On Our Way

We recently found out that our offer to purchase a home in Fort Collins was accepted, and we expect to be able to close the sale and move at the end of this month.




It has been a long time coming, but it will be extremely satisfying for us to make this move to a larger, newer, more comfortable home.

I'll be sure to post additional news and photos here soon!

Scenes from Christmas - Part 2

This past December we realized we would be spending our first Christmas at home since the kids were born. In fact as near as we can tell, it was our first Christmas at home since 2004, back when Dana was still on night shift and both of us had WAY more free time than we knew what to do with.

So we needed to obtain a tree.  I wanted to take the kids out to a tree farm instead of just a dusty corner of a parking lot.  I found a wonderful, family-run tree farm in nearby Windsor that fit the bill, complete with hay rides, hot apple cider, and lots of trees even at the last moment.  We phoned up our friends Kim and Tom and their 2-year old Dean, and we all set off a couple weeks before Christmas.

It only took a half hour or so to find the "right" one!

Then we had the rest of the visit to enjoy the other activities

Christmas itself this year was very mellow.  It was just the four of us together, enjoying each others' company.  We received some positively wonderful, thoughtful gifts from family and friends alike.  Alex got the take-apart truck that he asked Santa Claus for.  Genevieve got a drum which she delights in banging on.

I was required to take off the final 2 weeks of December from work, which provided me with the time I was looking for to dig into a minor kitchen remodel project.  We were in desperate need of a built-in dishwasher and a new kitchen sink, but in order to install either, it required ripping out and rebuilding a stand-alone set of metal cabinets from ca. 1955. I was able to complete all of the demolition by the Tuesday before Christmas, but then a nasty stomach bug took me completely out of commission until Christmas Eve.  It was not until my parents and Alison and Eric came out the following week, and with their dedicated help, that I was able to get most of the project under way.  Here is a brief pictorial of the project thus far...

1. The "before" shot, from the Monday before Christmas:

Note the somewhat hideous metal cabinets and deteriorating enamel sink and drainboards

2. Here is the same view around Tuesday afternoon:

3. Here is me and some of my extraordinary helpers

We both like drills

Eric gets extreme extra credit for both working his arse off on the kitchen during his vacation, AND chasing after the kids when he was not literally knee-deep in cabinetry

Also note in the above photo the gorgeous faux granite countertops that Ali installed - complete with a money-back 1-hour warranty.  These were done with shelf paper, and served two purposes.  First to give us a sense of what kind of counter top we would ultimately like to install, and also to protect the plywood underlayment that I installed.

Speaking of Ali, she also spent a huge amount of time entertaining, chaperoning, educating, and tiring out Alex and Genevieve in between fighting off a cold and helping with the kitchen.

Throughout the entire kitchen ordeal, Dana was hard at work finishing out the year with a bang at work.  I think she got mostly caught up, but her head is still spinning.

4.  And as of today here is the state of the kitchen

Clearly there is work to be done, but it is coming together. 

On the day we hooked up the dishwasher seen here, the washing machine decided to conk out.  This is an example of the universal law of conservation of functioning appliances (that is, the total number of appliances in good, working order in the universe is constant).  It turns out the coupling that mates the electric motor to the transmission had given out.  This is a relatively cheap $90 service call, but while the extremely friendly technician was working on it this afternoon, he noticed an enormous oil leak under the washing machine's transmission.  There was probably about a cup's worth of oil on the floor under the machine, and the transmission only holds 2-3 cups of oil, so our poor 7.5 year old Kenmore is washing its final few loads of laundry this week before its transmission grinds to a stand-still.