Boohoo! We're all alone!

Sadly, the fam just left Pittsburgh. Speaking only for myself, I had a fantastic week. I never cooked, except for apple butter and apple sauce. We indulged in great food from ALL my favorite ethnicity (Mediterranean, Thai, Indian, Italian, Ethiopian...) and I got to show off some of my favorite places in Pittsburgh. But mostly I just got to enjoy being with my family. Nana hemmed some pants for me, we drank some hot tea and laughed at the cat. It just felt like normal time with my family.

Nana's photos got posted to Snapfish, and at some point I'll create an album of the pictures I took too. Then maybe we can talk about all the fantastically fun stuff we did all week. In the meantime, I need to mope around a bit more since I have to go back to cooking AND working next week and no one is hanging out at my house anymore.

Sigh. I leave you with this one happy memory, of dinner at the Church Brewworks.

I’m so freakin’ tech savvy.

I’m sitting here with my laptop downstairs in Jean and Ray’s house connecting wirelessly to the internet through their router. I have configured a Virtual Private Network (VPN) that allows me to logon to my work network and then remote desktop view my computer back at work and check on it’s process in running the simulation that’s cranking on it even as we speak. My phone is connected to a 4G tower nearby and beeps at me whenever I get an e-mail or text message. Soon I will attempt to video conference with my family in Pittsburgh just to say *hi*.

We are living in the FUTURE.

-N

You are jealous

Right this very minute, I am waiting for the arrival of Mom and Nana. Yes, here, to my very own apartment. It feels pretty adult to be receiving guests in your home who aren't college buddies that would have happily crashed on the couch. We are Hosting. They are going to visit me for a WEEK (with Dad showing up at some point too), which means good times are sure to follow.

Our things to do, outside of eating gobs of ethnic foods and showing off the city in fall colors, include: Making some stuff with the half bushel of apples I picked last weekend, hemming some pants, seeing Nana's pictures from China, Skyping with the siblings (or anyone else who wants to get on Skype), cheering Matt at a Mtn Bike race, meeting our friends, showing off my lab and the ceramics studio. We've cleaned up our house and we are totally ready for fun times. I'll try and update with pictures as we go, but it might be ahrd to take a break from all the fun and stuff. You might just have to wait until everyone goes home to hear about how fantastic it was. Or Skype us. Your call.

Name changing and marriage

I obviously should have taken care of this a MILLION years ago, but I finally sent out my passport to get my named changed. Remember when I got married? Yeah- that's how long ago I should have dealt with this. I finally decided when we bought our tickets to Belize, that now would be an appropriate time to make this final upgrade. The passport arrived today, and my favorite bit is that the inside cover has a picture of the moon- which is now the next place I want a visa stamp from. Satisfyingly, this is the last big name change that I am going to worry about. Four years later, I guess I am really committed to this marriage. (I joke!)

I've been listening to a lot of Mumford & Sons this week (love the album), which, being Folk music is all about honorable love and honorable death and pious heartbreak. It puts one in an introspective frame of mind. This one line in particular has really gotten stuck in my head (due in part to the rockin' banjo)...

Love that will not betray you, dismay or enslave you,
It will set you free
Be more like the man you were made to be.
-Sigh No More

While I think we can argue about whether or not I am living the life I was meant to live, it does seem quite plain to me that without Matt around, I'd be living a much suckier version of this life. I'm not sure I would have been brave enough to venture to grad school, let alone so far from home. I surely wouldn't have the time, energy and leverage to pursue the other things I've done since I've been here (ceramics, WISC, teaching...). There would be no really compelling reason for me to leave work before dinner, or to ever come to the conclusion that working more doesn't mean more gets done. All the little emotional dramas of grad school would be the main emotion of my life, which would make them much harder to bear. Most details of my life are quite unlike folk music, I'll give'em the affectionate description of love.

I think I may actually qualify as Handy.

