clumping

well guys and dolls, we've got some catching up to do. we had a long but productive weekend, and with some happy successes along the way. 

when we last left our hero & heroine, they were about to embark on a weekend of scrubbing walls & floors, yard-work, and appliance hunting. also, they'd just had a mason's estimate come back and were waiting on another mason, a roofer (possibly 2) and a new plumber to get into the bidding. so lets see what happened!

friday.

so friday we heard back from the 3rd mason. and wow! we are glad we did. he called me up when he was at the house to make sure he was seeing everything and we discussed the various things i wanted taken care of while he could see them. so just a quick run-down to refresh you guys [& dolls] we've got the brick wall thats in pretty bad shape from water damage from the busted box gutter above it; theres also a chimney above that wall that needs to come down because its falling apart and is no longer being used; theres a second chimney on the back of the house thats in the same situation; and then theres a couple of spots where some bricks are just going bad and need to be replaced; and some various spots that need tuck pointing. okay so ballpark for all that work + materials he says we're looking at about 2-2.5g's... what?! thats amazing! thats a quarter of what the other guys are estimating! so the catch. he cant do it right away, hes booked for the next 2 weeks. bummer - good enough though. so he said hed do a little pricing on materials and get back to us with a written estimate early this week - awesome. he also gave me the name of a roofer he works with and he knows does good work for a fair price, so i tried calling them, but it was already 5 when i got off the phone with the mason - no answer. but overall im hopeful!

after work i discovered that karen had gotten a line on a stove on craigslist and we were going to pick it up. sweet. 50 bucks - you cant beat that. so we drove out to where the stove was... it was a little scary i'll admit. we we're deep in the suburbs and surrounded by "mccain/palin '08" signs in every single yard. it was very frightening, we were skurred. anyway, so we got there and the guy was really nice, showed us the stove, and we loaded it up and headed out. it just so happened [as it often does in deep deep suburbia] that we passed a home depot not far from his place and given that we needed a few things for the weekend's yard work, we stopped off to pick em up.

so after a half an hour, we left home depot [our second home as of late it would seem] with a new trashcan for the yard, a new chainsaw [hell yeah!] some hedge clippers, and a few other smaller things like extension chords and what have you. 

well again as it turns out [just...so...shockingly...] theres a red lobster next to the home depot and i grin at karen mentioning how tasty the cheddar biscuits are. and she stares blankly back at me. huh? im sorry, i dont care who you are, you cannot deny the tastiness of red lobster cheddar biscuits, thats like blasphemy! so i ask her what the deal is and why she isnt eagerly and excitedly agreeing with me - shes never been to red lobster! what kind of island dwelling crazy person did i marry!? totally cut off from the deliciousness of cheddar biscuits. its tragic really. so i decide to end her suffering and make her go to red lobster for dinner and resolve this travesty once and for all. [haha, dramatic much? who me? never.] so we had red lobster for dinner, it had been years since id been, so it was quite delectable, karen was mildly appeased, hardly impressed [ugh, shes such a food-snob! if it doesnt come from the island its just not good enough for her highness, bleh.] but admitted my biscuits were good. [lol!] so after that we were pretty drained, but went home and changed quickly from our work clothes and unloaded everything at the house before calling it a night. 

saturday.

well we got up early and checked craigslist for appliances again and found a fridge for 125 bucks, sweet! it looked fairly new from the picture, and it was certainly well taken care of so we called em up. a half hour later [after a trip to the atm] we arrived at what turned out to be an estate sale and a jolly middle-aged man greeting us on the front porch. long story short here, we got the fridge for 75 bucks [score!] and had to take the doors off of it to get it out of the house. however, somewhere in the midst of everything we managed to lose or forget the center hinge that is pretty much the integral connecting piece of the entire set-up [although we didnt discover this till later that night]. so we took the fridge to the house and got started on our work for the day. 

