Twinkies

Another un-eventful week in the books.  Friday night, the CFO and I went out to dinner with some friends and rented the movie “Identity Thief.”  The movie had so much potential, but moved much slower than I would have liked.  I give it an “Ehh, I’ve definitely seen worse and better movies."

Saturday was a near perfect July day, the high temp was only about 80 degrees and it was just cloudy enough where the sun light was filtered and wasn’t beating down on us. We had some discount coupons for a couple of nurseries, so we went plant shopping and picked up a couple accent plants.  We spent the afternoon outside, me working off and on in the yard (mixed in with some lounging) while the CFO read a book while sitting out on the deck.  

The new additions to the garden  

 

Sunday was a repeat of Saturday weather wise, so I slapped a paint brush in the CFO’s hand and said, “Get to work.”** We spent the afternoon staining the deck railing and we have now stained everything above the deck's support structure… Now all we have left to stain are the stair treads and then the entire underside of the deck since, unfortunately, it is visible when you stand in the back yard.  Whose idea was it to stain the deck a color instead of using a clear sealer?!?!?! (The CFO's for the record) Next time, we will take her dad’s advice and pay someone to do this work. 

For me, painting is on that list of things that you hate to do; but you eventually forget that you hate doing it; until you start to do it again a while later; which reminds you that you don’t enjoy doing it; but you’ve already started doing it so it is too late to turn back; so you suffer through completing the task; all the while telling yourself that you will never, EVER do it again; only to eventually forget that you told yourself that you would never do it again; and then, at some point down the road, the cycle repeats...  Not surprisingly, I can’t remember what else is on that list, but I’m sure there are other things…

Are you supporting the sweetest comeback ever?  I am... 

**I actually politely asked her to help, but that doesn’t make for good blog reading, does it?  

Before and after (2013)

Our bed and breakfast was closed for maintenance this weekend, it was just me and the CFO.  On satruday morning, we decided to enjoy the unusually mild weather and went down to a botanical garden near Champaign, IL.  It eneded up being pretty small, so it didn’t take us too long to walk through it… We decided to eat lunch and then continue south to the outlet mall.  Surprise, surprise, a trip with the CFO ended up with shopping.

That night we went to see the movie, “The Heat” and got many laughs out of it.  It was funny to watch two talented female actresses do the good cop/bad cop thing.  As long as you don’t mind foul language, you should see it.  On Sunday, we went to church, out to lunch and then I spent the afternoon working in the yard.  After hosting guests for two weekends, I was a little behind on weeding my seeded areas. 

A good friend of mine suggested doing some before/after images of the yard.  Surprisingly, I don’t have a ton of before photos, but I was able to find some and then went out and shot some similar images.  Unfortuantely, the house is shading part of the yard so the photos aren't the greatest...  



 A view to our neighbor to the left:

 

 

Looking back towards the corner, including the utility boxes I've been working to hide:

 

From the back of the yard looking back towards the house:

 

A view along the creek looking towards our left neighbor:

 

 

 

It is by no means close to done, but I have made some good progress, while working on a shoe string budget.  I should try to total up what I've spent on plant material so far, but it hasn't been too much since almost everything was bought on clearance, as a small bareroot twig or grown from seed.

I could do that! (well, maybe)

Our Bed and Breakfast was booked again this weekend, with the CFO’s parents visiting us for the Fourth of July holiday.  They were scheduled to arrive on the 4th around 5pm, so I re-arranged my work schedule so that I could work on the 4th and be off on Friday the 5th.  That gave me a 3 day weekend instead of being off on Thursday and having to go back to work on Friday.  Who would want to do that and why was I the only one in our company to think of this solution?

Even though I wasn’t working on Friday, I still rolled out of bed at 4:40 and went to the gym.  The tough spin instructor (A.K.A. my favorite one [because I like to be abused, I guess]) was doing a 1.5 hour “challenge” ride instead of our normal 45 minute class.  Considering the fact that it was double the time I normal spend in class, I still managed to survive and enjoy it.  I cranked out 37 miles during the class... go me.  Unfortunately, I’m not sure how many calories I burned, because my heart rate monitor and the bike computer have stopped talking with each other.  I typically burn around 900 in a 45 minute class, so I could probably estimate that I doubled that number.

