new arrivals

... yeah, i know i have babies on the brain, but these are arrivals of a different sort.

Welcome to Cheri and Shannon, who have both recently found me here....both were Bible school friends, and have their own little homes on the net. Check them out through the links on the right.

(and check out Angela's new blog - formerly Renaissance Grrrl, now Jumping Jolly - link is updated)

EDIT:

Kimmy G's blog is now added as well....sorry for the delay, Kimmy!

woo hoo!

So, after 5 years of living without a piano in my abode, i finally have one again! It has been at my parent's place for the entire time, waiting until we had our own home and space to take it.

Yes, i know we've been in our "new" place for almost 2 years now, but it's one of those tasks that you just don't think of scheduling - it's nearly 100 years old, and takes at least three strong men to lift, so it didn't sound like a very exciting way to spend any given Saturday, despite the benefits of having it done.

But now, it is done. And it is safely nestled into what will eventually be my teaching studio at the new place. Mom and dad are having the flooring in their living room replaced, and since they would have had to move it out of the way to do that, they figured they'd just move it out altogether! Thankfully they sprung for the cost of actual piano movers, so my husband's back is still in place.

And now I can make beautiful music in my home again. I've been slightly out of practise in the past number of years...not the best thing for a piano teacher and occasional performer at wedding and church events :)

And i love the little corner it's in. I played a bit last night, and it was divine - even with bare walls, no window coverings (Jessa stood outisde the window and stared at me playing for a long time), and a whole bunch of other items stored in the area (such as furniture from 2 sisters who don't have space for it right now, my sewing cabinet which will eventually find a home in the office, a treadmill and a not-useable weight machine).

Combine dreaming about the potential for that space, and discussing our actual current reno plans with a friend today (finish the bathroom, remodel the room that will become the office, and then redecorate the current office for the baby room), i am pretty excited about renos right now! (I know, this coming 4 posts after my rant about the stress and busyness of the window renos and inconvenience of having a half-ripped apart bathroom....you think i'd learn!)

Friday Night Lite

A few humorous stories from youth last night...

The event was "Battle of the Sexes", and there were about 25 teenagers working together in same-sex teams to accomplish certain tasks such as building a tower out of paper and tape that could withstand a dodge ball barrage, and baking something tasty using no printed recipe and a variety of ingredients which were all in identical unlabeled containers (think flour, salt, sugar, icing sugar, corn starch, baking powder, and baking soda....tons of potential for confusion and disaster!)

So, first of all, one of the girls' teams was baking a cake from a pretty straightforward recipe that one of the girls knew by heart, and everything seemed to be going fine, until the girls were a bit careless identifying their ingredients and ended up using 2 cups of corn starch instead of 2 cups of flour. Yeah. We let them proceed with no intervention, but when the cake had baked for 45 minutes and was still as runny as when they put it into the oven, we brought their group together and broke the news to them.

Then the boys had their chance in the kitchen. They decided on loaded chocolate cookies, and were doing quite well, actually. Other than being a bit short on sugar, and being a bit gummy in texture, they were alright (Boys, for future reference, gummy dough happens from not beating the sugar and butter, and from adding ingredients in the wrong order and kneading the dough with your hands for any length of time, let alone 5+ minutes, yeah.) But the most priceless moment (and I believe this was caught on video) was when the guys were looking for measuring cups. They found a stack of the glass pyrex ones, and were ready to use them to measure the flour, etc. when Keith pipes up "Guys, um, those are the wrong cups. Those are WET ingredient measuring cups, we need DRY ingredient cups". Now if you know Keith, you're laughing already. If you don't, just imagine the squirrel on "Over the Hedge" in human form, with a good dose of Drama Queen thrown in. Yeah. (ok, maybe you had to be there).

