Bathroom Festivities!

Confession: I am in love with my bathroom. OH, yes I am. I have been dreaming of this color scheme in a bathroom since 2003. seriously.

I know there is a “thing” going on right now in bathroom décor where it’s supposed to be all spa-like and serene. I say “eff that!” because my bathroom kicks my butt every morning and every night and I love it!

In case you don’t remember, here is what it looked like before:

Okay, so, that’s that, never to be seen or heard from again. Now observe the AMAZINGNESS of my current bathroom!

 

YEAY! I feel like having a party now, don’t you?

Just wait until you see the photos of the new living room!

COMING SOON!!!

Pictures of the House!

We’re finally in the house, have been for a week now, really. I just got rid of about 1/2 my wardrobe, and a ton of other stuff and I feel much better.

Here’s the first few pictures I’ve taken. . .this is what we have to work with (hover for room info):

as you walk in from outside you see:

then, going upstairs:To the left:Straight ahead:Ahead (to the right)Hard right:Right again:Or keep going:

Turning back:

You may have noticed that I too no pictures of the living room. I was surprised too. I was sure I had. ANYWAY, outside of a SUPER SECRET but amazingly awesome project in the bathroom, the living room is the BIG-DEAL thing we’re fixing up first.

Let me show you a picture of what the wallpaper looked like:

Horrible, right? I know. It’s gone now, don’t cry. So is the tan carpet. Here are some photos of us working on The Project:Here is Mr. Crow doing . .. something. . . I think he’s pulling staples out of the wood floors.

 

Here’s Mr. M and my Bro doing the same.

 

This is what it looked like after we tore off all the weird textured wall paper and removed the fuzzy left-over backing paper and scraped off as much of the other 3 layers of wall paper that still remained below. . . .

 

And look what I found near the bookshelf:

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And THIS is what it looks like now. we scraped off all the rest of the wall paper that was harder to get off with razor blades, patched any holes in the plaster, and, as an added bonus, we used a heat gun to remove the MILLION layers of paint from the trim around the floor, windows, and doors.

Next, we’ll be sanding and staining the hardwood, painting over the bricks in the fireplace (Mr. Crow hates them), and painting the walls. . . we’ll be done someday.

We DID get one thing done that I’m happy about:

I bought this light on sale YEARS ago and I never had a place to put it. I kept it for some absurd reason and now it’s in my kitchen!

Now it’s time to bake brownies.

Neil is Sick

This is making it very hard for me to enjoy the other successes in my life. . . .

I spent about a day glowing over the fact that the house appraisal came back better than we would have dared to wish.

Then Neil’s condition seemed to get worse. All information seems to point to pancreatitis. At first, when he came home from the hospital he seemed so happy and playful. He was definitely doing better. Exactly a week later, he seemed to back-slide. he was drooling all over the place and he threw up a little bit. So we trucked him back to the vet, who did some more tests, confirmed that some of the enzymes they look at are, indeed, elevated further, and gave me even more pills to give him. ugh.

So now, we’re giving him an appetite stimulant (mirtazepine), antibiotic (clavamox), Pepcid, and an anti-nausia medication (cerenia).

I also, while doing some internet research, came upon an interesting correlation. (You’ll notice that there are no pain relievers in the mix above.) We, for the first few days, were giving him some kind of pain relieving gel under his tongue daily. . . . but now we’re out and he’s feeling crappy again. I can’t help but think that the two are connected since the 8-10 websites I looked at list pain management in the list of symptoms that need to be addressed. 

Now my next step is to call the vet and see about getting something to assist Neil with whatever pain he might be in. It hard to tell with cats and Neil is so sweet and easy-going he probably wouldn’t complain about anything. . . . And it’s not like I can give him aspirin. Cat’s livers are funny things. Any people-type stuff could kill him.

The other big thing is getting him to eat and drink. I think/hope the pain relievers will help with this. However, in the mean time, the vet showed me how to give him electrolyte fluids under his skin. Mr. Crow can’t even be in the room when I do it. (wimp)

Ah, well. BGP, as my cousin likes to say.

I’m Trying To Write a Blog . . .

. . . It’s working.

Mr Crow and I just took a bath. Feeling refreshed. Listening to Penguin café Orchestra (Perpetuum Mobile). The Parakeet seems to like it and tries to sing along. I’ve stopped washing my face with soap. I’m recovering from a dozen mosquito bites. No joke.

