My New Toy

Last week I bought myself a new toy. It's something I've been thinking about getting for a while. Last week I walked into a store, and the front display was this item at more than 50% off. So I had to buy it! Would you like to know what it is? It's...legen... (wait for it... I hope you're not lactose intolerant because it's)..dary. Okay I stole that line from a tv show. But it fits the situation so well. I got an ice cream maker. I already have one, but it's a hand cranked type. It works well; it just takes a while. My new ice cream maker is electric and doesn't take ice or salt. You just freeze the canister for 24 hours, then dump in some ingredients and turn it on. 30 minutes later you've got ice cream!

So far I've only made one batch. It was a mixture of plain homemade yogurt, milk, vanilla, and honey, and it's wonderful. I'm pretty sure my next batch will have to be chocolate. Maybe with cherry pie filling. That sounds good to me. Does anybody have any other suggestions? Sorry the one picture is on its side. I don't know how to rotate it in here.

Sidenote: I saw True Grit today and thought it was wonderful. Besides the really gross parts.

The Nightmare Before (During, and After) Christmas

As most of you know, I had a rough Christmas this year. I won't go into all the details, because I'm sick of thinking about it (and really, the best part of this post is the pictures- yes, there was actual mud slopped around my floor and on the walls; good therapy for a clean freak), but two days before Christmas, I woke up to a wet floor around my bed and a wading pool in what had been my storage room. Over the next four days my family and I vacuumed enough water out of my basement to run my household for weeks (shouldn't I get some sort of discount on my water bill this month for putting more water into the system than I took out?) and kept four fans running constantly to dry out my carpets. The following week, my dad and brother and I jackhammered a hole through my bedroom floor to get under the foundation. Then we (okay, mostly they) dug a 26" deep hole and put in a plastic basin to hold a sump pump. The sump pump is now going strong and my basement is dry once again. I just hope it stays that way until spring when I can reslope my yard and maybe add lawn drains and trenches running to the gutter. In the meantime, I'm doing what I can to keep the water out of my house by shoveling the snow out of my backyard. And, because I guess this wasn't enough fun for one holiday season, I broke my pinky toe yesterday. It hurts like the dickens and is blue and puffy. Sigh...here's to a new year. (And thanks a ton to everybody who's been helping with my house! I appreciate it more than I can say!)

The day I bested Martha Stewart

I haven't had a lot to write about lately. Work, sleep, repeat. That's about it. So instead, I'm going to make an entry that I would have made a few years ago if I'd had a blog back then.

When I worked at Chrysler, they had all sorts of clubs and organizations. And they weren't just dinky little clubs. To put it into context, the Chrysler headquarters building is the second biggest office building in the country, after the Pentagon. There were about 9,000 people working there. So the clubs were a pretty big deal.

Anyway, there was a women's organization that had events every now and then. I wasn't an official member, but I could still go to the events. For one event, Martha Stewart came to speak to the women of Chrysler. The day of the event, a lot of ladies were all a flutter. They were just so excited to see the actual homemaking diva. Everybody was carrying her book around, planning what they would say to her when it was their turn to get an autograph. About an hour before it started, people started trickling into the auditorium where it was happening. They were savings seats for friends and chatting it up waiting for Martha. I had actual work to do that day, so I didn't end up getting there until about five minutes before it started, and by then, the only obvious seats remaining were in the very back.

But, since most women travel in groups, I had the advantage. They were all looking for five or six seats together, but I just needed one. I ended up on the second row, right behind Martha's personal assistant. When Martha came out and started talking, I think she picked me as one of her focus points in the audience. You know how speakers are supposed to pick a few people out of the audience so they can look around and act like they're talking to everybody? That was me.

For the next hour or so, she kept making eye contact with me. A few times, she held the eye contact for a really long time. I turned it into staring contests. She was pretty persistent with her staring, and I caved a few times, but at least twice, I managed to hold the stare longer than she could. And that's how I bested Martha Stewart. Even if she didn't know it was a contest. It was a good thing.