After getting the cookies under control, the guys decided to make an icing so they could make oreo-type cookies out of their creation. Yo speaks up and says "Guys, let me crack the eggs for the icing, ok? I want to try two at once, one in each hand!" Again, we just let them do their thing, and thankfully they started with just icing sugar, butter, and milk, and decided they'd wait and see how that tasted before deciding how many eggs to add. And of course, the sugar/butter/milk mix tasted pretty good to these 15-16 year old boys, so they left it at that. Phew. Nothing like a good case of salmonella poisoning to liven up a saturday after youth!

And the piece-de-resistance of the evening. Like any good youth event, the actual activities carried over somewhat into the part of the evening where things get packed up and kids go home. Last night, this applied to the dodge-ball part of the evening making its way into the lobby. Unfortunately, there was a wedding at the church today, and some of the decorations had already been set up in the lobby. Yeah. You can see where this is going.

Skipping some details (you never know who may be reading this who knows someone who knows someone who knows people invovled in the wedding in question....), it was 12:30am, and we had 2 sponsors hunting for glue sticks for the glue gun, Anthony running to our place to get my collection of dried roses, and myself and the guilty party trying to reverse the laws of physics by reconnecting things that had been severed and reconstructing things that were crushed. We did a pretty good job of it, i'd have to say; other than losing a couple inches of height (where the supports snapped), and having the flowers my husband gave me (instead of presumably the flowers the groom had given the bride during their courtship) featured, it was a near replica of the original decoration! And any minor changes were not things that anyone would notice (hopefully).

Two very positive things came from the last incident: A great deal of sponsor team building and bonding occurred, with our new motto being "A sponsor team that kicks together, sticks together" (as in kicks the ball, and has to stick things back together as a result), and i finally got vindication for saving all of the dried roses from our dating relationship (yes, they were fresh when they were given to me :)...Anthony has been teasing me about those for years, as they have followed us from house to house, always tucked back in a corner somewhere "Why do you keep those? Just chuck them! What's the point in hanging on to them?" Well, now I can say they did come in handy! I have no clue what we would have done had I not had those...

gunshy

I know we are under a heavy snowfall/high winds warning, and i know the last time we had one of these, it was a BIG DOOZIE of a storm, but I think this has made people a little gunshy when they hear that type of weather report.

I heard that last night, some activities (i.e., sports games, etc.) were cancelled, and some people were using the weather as a "reason" not to attend other important meetings. I also heard a couple "Well, i may not be in to work tomorrow because of the weather" comments.

Really, folks, yes, there was (and still is) a warning, but look out the window! And put it into perspective - 5 to 10 cm of snow is a typical medium-heavy snowfall for this area. And it was forecasted to be spread over at least 24 hours. So live your life, and if/when it actually starts to snow, then figure things out, cut your activity short, find an alternate place to stay if need be.

Ok, one caveat: I understand that for people living out of city limits, even a bit of snow combined with high winds can create dangerous highway conditions. But for city folk, really. Once in 50 years a blizzard actually cripples the city, and now we jump every time someone says "boo" on the weather network!

(ok, this has come across sounding more cynical and judgmental than i intended...i know there needs to be a consideration of risks, forecasts, and such, but let's also use reason and actually look out the window to check conditions, not just go on what might be coming our way. And for that matter, a quick check on the environment Canada website (radar pictures) yesterday throughout the day showed little/no snow in the immediate vicinity of Saskatoon...)

always ready to benefit from other's paranoias...

Due to a different pregnant lady worrying that exposure to a long period of loud sound would be detrimental to her baby, and the generosity of good friends, Anthony & I have free 2nd row tickets to Colin James tonight. It's his Big Band 3 album tour, and i've heard it will be a great show. Being a fan of blues/jazz/rock music, it should be stellar. And the opening band is a jazz trio from Canada, and from what i've listened to online, they're excellent as well.

Good thing i'm not super familiar with Colin's music, as my sore throat would probably turn quickly to laryngitis if i sang along all evening....

a busy 2 weeks

Well, i think we've made it through the busiest chunk of life for the next while...right now I am just sitting at home (by myself on family day, sigh), waiting for the energuide home evaluation guy to arrive.

