Snowing for real... instead of a few measly flakes

It's snowing! We had an early dismissal today and somehow I still managed to teach the wild ones for the twenty minutes that they were in my room. They are well aware of their homework... and their snow day work if I do not see them tomorrow. 

It was only raining when I left school. I stopped to get milk at Dickinson's and it started to sleet. A peice of sleet - a miniature snow pellet- landed directly in my left ear. Ouch and Ew! 

It took me two hours to get home and I averaged between 10 and 30 miles an hour... the closer to Culpeper the slower I went as I tried to stay in the faint tire tracks on 522. I did a 360 one time and luckily into a shallow ditch that I could get easily get out of. I pulled into a nearby driveway (because I was now facing the wrong way) and breathed deeply. The nice resident motioned for me to turn around in his driveway, as he had seen the whole thing, and we chatted a bit. I called Aaron and got the rundown on how not to spin again and got back on the road. The roads got worse and worse and it sucked. A lot. I made it home and promptly ate a giant bowl of fruit loops. 

Once I got home and calmed down I did Aaron proud and laid on the couch - while he alternated laying on the couch with me (anyone watching Mutant Planet? or Idiot Abroad?) and slaving in the kitchen on the stew he was making for dinner.

Full of warm delicious stew I decided to run outside and snap a photo of the front of the house.

It has been snowing and snowing and snowing. I went out to take the above photo of the house and Meaghan (the landlord) was shoveling the drive because her husband Jesse still wasn't home. I snapped the photo and then joined in - because hey I don't mind and because I still don't know the status of school tomorrow. There's about 4 inches here Aaron says but it seems like a lot more. Aaron took over shoveling and I decided to make a snowman. I can't remember the last time I made one. 

I was trying to figure out how to dress it... Aaron said not with anything I wanted to keep... so I decided to decorate it with a scarf and kitchen things. :) Then I took them all back in and left the carrot. So she is a naked snow woman until I think of something more permanent.

Look how awesome my cookie cutters look as the eyes, mouth, and buttons... and some of my christmas kitchen spatulas as arms.

Drumroll for the front of the house!

Here is a photo of the front of the house (finally). Yes quite a lot of stuff went up those front stairs. And our mailbox is that tiny black thing to the right of the open gate.

More house photos

Here are some more photos of other rooms of the house. More things have found homes (except the rug which will go in the attic sometime this week). There is still plenty to do and plenty to put away, but it's a start. 

the foyer (imagine the carpet away)

the dining room - still some boxes to take care of

Fun from the gas company - it does smell accurate too!

Back to NPR

I enjoy listening to NPR. I like the news, stories, jazz, and classical. Sometime in the past year, NPR reformatted my two local stations (to Louisa) so one was all talk and one was music and talk. The one I could pick up in my apartment was the all talk one and I still did not receive it well. This meant no more CarTalk, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, and Mountain Stage. :( I streamed them online sometimes, but it was not the same.

There is no NPR accessible in Culpeper. There is WTOP which is talk, news, and weather which is pretty nice as long as you do not mind listening to DC weather and traffic every 15 minutes. The two stations that are prevalent in Culpeper are a country station that is pretty good and a pop station that I can stand about 15 minutes of (Aaron loves it - you would not beleive the songs he knows all the words to. To be fair, Aaron also really likes WTOP).

This is my $7 goodwill radio. I bought this dated model because it has a longer tuning range in hopes that it would pick up more stations - which it does. Here it is with copious amounts of antenna wire to pick up more stations than the ones in Culpeper. Unfortunately this does not include NPR. Aaron has rigged a solution to my NPR withdrawal.

What gets me NPR is the fact that Aaron removed the top non-working record player, rigged some cords and adapters (red and black on left) so I can hook it to my laptop and stream NPR (WCVE is my station of choice) through the internet. You know some people pay Best Buy and such places hundreds of dollars for expensive sound systems. Aaron gets around it.

I have listened to a few symphonies, plenty of news, and I am currently enjoying jazz. It is incredibly satisfying to do schoolwork to classical music.

:) Aaron plans on getting the 8-track player (built in on this model (to the left of the tuner) working next. I have never heard an 8 track, but Dan bought us Best of Cher to test it out.

