My mom and dad came down yesterday afternoon and surprised us with a new garage door opener (and a drill for David) for Father’s Day. David and my dad got to spend the rest of the day installing it in the garage (which was a virgin garage, never having had a garage door opener installed in it before). It now opens at the push of a button. It has already been SO NICE going out to the cars via the garage.
Here are some pictures of our Master bedroom. I don’t think I want my bedroom displayed for all to see right now (the bed is unmade, there are no curtains up) so I am taking detail pics of things in the bedroom.
This is a lovely mirror that I scored at Pier 1 Imports for $20 (originally $60) which is hanging between the two windows. It was the perfect complement to the IKEA bed we bought last year.
This is detail of my first oil painting from 2003 which is the inspiration for a new color palate for the bedroom. I intended the green on the walls to go with the red/gold/tan/creme/green fabric I had used for the pillow shams, but the painting goes so dramatically with the wall color that it is powerful enough to completely overhaul my color scheme.
Plus, the new color scheme allows me to tuck away my cobalt glass in the bedroom without being completely tacky.
Pattern: Clapotis by Kate Gilbert
Source: knitty.com
Size: followed pattern
Materials: Bonsai by Berocco (97% bamboo, 3% nylon), beads, 1 spool matching sewing thread
Needles: size 7 Denise circulars
Amount: 7.5 balls of yarn for clapotis, ~1 ball for crochet border
Start Date: Match 29, 2008
Finish Date: June 3, 2008
You might think, “Clap-O-tis” like I did, but no, it’s more “cla-po-TEE” from what I have read online. This is one of the more higly discussed knitting projects and while some love it, some hate it. I am right smack in the middle. It wasn’t the most interesting knit, and it wasn’t boring either. Dropping stitches every little bit was enough to keep me plugging along on it, enough so to finish it.
This was a great grab-n-go project. I worked a lot of it in the car (whilst David drove, duh, I wouldn’t drive while knitting!) or while playing/watching James and Lowell in the mornings, or while having an afternoon and my mom’s house, or while watchiing a TV show or movie with David, or while waiting at Time Warner to turn in our old modem… It did not require a lot of attention. Needless to say, it is an easily memorized pattern and you just go with it.
Bamboo yarn has a lovely drape. In fact, this yarn started off as another project entirely. I had decided to knit a tunic (I know, sounds like something military) with my friend, Amy, and while she finished hers, mine sat half done collecting dust. Well, it’s ziploc collected dust. When I realized I had a substantial enough stash of this yarn for this project, I decided that the heavy drape would be perfect for knitting up a shawl.
Once done, it needed a little something. I came across another clapotis with a beaded border via ravelry (gotta love ravelry!), discussed options with my knitting guru friend Ana at knit-night on Tuesday, and whipped out the beaded border in just 2 days. It’s crocheted on and keeps the shawl from stretching out in all sorts of funny ways. I love how it added just the right touch and stabilized the edges at the same time.
I don’t think I will ever knit another one, but I am glad to have a completed clapotis in my projects over on Ravelry, and, uh, here in my house, too.
This was taken by Dave with our 50mm/f1.8 lens and the narrow dof almost makes it look like we’re miniature, sitting on a miniature hill amongst miniature trees. Click on the picture to view larger to get a better view of the effect.
So I did a bit of complaining in the last post and pointed out a bunch of negatives. Here are some good things:
The boys’ rooms are bigger than they’ve ever been. :-)
We have a “toy” room.
Since moving in, we have spent more time outside than we ever did before. This has pushed back the boys’ bedtimes, but doing yardwork and going for walks and just being outside sure does feel good when it’s the whole family together. Our front yard is in the shade in the evening so it’s nice to wash the cars, water the grass, play with the sidewalk chalk, and just be out there. The back yard is so weedy still that we don’t spend any time back there. It’s kinda a blank slate waiting for some lovin’.
Ooo, this is nice, the laundry room isn’t in the kitchen anymore! And it’s not in the garage, either. Well, technically it is, but they built the laundry room INTO the garage space so it doesn’t “feel” like it from the house.
We live really close to a great splash park.
Our neighborhood has a pool though it will be quite a while before we actually get a “key” to it. At least we live really close to that great splash park.
