I Don't Think Our House Likes Us Anymore

So, yikes. At least now I can't say I have nothing to post about. We've got some serious looking problems here at the House of Two Foo's (Foo & Mrs Foo, that is). Rain has become our sworn nemesis and frequent tormentor. My digital camera's on the fritz again, so here comes another video. This time, I used my less fancy analog Hi8 camcorder and captured it using the marvelous little dynamo, the Adaptec Gamebridge TV. I'll let the video do the rest of the explaining...

P.S. - I just want to add that I'm pretty proud of what I accomplished here in this post. I shot this video sometime after 8:00 PM, captured it, edited it, converted it to Flash video, gave it the little buttons, uploaded it and fixed a dozen little mistakes I made along the way. It's now about 10:10 PM and it's a fully finished product. It's even well behaved...it doesn't start itself when you load the page, it waits for you, patiently, to hit the play button. Hm. Go me.

I guess that goes to show what a little motivation can do. I wanted to make sure I got this up on the blog tonight because there's really nothing I can do to make this house situation better at this moment and I feel like doing this is as close as I can get to doing something.

This is gonna be a tough few weeks. It's kind of a "when it rains, it pours" deal, here. Figuratively and literally. We were already completely wiped out, financially, when the laptop broke and needed to be fixed. Our 2nd wedding anniversary is Sunday and we took all of next week off (Thanksgiving week, so really just 3 days as far as A. Duie Pyle is concerned) and had all types of plans to go out and do fun things, etc., to celebrate. Now it looks like we'll be spending a week looking at a hole in our ceiling because at least that's free. But...as I said in the video, things could get a lot worse. The biggest damage is in a room we don't really live in everyday, so life can pretty much go on as normal once we get the stuff cleaned up. Still...bleh.

A House Is Only Done When You Run Out Of Money

Well, $200 later, I have my laptop back, pictures and all. The Geek Squad really worked wonders, but I paid the cheap price! Thank goodness I know something about computers or else it'd be another $250 for them to install Windows XP, etc. on my new hard drive. Yikes. Evidently, I'm in the wrong business. Anyway, I'm back up and running again (knock on wood). Here's the post I wrote way back on October 20th:

I know it’s been a while…sorry bout that. We were so busy with cleaning up the house, etc. that once it got into a normal, livable state, we basically collapsed into inert, commplacent recuperation for a while. To end the cliffhanger, yes the kitchen is now complete, as these pictures clearly show. We can now breathe easily, cook for ourselves and even do wide socks-on-hardwood-floor pirouettes whenever we need to. The kitchen constantly astounds me with its wide open spaces and freedom of movement. Both of us can cook in there and not elbow each other until one gets fed up and retreats to the couch!

We did have some trouble with the stove the first couple of times we really used it. After being on for about an hour, it would really start to smoke. I’d open it up and find a puddle of black Godknowswhat on the floor of the oven. I’d use a damp paper towel on a spatula or a soapy sponge and clean it up and it’d be ok for the rest of the bake. However, the next time we’d use it, it’d start smoking again and the same stuff would be on the bottom of the oven. The ceiling of the oven didn’t seem overly grimy or anything. This happened a number of times, consecutively. We finally got around to running the self-cleaning cycle last weekend and I scrubbed the racks (which seemed to be dripping with whatever stuff was burning). We haven’t had the problem since, so who knows?

Anyway, the countertops turned out excellent. They really look great and I can’t thank John enough for his help and guidance. You’ll notice that we opted to put the microwave on a rolling cart instead of the non-sink counter. It takes up about half of the counter space and we couldn’t bear to part with that much. Now, if we want to use the microwave, we just plug it in under the sink, easy as anything.

Also, notice that the “Tuscan Kitchen” motif has pretty much taken shape…at least art-wise. We got the two cool pieces on the walls by the mud room door from Bed Bath & beyond and they seem to fit perfectly in Jenn’s vision for the kitchen.

The cutting board was a favor at Jenn’s friend’s wedding shower and also happened to fit right in. Perhaps someday we’ll do a tile backsplash on the wall above the sink, but for the time being, I’d be happy with just a little bit of lighting underneath the cabinets.

Also, I really wanted a trash can with a pedal, so we got this nice chrome one. It’s a little smaller than I’d like, but I’d like paying the outrageous price of the bigger ones even less. It gets the job done, hands free.

The bedrooms upstairs are also settling down into some semblance of order.

The guest bedroom at the top of the stairs has become a mostly organized office/retro-gaming repository, thanks to this nice piece from Ikea. Yes, it does contain a number of old game systems and games, dating back to the old NES with the original Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt cartridge (and Light Zapper gun!) all the way through to the Sega Dreamcast. There’s still some more work to be done in there, but it’s now officially a useable space.

The master bedroom is also complete, with curtains, lamps and even a nice beachy picture.