saturday we spent the entire day in the back yard. i got to use the new chainsaw [and it was quite joyous!] and karen fell in love with the hedge clippers. i have never seen anyone have so much fun with a pair of those things, lol, but she just got into it man. so throughout the day we did mostly cleared out the brush [and obviously fixed that felled tree situation] and cleaned up the yard in general. in the process of doing so we discovered a wealth of large rocks, bricks, and chunks of slate just below the surface of the yard [odd, but cool] and that we had a network of serious roots from some small plants that were growing through our fence [that we seriously could not dig up despite our best efforts. these little buggers are crazy! the plant is like a half an inch diameter through the fence, but the roots are like 3 inches in diameter! insane!] 

also, we have these weird bushes [i guess is what they are] that are clumps of stems that are long and tree-like individually and are just overgrown everywhere trying to get sunlight. well, when i was in denver i saw a grad project [possibly a thesis, not sure] that was about wrapping trees. it made a good argument that wrapping trees didnt hurt them and actually created a habitat for wildlife within the wrapping [like for birds to nest in and the like] that they wouldnt normally have. so this led me to suggest to karen that we wrap these things in tighter clumps to maybe encourage them to grow more vertically, and also to wrap some of the clumps together. well when i mentioned that to her, she loved the idea and told me that she knew something about binding oleanders [i think is the bush she told me about] and eventually the stems will actually grow together into a tree trunk. sweet. so we decided to give it a shot and we wrapped/binded all our bushes/trees while we were clearing out brush and digging up the dead, mostly dead, or somehow intertwined in the fences, plants. 

oh! and i forgot to mention! karen was all ready to go on scrubbing the inside of the house until we realized we dont have any plumbing, lol! kinda hard to clean without water. so we nixed that for the time being. ;]

heres a few before and afters for you on saturdays fun:

sunday.

so sunday morning we did whats become our normal routine:

church followed by a trip to home depot, lol!

church was good, a bit much, but i wont go into that now. home depot is always fun, lol! so upon discovering late saturday night that wed misplaced this hinge, we decided to see if we could get a replacement one at home depot as well as some replacement handles [the ones that came with this thing were just plain ugly with no hope]. also we looked into what it might take to repair or replace the door jambs and door hardware that were partially destroyed at the house right now, although we really liked and wanted to salvage the doors themselves. they were actually in good shape - its just the jambs that were messed up from someone kicking in the door at some point in the past. 

so we did some shopping and actually ran into our new neighbors at home depot which was fun. ive always wanted to run into my neighbors at home depot, haha, i know its silly but its very mayberry and for whatever reason i like the idea of that. although, running into the neighbors just isnt the same without their enormous dog feigning for attention, lol! i dont know what kind of dog this thing is, but its a friendly monster!

so after 'the depot' we went back to the house and got started on our new projects for the day. somehow [lol] i just assumed that installing new door hardware was going to be no big deal. heh, i was wrong. it probably took me 3 or 4 hours to install the first deadbolt having none of the proper equipment, lol! all i had was my drill and my largest bit is a 3/8" so you can imagine it took forever to bore out the 2"+ holes necessary, and to keep them clean for that matter! however, ive gotta say, i did pretty damn well considering. to look at em, youd never have known i didnt have the right equipment :]

so the first deadbolt took forever, but once i figured out some tricks with what tools i did have, the doorknob took like a half an hour, lol! when it was all said and done, it took most of the day, but i got one door mostly finished and all the hardware works properly. [and it only took one re-do on the deadbolt, lol!]

meanwhile, karen had taken on some projects of her own to keep her busy on sunday. while we were at home depot we discovered we were up $h!t creek [so to speak] as far as the fridge hardware was considered, so we were looking to improvise. the big stores dont carry all the little parts [or even the big ones] for fridges, so we decided to look in the general hardware section to see if we could be creative. well we didnt find anything that would work for the hinge [thats a pretty specific part that we were just going to have to re-order from the manufacturer] but we were pretty successful with the handles. as far as we're concerned, handles are handles, whether they be for doors, cabinets, fridges, cars, chairs, whatever. and we were looking to put something cool on our fridge that really spoke to our more fun & eclectic style. i wont spoil the pictures and tell you what we found, but we were very happy with the results! also, when we were looking for the handles we decided we were going to need some spray paint and we got some appliance enamel stuff. this is where karens projects came into play. as we were looking at the spray paint she got an idea for some fun and thats what she spent the day doing. again, pictures to follow - and keep in mind shes not quite done with the appliances yet, so these are just a taste. 

