Fingers firmly crossed that we get this AMAZING apartment Nate and I looked at yesterday. Seriously. I would do anything for this apartment.

The moving itch is coinciding nicely with our HGTV viewing habits. If we get the apartment, we're going to paint our black bedframe to make it a more antiqued white. I'm raring to go right now and wish we had a 24-hour Home Depot so I could go look at paint. Oh well, I do have an old folding chair to sand so maybe I'll go lay out some tarp and get to work on that. Lisa, it's the chair that you had given me, like, two years ago that you were driving around with in your truck. :) It's been my desk chair but I want to make it a pretty yellow or blue. :)

Labels: hgdiytvhd, home, tv

I've been combing craigslist for apartments in Boston and found this gem of a listing. I wonder if a psych eval and full physical work-up are part of the screening process, too.

You would be renting directly from me, the owner, so no management company fee or hassles. $300 security deposit and last month's rent at lease signing, then first month's payable at move in.

If you are interested in seeing the place, please write an introduction of your group, what questions you have, what you're looking for/

I'm looking for a cohesive, organized group of responsible people without major cleanliness, noise, financial or clutter issues. I prefer a group where all people will stay the whole lease year without subletting, or if not that at least one Type A person would be there the whole year to provide some continuity and keep things organized. Since the hardwood floors are still fairly new, I'd prefer people who would most of the time not wear shoes in the apartment, this will keeps the floors looking good for a long long time.

Noooooo thank you. Good luck, lady. You should just live in it yourself because you're going to have a hard time getting people to agree to those terms. Even people who are routinely neat and uncluttered and who leave their shoes at the door.

Labels: funny, home, WTF?

A big Mediacrity welcome to Miss Jane Norah. You picked a good time to come into the world. July is a great time to have a birthday! Someday you'll have pool parties and birthday popsicles and birthday trips to the beach and Disney World.

Labels: friends, other bloggers, pictures

We've become hooked on the home decorating channels. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who knows me, I'm a Trading Spaces fan from waaaaaayyyyyy back. When I graduated college my aunt and cousin, also TS fans, took me to see Chicago on Broadway with Paige Davis. That's how dedicated I was.

These days, it's way beyond TS, though. There are shows on small houses, on finding houses, on selling houses, on flipping houses, on houses that don't fit in their surroundings, on doghouses ...

Doghouses?

Yes. Welcome to Barkitecture. The premise is that a family adopts a shelter puppy. How awesome is that? Along with the shelter pup comes the show's vet Karen Tobias and handyman/desigener Kenny Alfonso. Karen teaches the family all there is to know about the dog: breed, temperment, health concerns, dietary needs, things like that. While that's going on, Kenny designs and gets to building the dog house. In the last episode we saw, the hosts arrived with a black german shephed puppy to be a companion to the family's own black shepherd, Scout. What kind of house did these two lucky pups wind up with? Bavarian architecture, of course!

I know a lot of people out there are dog lovers so you have to check this show out. You won't regret it.

Labels: animals, hgdiytvhd, home, tv

Yes, I read Harry Potter. That will have to wait because I want to give some attention to a book that's not breaking sales records. :)

I first heard of Amanda Davis and her tragic death when I was obsessively reading Mc Sweeney's and found their online memorial. Her career, cut so tragically short, piqued my interest and I sought out the two books she had written: Wonder When You'll Miss Me and Circling the Drain. I began reading the former but got distracted and it was shoved on my bookshelf to wait until I thought of it again.

Friday night, that time came. We had preordered Harry Potter from amazon so no 12:01am reading for me. I was avoiding the internet due to the proliferation of spoilers and was restless before bed. I went to the bookcase and selected a few titles I hadn't yet read and brought them to the bedroom to see which one held my interest. Wonder When You'll Miss Me was the first one I picked up and I was drawn in immediately. I don't know what changed between my first attempt and this reading but I couldn't put it down. I forgot all about Harry and his impending arrival. But I can't help but think that maybe I wasn't meant to read it until now, poised as I am to take my own leap of faith.

At its heart, this book is about bouncing back from trusting the wrong people, letting the right people in, and taking that first terrifyingly beautiful leap of faith. It's set in the context of a confused sixteen-year-old girl who is brutally attacked at her high school homecoming dance. She attempts suicide and spends 7 months away in an institution and then at home recovering. When she returns to school she has lost all her fat and looks like a new person, but is the same scared girl inside. She has an imaginary friend of sorts, "the fat girl" who follows her around, always eating, offering advice and cruel taunts alike.

