Birthdays... and toilets.

Marieke is now 30, and to celebrate the occasion Curt threw her a great birthday party at the Milky Way. Let's see... Party consisted of pizza, salad, whatever kind of tasty beverage you wanted to buy, a quiz of Marieke trivia (which Doug & I ROCKED! Yes!), an album of embarrassing Marieke photos - including one of her and a giant Brownie who I'm sure scared all the other little Brownies into earning their badges - bowling, Latin dancing, cake, and the requisite singing of Happy Birthday. Marieke looked splendid in her party attire, and Curt did a great job organizing the evening. Curt seems to be very good at organizing, and takes pride in making sure events stay on track. Taskmaster!

So here are some photos of the evening. First we have Marieke in her perfect party pose:
Then we have one of Curt scoring all of our "How Well Do You Know Marieke" quizzes. We were the top scorers, so we challenge Curt to make a harder quiz the next time. No more of these questions about Marieke's favorite book as a child, or Marieke's illustrious career as a Brownie. Ask us something really challenging, like which tooth did Marieke lose first as a wee one. Bring it on!

This next one is a good one - a candid shot. We've got Curt photodocumenting for the evening (Marieke was not the resident photographer that night!), Marieke holding court like every good birthday girl should, and Mark yawning (too much Latin dancing, maybe?). We know how to rock the place, right? But really, it was a great party!

This leads me to my next topic for the evening... toilets. So this weekend we had visitors. Chris and CHRIS were down from Maine. And on Saturday while we were trying to show CHRIS a good time before his lovely lady arrived, we discovered that our upstairs toilet was leaking. Yes, it was leaking. In case you ever encounter strange puddles of water near your toilet that you've never experienced before, it's safe to assume that there's a problem with the toilet. The water was leaking out of the toilet where the handle/flusher connects to the bowl because the flush valve no longer was properly regulating how much water was filling in the tank. So there was too much water filling in the tank. My initial reaction to the toilet problem was pure distress. Immediately I start seeing dollar signs as I dream of all the other things that are going to start falling apart around the house. Doug stays calm, though, and starts to do some research on why our toilet might be leaking. It was an educational afternoon for us, though I'm sure CHRIS would have preferred doing something else other than hanging his head over our toilet tank. Now he knows more about toilets, though, if his in Maine ever goes bust.

So apparently our toilet flush valve went kaput on us. This we learned on Monday night after Doug did some more research (and after we discovered ANOTHER plumbing problem on Sunday, this one more severe and that merits its own post altogether). My lovely husband went to Lowe's while I was at Curves, got some kind of Flushomatic part to replace our old American Standard original, and voila. In about a half hour our toilet is in business again! Yay! Doug had such a good time (and I have him on film smiling during this ordeal) that for a minute or two he was thinking about becoming a plumber, à la Grant on Ghost Hunters. That fancy didn't last out the evening, though, so I guess no career for Roto Rooter is in his future.

Here are a few photos of the toilet repair. This first one is proof that if only for a brief moment Doug was excited about plumbing. Here he shows off the new flush valve:

This is our empty toilet. The flush valve will be going in that bare spot on the left of the toilet tank.

Every master plumber needs an apprentice, and Meg is the chosen one this evening.

Here is the final exhibit. The finished product. The toilet's put back together, flushes right, fills properly, and Doug can't help but feel good about his manual labor. I feel good about it, too - way to go! Now we don't have to walk downstairs to use the other bathroom pre- or post-sleeping. I know, I know, that's definitely one for White Whine ("I can't believe I have to walk downstairs to use one of my other two bathrooms this morning!"), but I admit to having whined that all Sunday and Monday. Thanks to my husband, I am whining no more! (about that anyway...)

Going back to Cali. Or not.

Hello there, blogosphere. I am back from California, from filling my brain alternatively with news of Web 2.0 and how to incorporate it into libraries everywhere and with scenes from the great California sea coast. I could hear seagulls and seals (seals, people!) from my hotel room as I went to bed at night and as I woke up in the morning, and the sliding door to my balcony in the room was shut the whole time. These sounds of nature were definitely the best part of the trip.

What did I learn at Internet Librarian 2008? That I should be incorporating all kinds of nifty Web 2.0 stuff into my library world each and every day, if, for shame!, I haven't already. Wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, you know, the usual. I should be Twittering (which I am, though not enough probably), using Facebook and Linked In for expert connections (what kind of expert connection am I going to make in Facebook, and why do they want to see that if I were a musical instrument I'd be a clarinet?), staffing my library with a FTE just to push out news stories gathered by RSS Feeds and the like. While part of me was invigorated by this conference, other parts of me felt old, way too young to be out of touch with technology, and depressed about how my library seems to be so behind the times. But, as Doug reminded me, and as I reminded myself, we're making progress, and not every technology needs to be utilized in all environments. This is why I missed him. He always makes me feel better, unless he's telling me I'm a complainy-pants. But, I suppose he's right about that one, too. I am a Sheridan after all, and I think that's what we were put on this planet to do.