heres the sunday before and afters:

so over-all it was a very successful weekend and we're excited to get out to the house again and see what else we can accomplish!

we miss you all, hope you had a good weekend too!

a.short.one

house.
so for those of you that havent already heard, we didnt actually close today like we were supposed to. there was some issue with the title search taking longer than normal and they werent finished by this morning, so we have to delay in waiting for its completion. other than that, as far as we know, everything is in order and we're ready to close as soon as possible. so keep your fingers crossed that itll be very soon, we're hoping this week for sure.

work.
work is going well. ive got enough going on to keep me busy most of the day and the office is slowly getting used to me being here. its an interesting culture though, the architects/project managers in this office dont naturally or instinctively hand down work to the underlings [which took me a few days and a few conversations to really understand] and instead prefer a lot of the time to do the work themselves that someone in my position would normally do. [what we in the industry refer to as the b!%*&-work, lol] so what that means is that where im used to having a handful of project managers eagerly doting upon me the mundane tasks they feel theyre too busy to do, i now have to circulate the office each morning asking each individual project manager if they think they could find something for me to do today. [which is definitely a lesson in humility - i hate asking for b!%*&-work...] however, after a conversationi had this morning, theres a possibility that i'll be getting to put one of my biggest strengths to use [organization! woohoo!] and help the office by giving their project storage system and drawing standards some much needed attention. more on that as i know more.

karen.
karen is good. shes been enjoying her classes as far as i can tell, and work is... well, work. shes still um, frustrated, with her office environment and the work shes doing is beyond mind-numbingly-dull, but its a job and it pays better than mickey-d's, so she tries to be happy with it. things between us are great, we seem to be adjusting to our living situation and this whole marriage thing better than some half-glass-empties anticipated. ill admit i feel inadequate at times as a provider, we havent yet been able to live solely on my income when little things like truck repairs or me getting laid off pop-up, but she loves my in spite of my faults and hopefully someday soon we'll get there. getting the house should help significantly so we can stop throwing money away on rent and storage each month, although the other obstacles with the house are definitely going to be a financial burden for a little while...

im learning to thank god for obstacles he presents me with. ill keep trusting that theres nothing coming my way that i cant handle, and while its extremely frustrating at times and im never clear on the purpose behind some of these hurdles, im trying to be patient. wisdom, strength, patience. thanks...

family.
everyone in texas seems to be doing better. things are slowly getting cleaned up, everyone has power as far as i know. theres still ridiculous devastation that beyond anything you could possibly imagine, but theyre making it. dad just got back to saudi and hes fine. long trip, and uncomfortable next to a rather large woman all the way to amsterdam, but hes there and safe. other than that, i dont have much new information to report on the family, ive been a little out of the loop for whatever reason.

last weekend.
karen and i mostly just tried to catch up on little things weve been getting too busy to stay on top of. we did laundry, we cleaned the apartment, some shopping, catching up on the daily show and the colbert report, some little repairs around the apartment... on saturday morning we went to a tiling class at homedepot and learned everything we'll need to know to do tiling projects at the house - oh yes bathroom-suite, you are mine! it was actually very fun and informative and if youre interested in learning hands on how to do home improvment type stuff, i definitely recommend going to homedepot things. they usually do them every saturday, check your local on for specifics. saturday evening we went to a little dinner party at a friend of karen's and had a nice time. some home-made pizza, a little wine, a lot of laughs, it was nice. we're hoping to get together with some of the people again to have a debate-party for the next presidential go-around. [and speaking of politics. i wont go into it now, but in the near future im going to post a little rant of my views on the current situation...] the only other thing worth mentioning from this weekend was that karen and i decided we're going to go on a little detox diet [thanks to karen getting some inspiration from claire's blog, lol! thanks claire] starting next weekend. we've done some research and theres a bit of planning we'll need to do before hand so hopefully we can be prepaired by next monday.

well "ya'll," thats all ive got for now.

tune in next time...

[for stew: currently listening to p86-rival factions]