Moving Shmoving

All of the stuff is finally moved out of my apartment, but truthfully there is still stuff in the car because I keep forgetting it is out there and that it needs to come in. Easy to forget because there is so much everywhere else that needs to be dealt with.

We moved three truckloads and two carloads of stuff last weekend which included my clothes so I have been officially living with Aaron in Culpeper. We haven't killed each other yet. I don't think that I have even thought about killing him... The drive to work has not been bad... there was a snow day in there and a two hour delay. The funny thing is I had a snow day in anticipation of snow on Tuesday and it didn't start snowing here until 7pm - thus Aaron had a snow day off on Wednesday and I had a two hour delay.

Aaron and the elephant spill.
the lid almost made it out the door.

The biggest mishap was Aaron's spill and ride down the stairs. He was carrying two boxes marked fragile - keepers of my elephant collection I had packed up in 2000 and had yet to go through. I had just finished telling Aaron that they really weren't that fragile when from the apartment I hear the loudest thud-jangle-bang-bang bang. Aaron slipped and slid down a few stops and the top elephant box toppled, opened, and crashed-banged-boomed. I ran from the apartment yelling to see if Aaron was ok. His butt and ego were bruised, but otherwise ok. I collected the bits and pieces put them back in the box and will worry about it later. I of course had to photo-document this disaster.

I did move some stuff on Monday, but not much. I crammed my car with kitchen things in half an hour in preparation of the snow day so I could bake and to get home in time to spend time with Aaron for his birthday. I also had to stop and see if I could get Aaron's birthday present because I hadn't had time to get it. Other than that I had not been back to my apartment at all. We had spent some time putting some stuff away during the week.  

Yesterday was the last day for moving. We are both ready to be done. While Aaron was sleeping in later than me I did some homework, some classwork, and made blueberry muffins. Aaron finally fought off the sleep monsters and we rode down to Louisa. Mom and Carol met us there and I put them to work packing up whatever was left while Aaron and I carried furniture and boxes downstairs. I was cranky and tired of moving. We finally crammed the truck and my car as full as we could and we headed home. I went thru Gordonsville to stop at the best bbq place for takeout.

Mom and Carol are the best. They dropped off some Goodwill donations and then went to the liquor store for more boxes and went back to my apartment to pack the rest of my things. This was so helpful because when Aaron and I got back to Culpeper we didn't have to unpack anything to have the empty boxes to take back. We unloaded, ate, and headed back to Louisa. Mom met us again and helped hold the bed in place in the truck while Aaron and I carried all the components down. We cleaned everything out of the apartment and then realized that the fridge was not empty. Oops. I need to go back to clean anyway so I'll grab it when I go back.

the last trip down

Mom rode with me and we followed Aaron in the truck. Aaron has really bonded with the truck and thinks that Landora likes talk radio better than the country I play when I drive it. It has been fun to drive a big truck around for a thousand miles (that's a lot of trips to Culpeper) except when its cold and the heat is not hot. Once the truck was unloaded we showed Mom around to see the slight changes since the last time she was here and to discuss the placement of some things and then she took the truck home. We were so tired we decided to unload the car later - that and the car can lock and the stuff is safe and dry. This is why it is still in there.

Anyway. I spent the day in the kitchen. There were many things in the kitchen that needed new homes and now they are there. Aaron tackled the bedroom because we were going to roll up the tan carpet and expose the lovely wood floors and put down a much smaller green rug we had picked out. Aaron was at first skeptical that less carpet was a good thing, but he is now convinced. I helped Aaron roll up the tan carpet, but after that I was banished from the upstairs. He wouldn't even let me help him wrestle the carpet down the stairs. It was hard to stay downstairs because there was a lot of banging and Aaron was making funny noises, but I stayed away until all the boxes in the kitchen had been taken care of.

Tired of being in the house and both in good stopping places, we walked down to the coffeshop and then down to the park. It's cold outside, but warmer than it has been. Plus the sun was shining and outside seemed way better than still in the house... until you reach the critical cold point. Then its time to go back inside.

the guest room - too much beige!