Our first assessment was in Fall 2005, and we had about 16 months to do all the upgrades we wanted to get done to make the house more energy efficient. We did the furnace right away that fall, and then made plans to do a few other things, most of which have happened in the past two weeks, along with some other renovations.

The biggest thing we got done was new windows throughout the house (well, except for the one the store forgot to order, the one that hadn't come in yet, and the one that the store ordered the wrong window for, but those are another story altogether). Now, i didn't realize that it would be such a huge ordeal to do the windows, but part of that was due to the rushed timeline. We only had two days' notice that the windows were going in last week, so aside from the rush to rearrange work schedules so that one of us could be here, we also had to pull down all the window coverings and the trim from around the windows so that we were ready for the install.

The install went great, it was a 1 1/2 day process, and the new windows look (and feel) wonderful - we have no more drafts coming in! But changing from single pane aluminum sliders (basically metal on metal with no seal against the wind) to pvc dual pane low-e argon yadda yadda will do that. It is nice not to have a breeze over my head while i try to sleep, let me tell you that.

However, once they were done the work, i wasn't quite prepared for the amount of cleaning I would have to do - EVERYTHING in the house was covered with a fine layer of dust due to the cutting they had to do in the plaster walls in order to get the windows fitting properly. So it was about a 5-6 hour job to wipe down everything to get that dust off, and it still seems that everywhere i look, i need to go wipe again, as the dust is still in the circulation system of the house...yes, i think it's time for a new furnace filter.

Then alongside the window renos, we (meaning Anthony, for the most part) have been ripping apart our upstairs bathroom...it was very dated, with green tub and toilet, and nasty wall tiles, and no shower, so we decided to treat ourselves to a new bathroom with a soaker tub and a shower before this kid arrives. He's been doing a great job, mostly working in the evenings and on weekends when we have been home, and at this point, we are just waiting for the new tub to arrive next week, and still need to pick out the floor tiles, and then the re-assembly can start.

We have had some surprises, though, in dismantling the bathroom, mainly due to the age of the house. First of all, when removing the tiles, the walls were ending up in REALLY bad shape, as they were plaster walls (not gyproc), so we made a decision to put up all new gyproc in the bathroom - it would be impossible to patch the plaster, and really, plaster is not that great in a moist environment anyways. So the walls came down. That's when we discovered that on plaster walls, every corner (vertical, and where the wall meets the ceiling) is reinforced with a wire mesh, so you can't just take down one wall and leave the ceiling intact, as a good six inches of the ceiling is meshed into the top of the wall.

So, the ceiling started coming down. And that is when we discovered that our attic has wood chip insulation. Oooooh, fun! and MESSY. So we have currently left as much of the ceiling intact as possible until we can find a good way take it down without disturbing ALL the insulation...we'll see how that goes. We do have a couple options that contractor friends of ours have suggested, we just need to find the time to do it.

And one of the reasons that's been put on hold is because of the insulation and vapor barrier we found on the outside wall when the tub came out - it was old, first generation fibreglass insulation, and it was charcoal gray. Yup, no pink stuff in this house! And the vapor barrier was not plastic, it was some sort of papery substance - imagine thick, heavy brown packing paper that has some sort of waxy substance coating both sides. So needless to say, that whole wall was stripped down to the outside layer of plywood, and new insulation and vapor barrier went under the new gyproc.

Back to the energuide evaluation - all of this work on the outer wall (which we did not anticipate having to do) had to get done by today so that it would not impact our home efficiency rating for the energuide rebate.

So today, on Saskatchewan's first Family Day stat holiday, i spent the day (alone, tony had to work) putting up the last couple pieces of drywall around the window (the old one, since this is the room for which the salesman forgot to order the new window) and to cover the 6" gap between the ceiling we had not yet torn down and the part that had to come down when the wall was replaced. It went very well, though, and i feel like quite the handywoman!

But i think the guy is here now...gotta go!

I know, i'm a geek.

I have realized something about myself through my new job...

I get a HUGE sense of satisfaction from date stamping papers. I LOVE it!