Just one girl trying to not to drop anything too important...

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Goodness and Light


I love photos of my kids having fun. Fun that doesn't involve sharp knives, electrical outlets, Sharpie markers or scissors. I also love the outbuilding. So happy kids on the bed out there is pretty much as good as it gets. Although those same kids NAPPING on that bed would be right up there.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Noggin, the Walla Walla Sweet

We're growing Walla Wallas this year in the garden. They are a yummy onion, and can get rather large. This particular specimen showed unusual promise - so much that we were tempted to enter it in the Clark County Fair. They have a category for "largest onion," but what with school and kids and kitchens, we just couldn't find a way to get over to the fairgrounds to enter it at the scheduled time. So, we left it in the garden. When we went to the fair, we made sure to see what the largest onion (not counting ours) looked like. I'm not lying - it looked like someone had gone to Freddie's, trolled the produce section, and grabbed any old onion. Sure, it was big like a sweet onion compared to say, a shallot. But, it was just an onion. Our onion was as big as a human head.

So, the other day, I left the children playing for five minutes and the next thing I knew, they had gone in the garden and yanked out at least half of our onions, including the Pride of Brush Prairie that you see above. So, when life gives you onions, what's a girl to do? The options are limited, so we named it Noggin and took some pictures. We haven't figured how we want to use it - I'm voting for cooking it up in some sauce and enjoying little Noggin bits every time we eat spaghetti for the next year.

Gone, Gone, Gone

Some sunny day, baby


When everything seems okay, baby


You'll wake up and find that you're alone


'Cause I'll be gone.


Gone, gone, gone - really gone...


Gone, gone, gone, cause you done me wrong...

Monday, August 24, 2009

Before

We are now 12 days into our remodel, and I'm looking at these before pictures vacillating between, "Thank God that crap is all gone!" or "Oh, I remember when we used to have a kitchen! We could eat hot food then! And we didn't have to wash dishes in Maggie's bathtub! And the laundry room!!! We used to wear clean clothes! And the office! We used to have a printer!"

Well, they weren't that good, truth be told. Here's a recap.

Coincidence that CHOKE rhymes with OAK? I think not.

If this little tile tableau was not on the wall behind our dangerously unbalanced cooktop, the idea for the kitchen remodel might never have been hatched. But, spend a few years stirring spaghetti sauce and cooking up fried eggs looking at this little beauty and just try to keep yourself from spending thousands and thousands of dollars and risking months of familial stress to just MAKE IT GO AWAY.

Here, I've backed up a bit to show the triumverate of evil, ugliness and woeful inadequacy. From the top down, the cheapest "hood" known to man (the word "hood" must be used in quotation marks because it is only tangentially descriptive of the fanlike device above the cooktop). Moving down, the peasant picnic tilework. One worker has said, "Wow, someone spent alot of money on that." And he was serious. Different strokes, as they say. And finally, the cooktop that I believe was inspired by someone's trip to the South Pacific. Little, dangerously steep and uneven islands of fire arising from the Pacific Ocean of lovely tile countertop - ready to erupt at any moment to send a skillet of scrambled eggs tumbling ever so noisily onto the floor (and the cook). Surely, this area was the epicenter of all that was wrong with our kitchen. But, it was not by any means, the ONLY problem area. Moving on...

How is that oven hovering in space like that? Ours was clearly an antisocial wall oven - He didn't want any cabinets or counters nearby. Nope, he wanted to be by himself. Kind of like a wall flower, but hotter. But, not THAT hot, because no matter what temperature you set him at, he was always a bit of an underachiever. And then he'd lie about it. "You set me at 400? I'm at 400! Really! Don't you trust me?" NO I DON'T. That's why nobody wants to hang out around you - You're a liar. You are not a degree over 350.

And next to the oven is the pantry. It only had one remaining hollow core door when it was removed. Jay got mad one day, and the door lost. I don't think it put up much of a fight. Nice how that wall blocked off almost all access to the dining room from the kitchen, isn't it?

But, let's say you tried to make it into the dining room from the kitchen. You would have had to walk past Jay's wall art, a masterfully done paint transition that was created years ago with lots of patience, swearing and masking tape. I loved it. Sadly, it has been a casualty of the remodel. I fought to save it - to try to get it cut out and hung over the doorway to the laundry room/bathroom hall area. But, alas, it was directly over a stud and couldn't be removed. So, it's buried under a coat of Athenian Green paint. The green from the dining room now extends around the corner into the hall area.