I made so much stuff this weekend that the only way to contain all my productivity is in a list:

1) Decided to fix pretty much everything
2) Disassembled and reassembled the dripping kitchen faucet to learn how to do it.
3) Tried to disassemble the master bathtub faucet
4) Failed
5) Did some internet research
6) Succeeded!
7) Went out to Lowes to buy a whole bunch of replacement parts and a ceiling fan.
8) Jess took a nap
9) Fixed tub.
10) Fixed kitchen sink
11) Hung up a ceiling fan (good arm exercise)
12) Jess woke up from her nap
13) Assembled a rocking chair (for future nursing-of-of-baby)
14) Did some Laundry
15) Replaced some light bulbs
16) Hammered some nails
17) Wrote some music.

That last one doesn’t count as handyman work, but I did accomplish it, so it goes on the list.

You want to *hear* my music? Of course you do. Click here and enjoy with your ears, not with your hands.

Preamble-Vengance on spooky mountain

-N

Why I Like my house....StumpWars and the Final MBR

We had super high tides yesterday and took the opportuinity to finally launch the stumps that had appeared near the seawall and hung around for YEARS. I got the tangle cut in two a couple of years ago and they had moved around a bit but they are now back in circulation. See the Pics.







And we are ready to announce the end of the 14 month long remodel of the master-bathroom. We have a few specks of paint to finish but no more sawdust or morter to mix. See the Pics II.

My least favorite thing about houses

I like my house. It’s a place of safety, of support, of investment in my present and in my future. I want to trust it. I want to believe that it will always be there, solid as a rock, and unchanging.

But inevitably, things break. I hate that.

I’ve always hated that. Even when it wasn’t my house, or when it was just an apartment. If it’s my space, I want it to be solid and safe. When things go wrong in my house it drives me crazy. I remember a few times back in Alaska, even. When I saw that something was going wrong with the house itself it made me really, really nervous. Bugs would get in the house. Not even a lot of them! Just a couple of ants, and I’d start to get worried about bug invasions and walls coming down. Or those drips from the ceiling that we, now, know were the result of really bad insulation in the roof. Or water stains on the ceiling. *Where did they come from?* It puts me on edge.

So now I own my very own house, my very own walls, my very own foundation, and so I have to start worrying about things going wrong in a space that isn’t just my home, but my *property*. And when things go wrong in the house? Rrrrr.

A few weeks ago there was a big tropical storm here in Austin. The winds weren’t that bad, but it rained for about 24 hours straight. Heavy rain the whole time. I heard reports of > 6 inches of rain in a lot of places. And just like I get really tweaked when things go wrong in the house, when things go right? It’s fantastic. Blissfull. 24 hours of rain just bouncing off our new roof. Streaming down our stone walls. Incapable of penetrating, impotent! Behold my mighty house! Capable of keeping me dry. When it rains, I feel good.

Until I discovered the wet carpet.

Arr! Tweaking out instantly. It was the carpet by the TV in the living room. Not just a little wet: the entire corner was pretty moist. I immediately pulled up the rug and set some fans to start drying it off, but the betrayal! This is my house! Why isn’t it working right? It’s broken. And it needs to get FIXED.
Later I went out with a hose and started watering down the outside of the house to see where the water went, and it didn’t take long to find the leak: a big crack between the window and the stone façade that the water was just pouring into. A hole. In *my house*. This will not stand.

I went out, I got some caulk, I got a caulk gun, I did some reading, and I *filled that hole*. And several others beside. And let me tell you something. Fixing that hole? It felt good. I felt accomplished and manly and dad-ish and everything. Problem with the house? My house? I will fix it. And the next time a storm comes by that carpet had better be bone dry or I’m going to go out there and fix it again. Now I know how dad felt when standing on his massive, stone sea wall and watching the waves crash, impotent, against his efforts. It feels good.

The kitchen sink is dripping. You’re on my list, buddy.

-N