The girl, incidentally named Faith, retaliates against one of her attackers with matched brutality and finds herself on the run. She falls into a circus where she finds a place to belong and begin anew as Annabelle. Most of the circus people have dropped out of society in their own way for one reason or another so no one questions her reluctance to talk about her past. In that, she finds the strength to confront it and move on.

I just hope I'm so lucky to have someone there to catch my safety cables if I should be heading toward landing at the wrong angle.

Labels: books

For my birthday today I got this:



I was supposed to get this, too, but Boston traffic decided that wasn't going to happen:



However, hopefully tomorrow I will get the best gift of all, this:



BUT, my birthday isn't over yet because tonight, while the kiddies are busy buying book 7 (we preordered ours from Amazon), we are going to see this:

Labels: friends, holidays, movies, pictures, weekend

I've been living on mozzerella from Trader Joe's and good, tasty bread. I bought some last night and came home so excited to settle in with my dinner and some To Catch a Predator action but it was not to be. The mozz was somehow off. It SMELLED fine but it definitely did not taste fine. I went back there tonight hoping to exchange it. I packed up the container of it, complete with the bits I had taken bites of, and the receipt and went in ready to defend my case to the death to get me another container.

Well, I walked in, went to the register ... and was done within less than a minute, cash refund in hand. THAT is how life should be.

However, I can't wait to get out to the deli Eric recommended and get me some more authentic cheese.

Tomorrow is the big quarter century. I'm not quite where I'd like to be with my life but that's neither here nor there. I have (most of) my health, I have my sanity, I have my family, I have my friends, I have my husband. The rest is just gravy. If I've learned nothing else in the past year-- hell, the past six months, it's that.

So how about that Harry Potter, huh?

Labels: books, food, thinking

Some more baby pictures of little Mojo. This was his first bath.

 

Labels: animals, mojo, pictures

I dozed off reading on the couch this afternoon. It was a perfect day for it, grey and stormy, thunder lulling me to sleep.

I woke up an hour or so later drenched in sweat, confused, heart pounding. With one hand I found my box of gummy lifesavers while the fingers of the other blindly groped for the slippery black pouch containing my meter. Simultanously shoving a tower of 5 gummy lifesavers (15g of carbs) in my mouth and pricking my right ring finger I waited out of the 5 second countdown for the answer I already knew. 51 mg/dl. Instinct overrode good sense and before I knew it I had eaten a full bowl of cereal and half a bag of Trader Joes Unburied Treasure that Nate had left on the ottoman. Oops.

Fortunately I did get a clear enough head to count up the carbs I had consumed and bolused for them. I'm quite glad I didn't have to draw up a syringe and inject with the shakes. I do not miss that. More often than not I wouldn't give the proper amount of insulin and wind up bouncing/swinging.

I love my pump.

Labels: diabetes, health, pump, stories

My aunt and uncle had a little bbq today sort of for my birthday (less than a week!) and to introduce the new pup, Mojo.

My uncle used to be a chef at an inn so we were really excited for tasty food and were not disappointed. They had grilled chicken and steak and homemade ketchup-type dipping sauce, plus grilled squash and zucchini, and awesome potato salad that my aunt made. I don't normally even EAT potato salad and I had seconds! Then for dessert we had lemon pudding cake that I haven't been able to get out of my mind since the last time I had it over the winter/spring.

Nate had to leave to get to his show but mom and I hung around and went through some stuff mom had gotten from my grandma. Pictures, old letters, cards. Some of it was very funny, like arts-and-crafts projects my aunts and uncles did and groovy 70s fashions.

So back to the pup! He has a long fancy name, Breezy Ridge Someswissgrapeiforget, but he's Mojo for short. Nate took some awesome pictures of the little guy but I just can't wait to show him off so here are some of his puppy pics.

 

 

Isn't he cute? He's a Swiss Mountain Dog and very sweet. When we got there he was pretty sleepy so he dozed under the table a lot. After we ate, as the weather cooled down, he got a lot more rambunctious and started chewing on the (metal) patio table, our feet, my mom's bags, flowers ...

When Nate has those pictures I'll be sure to post them! He's a good little guy.

EDITED TO ADD: Mr. Mojo's first photoshoot is up!