Fail Blog

About a month ago, I bought a barbecue. Over the last few weeks, I've been assembling it, 15-20 minutes at a time, whenever I had a few free minutes. I finally finished it last week and decided to break it in tonight with a hamburger. And I was fairly terrified. After all, this is a large piece of metal, with gas lines and a big tank of gas, that I put together myself. In other words, a bomb, and an unstable one at that. All week, as I've been pumping myself up to take it out on its maiden cookout, the only outcome I've been able to imagine is a sudden fireball taking out my entire neighborhood. But I couldn't very well just let it sit in my garage, brand new forever. So I faced my fears. I wheeled it out to my driveway, checked all the connections, listened for any gas leaks, etc. And then, with all the courage I have within me, I turned the ignition knob and pushed the button. And...nothing happened. At all. I tried again. And again. My barbecue doesn't work. I don't know why. Probably something's not connected right. But I still had my hamburger patties sitting there, waiting to be cooked, so I put them in a pan and cooked them inside. Meantime, I meant to buy hamburger buns yesterday, but I was in a huge hurry at the grocery store and forgot all about them. So I made my own. They were baking nicely and finished just as the meat was done. I took the pan out of the oven and put it on the stove top to cool. There must have been some water on the stove top or something, because a few seconds later there was the sound of an explosion, and my hamburger buns were sitting not in a pan, but in a pile of glass. Sigh.... I cleaned it all up (note: glass takes a long time to cool off, even when it's in tiny pieces all over the kitchen), and ate my dinner (at least the meat tasted good). Then I went for a walk and now I'm going to eat a brownie and ice cream and sulk all night.

Dirt

Last week my parents dropped off a truckload of good topsoil in my backyard. The soil already in my yard is really hard and clayish, and I want to expand my vegetable garden area, so I need this soil. But I didn't have time until last night to start spreading it around to where it needed to be. All day, I was planning on coming home from work and moving dirt. But when I got home, what had once been a tidy 3-foot pile in the corner of my yard was now a much thinner pile covering my driveway and part of the street, with little footprints throughout and a pair of socks lying in the middle of it. I wish I had taken a picture, but my initial thoughts were hardly centered on how funny it was. My first reaction was, in fact, somewhat un-neighborly. Something to the effect of "My yard is not the neighborhood playground! Keep your kids out!" I immediately changed my clothes and went out to start sweeping it up into a nice pile again so I could distribute it. Gradually, all of my neighbors came out and apologized in case their kids had been the culprits, and all the kids came out and blamed the mess on each other. And as I kept sweeping, I got to thinking- it was a big pile of dirt. Few things are as enticing to little kids on a clear summer day as a big pile of dirt. Of course they were going to play in it. And really, it only took about twenty minutes to gather the pile again. And once I was done with that, one of my neighbors came over and helped me shovel it to the garden area. As we got working, the kids all thought it looked fun. Eventually we had two grown-ups and five little kids helping shovel the dirt. Let's just say with that many (little) people, a lot of dirt ended up on the grass rather than the garden. But the lawn needed a dirt refreshment anyway, so no worries.

I'm Online!

Check it out! I'm at my house, and I'm online. I installed the internet myself! Without help! I actually did a computer thing right! Plus, in the last few days, I've figured out how to program my sprinklers, I reset my garage opener so it doesn't open randomly when I'm not home, and I hung curtains! I think I might just be ready to have a house after all. Next task: get a tv signal. I might need help on that one. Specially since the antenna I plan on using is at my parents' house.

The super big news!

I tried to post this yesterday, but the website was having problems. So instead I put in on Facebook, which means most of you already know this. But, for posterity's sake, I still have to blog about it. I have a house! And a much smaller bank account! But a house! After six weeks of the mortgage company asking for one piece of documentation at a time, always promising it would be the last thing they needed, and then one week of them realizing they wrote the loan wrong and had to start over, they finished on Monday. The girl from the title company came to my office yesterday and I spent my lunch time signing papers, and now I'm done! I spent today's lunch calling all the utilities companies and having the accounts switched to my name. It's a wonderful feeling to know I can stop emailing my banker and my realtor every few hours to find out the status of the paperwork. Yeah!! Now the real fun begins, right? I have my own yard to landscape however I want (within the HOA guidelines), I have my own walls to paint however I want, I can hang shelves and pictures wherever I want, etc., etc. This could be fun!