We have around $50 in equity! I mean, wow, that’s not a lot but we’ve made one house payment so far and $50 of it didn’t go to interest! Woot! So much for “not throwing money away” (we just threw more than our rent payment EVER was into interest, so in my mind, that’s “throwing money away” in a big way… oooh, I better check myself, I’m starting to teeter on the negative stuff again.)
The kitchen exhaust (built in to the microwave somehow) vents outside instead of just blowing your food smells right back into your face.
Oh! How could I forget? We recycle, have a recycling bin, and it gets picked up curbside!
Tomorrow we will have been living in this house for one month and we’ve learned a lot about this house. First off, it has ants everywhere, in every room, and they’re the nasty kind. Not the innoculous little sugar ants, though those are running rampant, too. They’re not what I would call fire ants, having grown up in the country and seen REAL fire ants (about a centimeter or more in length, big circle of dirt mounds, trails of destruction) but they are what most city folk dub fire ants, due to the burning stinging fire-like sting. The shrubs out front have two kinds of scale which adds to the infestation of sugar ants, since scale and sugar ants go hand-in-hand. I haven’t seen any roaches, but we do hav the occasional spider and june-bug (fitting since it IS June, afterall)…
Besides pests, I have learned that linoleum does not smell very good when it gets wet and stays wet. It smells like sour rags. I’ve also learned that I need to buy new curtain rods as apartments tend to build big luxurious windows into their walls, so all my curtain rods are waaaay too long for the dinky little windows in this house. I’ve also learned that grass is hard to grow when you start off with only a small patch of it. We never watered EVER at the duplex and it always had green grass, I guess because the grass was healthy to start off with.
Our first water bill, for the period of time before we moved in and didn’t use any water (April 14th to May 11th, okay, we lived here ONE day) was $80 so I’m dreading what it will be when we’re actually using water. I hear other Leander residents tell me that our water bill will easily be over $200/month, every month. It’s just not right. Our water bill in Round Rock was $40/month and included the same stuff as the bill here (trash, sewer, water). We’ll see. I’m not excited about the huge cost of water in this town.
We also looked into a garage door opener and learned that those are a huge hassle to install for the first time (which is probably why NONE of the houses on this street seem to have them). It would be nice but we can live without it for awhile.
I have the master bedroom clean, presentable, almost done! Next for me is the livingroom but that will always be a work in progress as it is also the main un-packing zone. Probably the next space we need to focus on is the kitchen. It has the biggest ant problem and also needs the most work. We’re missing one very large drawer (there are only 3 drawers! it’s, like, half the drawer space in the whole kitchen!) and need to finally decide where the plates, cups, cooking, measuring, storage stuff all goes. We also need to come up with a solution to the huge blue recycling bin, hang some curtains, clear off some counter top space, and deal with the top of the fridge stash.
Pictures of the master bedroom soon. Lowell is in my lap giving me kisses, so I need to go focus on him first.
Okay, if we go by our guessed due date of December 6th, we’re 14 weeks along (more or less since it’s all a guess) and today I felt two tiny bump-bump thumps very low, front, center during lunch. I’m convinced it was the baby. And if it wasn’t? So what. I’ll be feeling them more and more soon. At least it was a cool thought that it’s possible that it was the baby. “They” say with each consecutive pregnancy, you feel the baby move sooner and sooner. It’s not entirely impossible!
What would you do without your friends? These ladies encompass some of the longest and funniest and strongest friendships I’ve had. Let’s hear it for the girls!
This picture was taken because Jeni (fourth from the right or fourth from the left) and her family are moving in, like, a week to a city far away (but still in Texas, thank God). We’ve had such good times meeting them week to week on Tuesday nights, watching their son and baby girl grow up and witnessing their awesome faith grow.
We’ll miss you guys tons, and I still think Jeni aught to start a blog! (hint, hint, Jeni)
I can just imagine that sweet face with some freckles by his nose when he’s a wee bit older. That outfit was given to James with a matching 3-6 month one for Lowell last year from their Grandma B. I can’t believe Lowell already fits into the big one!
Lauren and James were in swim class together back when they were both, like, 9 months old. Now she’s getting so big!
I’m trying out another video hosting site just to see what options are out there. I like this one because it’s not blocked by David’s work’s filter (though that will not be a problem in another 2.5 weeks).
Here’s one of Lowell, not to be left out. Yes, I’m already in maternity clothes. I have been for a few weeks already. I tell you, there’s nothing holding it in the 3rd time around. A-ha! Dropshots lets you rotate the sideways ones.