Labels: animals, family, mojo, pictures, weekend

In the wee small hours of the morning, the new layout was born. Most of the time was devoted to finding the exact right shade of green, deciding what color the main text boxes should be, and figuring out how to have a list of the tags/labels I've used in the sidebar without switching my entire blog over to be hosted on blogger's servers.

There are still little things to be done, like putting more blog links and a GoodReads widget, but for right now, I'm just glad everything that's there is working.

Everything is working, right? Please tell me if something isn't. :)

Labels: blog business, tech stuff

Any locals out there that can tell me how I'm supposed to dispose of two spent CFL's? I can't find anything on the West Hartford DPW site but I have a feeling that, with all of WH's draconian trash collection policies, this is something they're pretty specific on.

WHDad? Lisa?

Labels: environment, home, local

No, not for my own blog. A new focus in seeking out other blogs. I keep up with some diabetes message boards, especially since getting Sheldon here. I'd occasionally check blogs people linked. From one of them, Six Until Me, I heard about a social networking site for diabetics, Tu Diabetes and signed up. I've been having fun with it for the past few days, finding some friends, exploring.

The creator of SUM friended me, too, and I checked out her profile and found that she's around my age and from my area so I started reading her blog more and reading what she links to. Through that I discovered dLife and her columns. I've spent a better part of this evening reading them, laughing and nodding along.

I've often toyed with starting a diabetes-focused blog, even set one up on blogger, but I couldn't focus on it, didn't feel I could give it everything I wanted to. Here, I talk about everything from TV to stuff I see around town to, yes, even my health. Everytime I tried to write a diabetes-specific blog, I felt like I was just saying the same thing as everyone else. I'm the kind of perfectionist who gives up before even starting if I don't think I can do it perfectly the first time, I guess. At the same time, when I was going through some of the things I've been though (retinopathy and the associated surgeries, namely) I had a hard time finding personal experiences online. Now, finding all of these other blogs, I feel that maybe I have a place after all. I'll keep thinking about it and reading what others write in the meantime.

And Kerri, if you read this, thanks for sharing your story online and giving me the perspective of someone I can identify with.

Labels: blog business, diabetes, health, other bloggers, thinking

Dan. Dan Dan Dan. I am THRILLED to death that you are once again gracing my TV screen nightly. But WHAT is up with your pro wrestling fixation? I think 70% of your new show has been on the Chris Benoit thing. It's sad, it's horrifying, there are still a lot of questions, but what gives? I'm sure you can find some other people to be panelists on your show than Johnny Be Badd and "Superstar" Billy Graham. No matter how many times Billy Graham tells you you're the man. Hell, I'll come on. I'd be honored and delighted to. We can talk about ... well, mostly I'll just stare at you and giggle. I'm sure we can find something to talk about, though.

xoxo,

Your Biggest Fan

(PS: I took the liberty of entering your name into a wrestling name generator and, yep! You're Hulk Axe!

Labels: celebrities, news, tv, why?

(c) nataliedee.com

Labels: food, funny, health, pictures

Calculate your Live Impact score and your annual carbon output!

Mine was 355. Scores range from 150-900 with a lower score being better. The average score in the US is 325, the average score in Canada is 305. It will also give you tips on how to improve your score. What lowered mine (ours, really, since it's done by household) is the amount of driving we do.

My carbon output was 15.1 tons per year. In the US the average is 20, in Canada it's 17. Interesting that my carbon output is relatively low but my ECP is higher. Maybe that's because we don't travel by air much.

Labels: environment, news

Nate and I did our patriotic Independence Day duty by celebrating with a movie.

We saw Sicko. It was horrifying and sad and funny and enraging. It's flawed in itself, obviously, it's a Michael Moore production after all. I mean, I don't imagine the good doctors of Cuba would have mistreated his little caravan with the cameras rolling.

We can't let that let us lose sight of the message, though. No matter how much posturing and exagerrating and manipulating was or was not done, one thing remains: America's healthcare system is disgusting and criminal. I know socialized medicine and universal healthcare aren't always ideal, either: just ask some Canadians how long they wait for their insulin pumps to be covered. None of that makes what goes in on our country's healthcare system right. It is criminal for doctors, sworn to the Hippocratic oath, to be given bonuses for how many people they kill. They may say it's just denying payment, sure. But it's slow and agonizing murder.