One thing I really wanted to get done today was to get my bed set up in the guest room. This required moving a really overbuilt heavy bed board. Aaron decided he was going to cut it in half with his circular saw. Unfortunately there are no electrical outlets on the front porch where the board had been unloaded. The board is so heavy and unwieldy that we had difficulty moving it anywhere. We spent at least thirty minutes looking for extension cords to reach from the far wall of the foyer out the door onto the porch. I found an extra long one but it was a two-holer and thus useless. Eventually cords found, it took Aaron less than a minute to dissect the big-a** board. It was much easier to get up the stairs... why hadn't this been done before?

the office - two desks, a couch, junk drawers
and a lot of books

the bedroom.
there will be doors to wardrobe when they are in stock.

I made cornbread to go with Aaron's leftover soup - a great pair. After dinner we cleaned up a few more things and we decided that the bedroom, the guestroom, and the two bathrooms look great. The office looks ok. The rest I am kind of embarrassed to take photos of. Well... the kitchen wouldn't look bad if it wasn't full of the trash and goodwill piles.

Moving to Culpeper

what a silly slogan.

So we are in the process of moving. We got Aaron moved in about three days and four trips around New Year's. I don't have a plan yet, but I have moved a few things and I have started packing.

We spent part of Christmas break in Cleveland visiting Aaron's family. It snowed every day I was in Cleveland though accumulation for the the entire time was probably less than an inch. Aaron joked I would never see the sun, but I did see it one morning before he got up.

The stadium is behind me to the left. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is the odd glass building behind me and to the right. Do I look cold?

We also went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The museum was pretty neat and like the Country Music Hall of Fame focuses a lot on early artists that I don't know much about so its pretty interesting. I like seeing the costumes and stuff, but don't know enough to appreciate all the guitars on display. Unfortunately it was the same day as a home Browns game so there was no close parking. We had to park several blocks away and face the wind off the lakes. Nothing like "Feels like -4."

Round 1 of moving. I stuffed the truck.

empty kitchen.

kitchen with more things. some things were put away and since this photo even more has been.

the dining room with the fireplace (right)

Huge foyer full of all Aaron's boxes that we don't know where to put yet

bedroom. please wonder at aaron's leopard blanket.

kim in the claw foot tub in the bathroom upstairs

this is the rear (courtesy of the landlords)

I have some moving pictures and house pictures... but none really of the outside of the house. Oops. So enjoy these and I'll take more later.

2011 resolutions and a review of 2010's progress

It's time to make resolutions. I know that I made 10 resolutions for 2010 and honestly was having trouble coming up with all of them. So I looked them up. Here's what they are and how I did. 

1. Use up lotion.
*Worked pretty well. The number of bottles is steadily decreasing and I remember to wear it more frequently. 

2. Win a receipt sweepstakes by doing every survey I get on a receipt.
 *Did not win. Gave up after April because I did not win. Still consider it though.

3. Go on more dates.
*Well this one was successful. I did go on more dates, I met Aaron, and as of New Year's we have been on over 140 dates. Woot!

4. Exercise more consistently.
*Nope. Still a slacker.

5. Wear more lip gloss.
*Nope. I wear plenty of chapstick, but lip gloss makes me self conscious and it wears off. Too much work.

6. Visit one of the two states left on my list.
 *Success! I visited both North Dakota and Oregon. You can check all 50 states off my list!

7. Go through some of these dang boxes and get rid of things!
*Success. Still culling and now I am repacking it and going to get rid of even more. It may not look like it, but it is true!

8. Drink more wine.
*Marginally more successful. Really I drink more beer and good beer at that.

9. Watch more movies.

*Marginally successful. I have watched more movies especially with the opening of the drive-in, but probably not that many more.

10. Leave school at school.
*Marginally successful. I leave earlier every year and I spend less time working on stuff every semester, but I am still a work-a-holic. Becoming a graduate student probably has not helped this situation.

So that brings me to resolutions for 2011. Some of those obviously will continue. Aaron would say that I need to spend more time sitting and doing nothing, and I try, but mentally that is hard for me to do.

Well one is to leave work every day by 430 and also not to do work at home. The time constraint is because soon I will have a 45 minute commute and I want to get home while it is lighter. It also ties in with leaving work in general and using my time efficiently. Besides coaching two teams, I am teaching three sections of the same thing for like the first time ever so that should make it easier. It's a good goal.

Other than that I am not really sure. I am drawing a blank on a possible year-long goal which makes me a slacker after having 10 for last year (even if some of them were failures). I will think on it more.