We biked to the Relator's office to go over some paperwork, then we went a little further to the North Market:

Namaste beer

personal watermelon

white peach

3 avocadoes

a dozen eggs: 10 brown, 1 white, 1 blue

rhubarb, lime, cardamom ice cream

 

We found the recycling bins closest to our new house. . . .

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On the house-front we’re having the appraisal next week. Assuming all goes well, we’ll be in by September. We’re nervous but I don’t think we’ve got anything to worry about (as if that makes sense).

I’m already mentally placing the chicken coop to the left of the back porch. I’m reading three books right now:

Chick Days

The Quarter Acre Farm

The Girl With Curious Hair

. . . too bad Mr. Crow isn’t keen on chickens. he’s worried that they’re going to be too noisy. . . I think he’ll live. (He’ll have to!)

 

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Neil is in the hospital. He hadn’t been quite himself since Sunday. The doctor thinks it may be his liver but we won’t know for sure until later. Sadness.

Home Inspection Etc.

The “Etc.” up there is for the two new headbands I bought!

So, the home inspection was yesterday. It went as expected. It’s an old house. It needs some work. Some of it is more important than other bits.

okey doke. Let’s get started:

So, the basement is damp. It’s damp, apparently, because it’s stone and stone is “like a sponge”. Which means, really, that there’s nothing to do here but level out the floor a bit. . .and kill all the spiders.

The roof over the porch is leaking a small bit so we’ll need to fix that. It’s just a little patch on one side so it shouldn’t be too hard.

The gutters need replacing. This issue is what’s causing a lot of the dampness in the basement. Fix that and it’s two problems for the price of one. I’d really like the kind that you don't have to muck out every season but we’ll see.

The forth thing that it really needs is a new coat of paint. To get that done we’ll need to replace some of the broken shingles around the house. Easy enough, I suppose, but what’s on there right now is asbestos. bummer. Fortunately, Home Depot sells a similar looking product called “concrete fiber” that we’ll use to fix what we need to. This is the big papa project. There are some places in back of the house where it looks like they put in a shorter window and just put a big board over the hole instead of reshingling. *sigh*. Also, there’s a door to the kitchen RIGHT NEXT TO the door to the living room. This looks stupid and we want to cover it over. Of course we need to do all this at the same time:

-take out the door

- rip off the boards

- replace all the damaged shingles

Only then can we paint. Good thing we’re young-ish. . .

So, maybe we’ll get all of this done by winter. . . maybe not. We at least want to get the porch and gutters done for sure. . .paint can wait until spring if it has to. . . but the blue is SO UGLY.

AAAAnyway. Now we wait. The underwriter is working on stuff and then it’s go go go until it’s ours.

Adventures are Time-Consuming!

Who knew?

So, I’m married now. That was great! You can check out the details here.

Now we’re in the process of buying a house! HOLY COW! It’s been a kind of whirlwind, really. On Monday, July 11th, I was browsing Zillow.com on my phone. None of the pictures were loading. The map said there was a house in Clintonville that just happened to be in our price range! I got a “feeling”, you know. . . so I sent an email to Mr. Crow to have him check it out. He immediately sent a message to our realtor who, being amazing, was able to show us the house Tuesday at noon. . . we signed our papers at the Taco Bell down the street immediately after that.

Offer, counter offer and here we are, 4 days later waiting for an inspector to check the house out for us (This upcoming Tuesday) and then, barring any major issues, we’ll sign and the house is OURS!

That’s an adventure if ever I heard one.

The current pictures online don’t really do the old girl justice so I’m just going to wait and take my own. We’re also planning on doing a little work to the house right off the bat so there’ll be pictures of that coming up at the same time.

Banzai!

Feeding Time At The Zoo

I decided I was sick of smoothies this morning. Not surprising, I’m sure.

I decided to make banana “pudding” instead. Actually, as I eat this, it’s really more like raw COCO Wheats.

This is a bowl of 3 mashed bananas, some dried, grated coconut, and about 1T of ground flax seeds. I also stirred in about a tablespoon of this amazing junk:

I may not be able to eat the whole bowl but I’m certainly going to do my best. What this yields is a sweet, toothsome mash that You could probably dehydrate into some amazing chocolate crêpes as well. I ‘m just going to eat it.

Oh, I feel I should mention, even though my week of “science” is at an end, that my skin is looking phenomenal. That alone is enough to keep me eating mostly raw. However, the mood balancing, ease of preparation, lack of guilt whilst eating “junk food”, and energy booting magnificence are also good reasons for me to keep it up. Yeay!