Anywho, I'll post a few photos of California This first one is of my hotel room at the Portola Plaza hotel. A nice hotel, but the gym sucked. Pardon my language, but the "gym" consisted of two treadmills, two stationary bikes, two elliptical machines, and some free weights all crammed into a hotel room, room 125 to be exact. The headboards were still in place, the giant armoire for the TV was there... and then all the equipment. It was like hanging out in your bedroom with a bunch of strangers, getting all sweaty and smelly. Not so great. But the guest rooms were nice, and it was all free (thank you, job), so I'm not complaining. Not really. Or wait, I guess I am.

Moving on. This other photo is where things get good - the wildlife. Monterey is filled with great birds and sea animals, like sea otters and seals. This fine creature is a pelican about to take flight, and these birds look large in the water but look even larger when flying. I was impressed by the pelicans and was pleased to see them there. I don't think I'd ever seen one before. This other example of California sea life is a fine looking seal sunning him/her self on a rock. Now I wasn't that close to these creatures (our camera has a good zoom, thankfully), but they were fantastic to watch. This guy here just lay like that for at least the 45 minutes I was sitting there watching things down at the harbor. Didn't move at all. What amazing muscle conditioning! I don't think I can hope to achieve that at Curves.

This one here is a good one of the harbor area, or I guess what is called the Bay in California. Monterey Bay. I did not know that fishing is still such a part of the culture here, and I think that it is, but just not for commercial purposes. There are a lot more of these private little sail boats parked long the bay than commercial fishing boats, but I'm sure these little guys have caught a few fish in their day. The pelicans were catching oodles of fish, so I'm sure anyone with a fishing rod would have a great time in the water. My sister and brother-in-law should take my nephew out to the Pacific Ocean. I bet he'd have a blast out there. And speaking of traveling, this last photo I took from my window seat on the little puddle-jumper that took all 12 of us from the rinky-dink Monterey airport to the international airport in San Francisco. The view from my window was pretty cool, but I had images of this propeller breaking off the wing and smashing through my little window, with me dying either by decapitation or by explosion from the then depressurized cabin. Yes, I have quite the imagination, and I blame too much Dr G Medical Examiner. San Francisco is somewhere in that photo. That's probably all I'll get to see of San Francisco for a while! At least I can say I was there, right?

All in all, a nice get away, a good trip, a good conference, and a nice homecoming to Doug at the airport. I am glad I made him charge up his Blackberry, otherwise we might still be wandering around trying to connect, but we found each other, grabbed some Five Guys for dinner and watched some ghosts on TV. A very nice homecoming indeed.

Avast, ye New Bedford!

Cotton and I took a trip to New Bedford on Sunday. It was a beautiful day, and we were trying to decide what to do. We were making the bed, and I think the aquatic blue color of the bedroom got to us because my immediate thought was not the Topsfield Fair like we had planned, but instead the New Bedford Whaling Museum. I'd been dying to go, and we were looking for a road trip, so we said, Ahoy!, and went on our way. The museum itself is AWESOME. New Bedford, though, seems like it has seen better days. I think parts are really neat - the wharf area, and also the historical whaling park area, the 20 blocks of national park. The rest is not so hot. I think Doug was telling me that in 2006 New Bedford was the site of the largest drug bust in New England, or something crazy like that. I can't say that I'm totally surprised. I mean, here's another sad and tired New England story: a town is one of the richest towns in the country due to robust industry, in this case whaling, and then that industry disappears and what happens to the city? Complete devastation, basically. How do these cities get revitalized? Providence is a success story; Hartford is not. This is a case for urban planners, I guess. Or Buddy Cianci.

Anyway, our first stop for the day was gas, and I had to take a photo of the price. $2.95, to us, felt cheap. Now we can take road trips again! Yay! So we get gas and then head on down to a part of MA we had never explored before. I didn't know New Bedford was so far away. It's not, really - only an hour - but it's not necessarily close, either. For some reason I was thinking it was closer. And when you're down there you don't feel like your in Massachusetts. You feel like you're in Rhode Island. What's the difference, you might ask. Well, there is one. Subtle, but noticeable. This area is slightly more industrialized, or slightly more... decrepit? That's mean, and not exactly what I mean, but it will do for now.