I realize how extraordinarily lucky I've been thus far in my life to get the care I've needed. Tonight, I also realized how close I live every day to being better off throwing myself off the nearest bridge. How I'm one breath away from being buried under medical debts, unable to pay for my insulin, forced to reuse syringes until the needles become too dull to pierce the skin. Because forget about pump supplies. Without insurance for even a few months, I'd never be able to afford this life-saving device.

It's absolutely criminal. Why does a CEO deserve to stave off kidney failure and death more than I do? Why does the president of a company deserve to have both of his fingers reattached without having to make a choice? Why does a trustee's wife deserve to receive a life-saving treatment for her cancer while a billing clerk's husband dies? Why does the infant daughter of an oil executive deserve to be treated at the nearest hospital for a common infection while a bus driver's child dies in her arms after being denied care for not being at the "right" hospital?

We all deserve the same thing. Whether we're democrats, republicans, independents, communists, catholics, protestants, jewish, muslim, satanists, presidents, union workers, retirees, computer programmers, black, white, asian, male, female. We are given life equally and it should be preserved, defended, and treasured equally. We all deserve at least that much.

Labels: health, news, thinking, WTF?

Well, MSNBC's website and guide listing still claim that Scarborough Country is on every weeknight at 9pm but my Dan has been "filling in" quite frequently since Joe's been trying out his morning show.

Tonight, the graphics no longer say "Scarborough Country." This show has a name ("Live with Dan Abrams"), it's own commercial bumpers, it's own sound effects ... dare I dream that my Dan is back on my TV regularly scarcely a year after he left it for the greener pastures of being GM? He looks like he's loving being back on the air, interrupting guests with his trademark irresistible charm and smirk. Well, Eat The Press is giving me cautious hope. As long as this keeps up, 8-10pm will be the greatest two hours of television with Keith Olbermann and Dan Abrams back-to-back. Squee!

And tonight, the long-awaited premiere of a new "To Catch a Predator"!

Can life be any better? Maybe the only way it could would be if Dan resurrected his blog. Oh, and if he brought back the viewer mail segment so I could write in again and hear him say my name on the air. Yes, that did happen once. I nearly fainted.

Labels: celebrities, news, tv

This is how I plan to spend my birthday.

Labels: books

A fun little survey from Alan.

A) Four jobs I have had:
1. Temp
2. Marketing Assistant
3. Office Worker Extraordinaire
4. Daycare Worker

B) Four favourite places I have lived:
1. West Hartford, CT
2. Hartford, CT
3. Clifton, NJ
4. Ridgewood, NJ

C) Four favourite places I have been on vacation:
1. Playa del Carmen
2. Wildwood
3. Disney World
4. Galway

D) Four movies I would watch over and over:
1. Speed
2. Saved!
3. Dirty Dancing
4. A Walk in the Clouds

E) Four big movies I’ve never seen:
1. Citizen Kane
2. Pulp Fiction
3. Gone with the Wind
4. Fight Club

F) Four TV shows I love to watch:
Since it's summer, these answers are a little different
1. Without a Trace
2. Various flavors of Law & Order
3. Next Food Network Star
4. various MSNBC documentaries (Lockup, Dark Heart Iron Hand, To Catch a Predator ...)

G) Four of my favourite singers/bands:
1. The Hold Steady
2. Jesse Malin
3. Bruce Springsteen
4. Colin Hay

H) Four of my favourite singers/bands that people outside of Canada have actually heard of:
I'm not Canadian, eh?

I) Four of my favourite non-alcoholic drinks:
1. Diet Raspberry Snapple
2. Diet Coke
3. Tea
4. Water

J) Four of my favourite alcoholic drinks:
1. Girly bottled drinks like wine coolers
2. Banana margaritas
3. Malibu bay breeze
4. Diet Sprite and Stoli Raz

K) Four things I do just for me:
1. Sleeping
2. Watching crime shows
3. Keeping up with the news
4. Going for drives on nice days

L) Four of my favourite foods:
1. Mozz and good bread
2. Cheesesteak
3. Mac & Cheese
4. Cheesecake

M) Four sites I visit daily:
1. LiveJournal
2. Facebook/MySpace
3. NEY
4. Other blogs

N) Four places I would rather be right now:
1. On vacation somewhere
2. Seeing The Hold Steady live (Boys and Girls in America has been my mopping soundtrack today)
3. Living in Boston
4. New Hampshire

Labels: lists, meme, music, other bloggers, tv