By the way, nice floor, huh?

Here I am in the dining room - on the wall behind the wall oven/pantry in the kitchen. I am sitting in the "Jesus Niche." We named it that because the only thing we can think of that would go in there with any sense of purpose would be a 3-foot tall porcelain Jesus sculpture. Since we don't have one of those, we just took out the whole wall.

There's the dining room from the great room. I brought the table and chairs with me from a past life, and I am years removed from my old furniture in dark cherry phase. But, the feature about this dining set that sealed its fate was the fact that the table was 48 inches wide. The average dining table is more like 40 inches wide. This meant that if you happened to be the poor fool stuck in the middle seat on the left side of the table, here's hoping that you hadn't had too much wine... because if you had to relieve yourself in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner, you might have had an issue trying to get out of the room. God forbid we ever had a fire during a holiday gathering. There would surely have been at least one death by familial trampling.

And, wouldn't wood floors look nice in the office? And, maybe built-in bookshelves instead of the Easter Island thing we've got going on? Do you see the Easter Island thing? A bunch of individual tall shelves looming over the room? And, is that more OAK I see? I do believe it is.

Basically, we've had some issues. And, we're figuring we might as well deal with as many as we can while we're all turned upside down in the middle of August. We have a grill, a garden hose and an outbuilding with most of the comforts of home. So, here we are. In this last photo, Jay is waiting for the "boys" to come on the first day. Demo is imminent. And there is tension in the air at our house. But, rest assured, demo happened and it was as if a gigantic cloud had lifted and we were off on our journey. More photos soon!


Saturday, August 22, 2009

A Day for Celebration


Today, I became an aunt! Leslie had her baby boy, and I know nothing other than that his name is Kieran Timothy. I was not home when Gramma Jerri called with the news, and well, Jay's not one for details. But yay, City Relatives - Cousin Junior has joined the family!

What else? The sun is shining. The temperature is perfect and I have both cold beer and cold wine waiting for me. And a bounty of tomatoes from the garden. And my little garden out front is doing surprisingly well for me.



What else? We went to IKEA for lunch with the girls and they had Face Painting there, and look who let a complete stranger decorate her skin. And the same kid actually told the woman what she wanted to be painted upon her face. I think we are growing out of the painfully, frightfully shy in the presence of her parents stage. And as one of those parents, I say that is cause for celebration. So Ellie got her face done, too - just like her sister's. And Jay, who was really wanting to get home to paint the kitchen, recognized the significance of the event and went along with it, even though it took a bit of time. Of course, my children plan to never sleep or bathe again in order to keep their faces in their present states. Actually, Mags does plan on sleeping, but only on her back with her face pointing straight up at the ceiling.



What else? Could I be out of good news? NO! I have saved a doozie! I am finished with a year of college chemistry - and my 20-year old self is right now standing in her bedroom down at JMU, looking into the future and wondering who the hell is 40-year old Colleen and why isn't she off using that history degree? Yes, I have more classes that start on Monday, but for 36 hours, I'm going to try to party like it's 1991.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Oh, what a beautiful morning!

We are smack in the middle of a kitchen remodel (demolition is done and no kitchen exists right now). I am trying to wrap up my third term of chemistry by this coming weekend. My mother-in-law is bringing a friend up for the night to sleep in our cluttered outbuilding which has been serving as my study room for months. My husband is cleaning books out of our office right now to prepare for refinishing the floors in here, and any hour now this computer will likely be decommissioned for a while. But, it is indeed a beautiful morning - I've had some coffee, there's a little bird in the tree outside the window, and roses are blooming in the garden. We've got red tomatoes and tons of green beans and the world's biggest Walla Walla sweet onion. And, well, it's just a good day for singing. Don't know why the video is blurry - one day I should read the manual for my camera (yeah, that probably won't happen...) Listen carefully and you'll hear the sound of a burly guy cutting through drywall somewhere in the front of the house in the middle of the song.

I need to document the kitchen remodel on the blog - It's too monumental to lose to the cobwebs of history. So, hopefully, more posts will be coming. I'm counting on the coming absence of chemistry classes to provide time for some fun and blogging.