The museum is filled with really cool whale stuff, as the name would suggest. There's this blue whale skeleton hanging in the lobby, and also this cool killer whale relief.
We noticed that whales are always smiling, or at least that's how they're always depicted. (If a whale's life is always happy then let me come back as a whale, please! But somehow I doubt this estimation of what it's like to be a whale.) We learned neat whale words, like spermaceti and odontocete. We also saw interesting exhibits on the whaling life in New Bedford and breathed in the refreshing salt air from the lookout deck on top of the museum. We didn't see the whole of the museum, which was partly intentional - we want a reason to go back soon - but we did spend some time walking around New Bedford. It seems we were the only ones, though, out and about on the streets downtown. The place was deserted, save the random crazy person or tattooed hipster. There weren't even any cars driving around. I was expecting to see tumbleweeds at any moment. All the restaurants we would pass were closed. Not even a Dunkin' Donuts was open (didn't even see one, actually). We finally found an open eatery - Freestone's - where we had nachos and buffaque chicken tenders, but still, we felt like there could have been so much more to the city had we been walking the streets maybe 50 or so years ago. It's terribly sad how cities live and die, just like people. I don't know if New Bedford is dead, necessarily, but it's holding on for dear life. What is has to offer is history - whaling history - and how long can it survive on that? Doug and I will go back to see the museum again, to finish it, but then what? What after that? We'll probably never go again.

Success!

So, I will say that I think our first party in our new home was a success. Sure, it was a little stressful to get ready for it (mostly worrying that the house was a) clean enough, and b) properly organized/decorated/arranged), but I think all that stress was a good thing. The basement is now way more organized that it ever has been, we discovered a box of stuff that we didn't know was missing but are glad we found, and the place probably hasn't been this thoroughly vacuumed since we moved in. These are good things.

We had a beautiful day for a party. The party was supposed to start at 1pm and my mother, aunt Alice, and cousin Linda arrived about 45 minutes early to help us get ready. This was a good thing, because I hadn't even finished cooking at that point. My mother, though, needs to learn to sit down and relax. She can't just sit and talk with you; she needs to be constantly doing something. I kept asking, "Where's my mother?" and I would be told she's out watering flowers, taking out the trash, doing dishes... for all I know she cleaned our gutters, too. She just works too hard at these events when she should be relaxing. She's our guest, not our housekeeper! Anyway, people didn't start arriving until after 2, which worked out well with my slow cooking schedule. I showed people around the house, and everyone eased into a nice afternoon of eating and conversation. We had about 12 people here, total. Maybe more? Let's count - Mom, Dad, Aunt Alice, Linda, Uncle Jimmy, Mary, Fred, Margaret, ma soeur, Mike, Frankie, Maddy, Maria, Robin, Jeremy, little adorable baby Lauren, Nate, Katie, and then Rose (the dog) and Kittery (the dog). That makes 19 people, counting all the kids. Wow! Not too bad! It was a good number for our house. Not too many, but enough room for everyone. Plus, it helped that we spent a good part of the party outside. Doug picked up a soccer ball at Dick's while he was out getting beer (more Shipyard Pumpkinhead... yummy... but now we also have several leftover cans of Bud Light, too), and Maddy, my soccer-genius of a niece, got us all kicking it around. She sometimes plays goalie, and I asked if she liked it. Her response was no, that she'd rather be where all the action is. That's Maddy! How I love that kid.

Do I have photos to post? Yes, but a paltry few. You see, I was planning on photo-documenting the whole party for those family who couldn't make it, but right after I started taking photos I put the camera down somewhere (I thought in the living room) and then couldn't find it. After people left Doug and I were tearing the house apart looking for it (under the sofa, behind the chairs, that kind of looking), and we even went out with flashlights looking outside, thinking I might have brought it outside. Where did I eventually find it? In my office closet sitting on top of the filing cabinet. I have no explanation for this. None. Anyway, here are a few photos from the day:

This one is of our table set up with appetizers. I don't think I ate any of them, but isn't that the way when you're hosting? You'll notice the nice bouquet of flowers in the center of the table; those are from Mr & Mrs Sisko. We have lots of flowers in the house now. I like this. Flowers are nice and cheery, especially ones in fall colors.

This one is of the sink area after we had cleaned up most of the mess from the party. Notice the tiny coffee pot and the Mr. Coffee directions next to it. This is the first time we have ever, ever made coffee. My mother and sister found this to be hilarious - how do we drink coffee? Well, I've never had a cup of coffee in my entire life, and Doug just buys his coffee out, at Dunks or Starbucks. We're really not coffee drinkers, but we did have the foresight to get this small pot for guests who do drink it. And now we know how to use it.

This one is of Doug outside in the backyard looking for our camera. Yes, yes, yes, I realize that I missed the entire middle and end of the party, but that's not my fault. I blame the cats (or the ghosts) for hiding the camera on the file cabinet in the closet. Bad kitties! Must have been revenge for having people come over and interrupt their sleeping routine.

I do think that my uncle Jimmy will email pictures of the party around, and when he does I'll add them onto this post. But the good news is that as Aunt Alice was leaving I asked her if my name was indeed on the holiday party-hosting list, and it is. She said that if I wanted to host the family's annual Christmas party that might be able to be arranged. So perhaps for that party, whether it's this year or next year or whenever, I'll be able to redeem myself with taking pictures.

Update: Uncle Jimmy indeed sent some photos around, so I've attached them here. This first one is of our house. I actually quite like this photo as it's a good shot of the whole place. We don't have one of these yet. This, we think, is the south side of the house. We still haven't figured all that direction stuff out yet, though.

These photos are of people outside having fun. People in these photos: my sister, my niece, my second cousin (or first cousin once removed? I don't know what my cousin's child is to me, honestly), then Jeremy, Mike, Rose the dog, my niece and nephew, and Aunt Alice and Linda. There were more of us outside, but at least Uncle Jimmy didn't lose his camera and was able to take a few shots of the party! Thanks, Uncle Jimmy!

Stuff.

I'm finally home from work. What's wrong with this picture? I get home from work, put some canned chili on the stove for dinner, and then head straight for the computer. Some life, right? I mean, for the past 12 hours I've been staring at my computer screens at work, and now I'm staring at them again. Except that I have only one here at home and it happens to be a lot smaller than the one at work, as well as having a fuzzy white cat plopped in front of it. I like the fuzzy white cat part.

So Doug and I are reaching the point where we are getting tired of social media. Not tired, necessarily, but just lax. I don't Twitter very much anymore, hardly ever go to Facebook, and am blogging less frequently. I haven't lost my enthusiasm for blogging, it's just that I don't feel right blogging unless I have pictures to post. Does anyone want to read anything with just text anymore? Probably not. This is a totally interactive world now, with text, photos, sounds, you name it, blasting at you at all times. My blog should operate as such.

With that being said, I'll post a photo that I haven't posted yet. Don't ask me where this came from or how it got onto the computer, but here's a photo of our wedding day, February 16, 2008, a day I thoroughly enjoyed. This is our Civil War wedding pose, a pose recommended to us by Adam. The photographer put a couple of these photos in our proofs album in a sepia tone, which looks great, but we haven't ordered any of our wedding photos yet. As a matter of fact, I went and tried to order some the other day and couldn't find them anywhere on Anissa's website. Well, it turns out that they're not there anymore. There was a six-month window where we could have ordered photos online, and we've missed it. Now we have to look up the file names of the photos we want on the CD of photos she gave to us, email her the list of file names we want, what color, what size, how many copies, and she'll have them printed up and send us a bill. If only we weren't so slow to order the photos! It would have been a lot easier to just order them online. Ah, well. Maybe that will teach us to get married, go on a honeymoon, buy a house, start a new job, move, and get settled all in about 8 months time. Next time we'll have to pace ourselves a little more so that we have the time, desire, energy, and motivation to do the important things, like buy wedding photos.

Time to rescue the burning chili...

Swimming to sleep.

Well, as predicted, I couldn't wait until post-Internet Librarian to paint the bedroom, so Friday night Doug and I went to Home Despot to get our painting supplies (my mother had taken all of her stuff home with her - rollers, brushes, paint trays, etc., probably thinking that we were done with them for at least 5 years), and then Saturday morning, after Curves, a little housework and a snack, went to this awesome hardware store in Newton to get our paint. I really think that we got the colors in Chris's picture very close to right, or at least one of the colors (the accent wall color, the darker blue). What I am not sure about is whether the picture was quite as nautical looking as our room now looks. Doug and I really do like the color combo, and we LOVE that it is much brighter. The space feels happier, more youthful (though we will need new accessories, like a new blanket for the bed, some new art for the walls, and possibly a new rug, in order to keep the new look consistent), but the space also feels like we're living in an aquarium, or that we're on some kind of pirate ship, looking out across the open ocean, sailing off on the blue seas. I doubt the pictures below will do the shades justice, but trust me, the colors are very... blue.

The below is the accent wall pre-painting. It's a very earthy green color, one I think would be fine in a dining room but for our bedroom was just not working.

This is another view of our bedroom. All the walls save the accent wall were this buttery off-white color, which a) reminded me too much of our bedroom in Newton, and b) was too non-descript for me. We like color, we like punch (we have a purple dining room!), and this color was not punching us. We tried to make it work, but really, why try that hard? Just repaint.

Here are a few photos of the painting process. Really, when you think about it, it didn't take us long to paint the room. We even did two coats! We started around 2pm and we were washing our brushes out and putting the room back together by around 7pm. That's not that bad! We're like pros now.

So, on to the final product, or almost the final product. The painting is done, but the room, as mentioned, still needs some accessorizing. In the meantime, though, we can dream about sailing the high seas in search of treasure as we stare at our Caribbean Blue Water and Baby Boy Blue walls. Thanks, Benjamin Moore! You've done good.