After I returned home and got cleaned up, we all drove up to the furniture store where we bought our couch.  The CFO and her mom love to shop for furniture (well, they really enjoy shopping for just about anything, expect maybe puppies or kittens) so we went looking for accent chairs and/or lamps.  We didn’t find anything, but had a good time roaming around the store…  We hit Chick-fil-a in Peoria on the way home, which was a huge plus for me!

Speaking of furniture, the CFO’s parents brought a chair back to us that they had been holding in their basement until it could be reupholstered.  The chair came from my grandmother's house (dad's side) and it is something that I have been wanting to redo for a long time.  There were some serious debate regarding fabrics for the chair and the CFO won out on this one… hence the pink back.  The final product ended up being very bold, but the colors do tie in with our new green couch.  I’ll admit that this isn’t the color scheme that I would have picked first, but it is growing on me.  We have one other chair from that same grandmother’s house, but we have yet to negotiate a color scheme for it yet.  Who knows how long that will take.

Before:

I don't know how old this chair is, but it had been this color as long as I can remember.  Some of the seams were ripped and it had just seen better days.  (as a side note, I've always considered this chair's color as green, several people have been arguing that it is gold, but I don't see that)

 

After:

 

 

 

I told you that it was bold... 

 

On Saturday, we tried to beat the heat and went to Uptown Normal for the Sugar Creek Art Festival as soon as the gates opened in the morning.  Evidently a lot of people had the same idea because the place was packed.  There were artists from all over the country, including a few from Georgia.  Some of them were really talented, some just didn’t suit my tastes and then there were a few artists whose work made me immediately think, “Hell, I could do that.”  Most of those were photographers who had broken a single landscape photo into 3 sections, printed each of them onto a canvas and then hung the 3 canvases side by side by side.  It creates a cool look, but not one that I would pay 800 bucks or more for…  Time to grab the camera and fire up photoshop!  We need some stuff to hang in the living room, so I think that I might make this is my new photography goal. 

By the time we walked the whole show, a couple items still stood out to us so we circled back and made a couple purchases, including this painting from a lady in Missouri.  It is brightly colored and ties in well with our glass pieces (and the new pink chair).

 

After church on Sunday, the CFO’s dad and I went to see the movie “White House Down” while the girls went out shopping.  The movie started out a little slow, but the pace definitely picked up later on, with a couple little twists along the way.  While I don’t really consider Jamie Foxx to be a serious actor (but more of a comedian), he did a good job in the film. 

The purple cone flowers that I seeded in the backyard three springs ago are putting on a serious show this year.  I really like how they have become a wave of color across the yard (just as I had planned it, I might add), but it makes me mad that the black eyed Susan's that I seeded at the same didn’t establish as well.  I really wanted sweeps of each color intertwined with each other… I will make a second attempt to reseed the black eyed Susan's this fall.

This is the view from the master bathroom in the house that they are building beside our house.  It is a nice view of our yard, I wonder if the future owners would mind if I took a photo from here next year?  You can see the wave of purple cone flowers in the back, don't pay any attention to the dead weeds in the foreground.

 

Which brings me to another issue: Since I have been knee deep in weeding, mulching and trying to get plants established, I can’t seem to really enjoy the yard yet.  People come over and say, “it looks beautiful,” and I can’t just respond with a simple “thanks.”  Instead, I have to say, “eh, it’s a work in progress,” or “well… there are a ton of weeds out there.”   I guess that I am the only one who knows that a plant over there has died and left a hole in the grouping, or the fact that the back area along the fence line is all weeds because the seeding didn't take, or that parts of the maple tree died and after I pruned out the dead, it looks lop sided.  It is one of those “I can’t see the forest for the trees” kind of thing.  I need to just build a fire in the fire pit, roast some marshmallows and sit back and enjoy the garden.

Do I expect too much?

The CFO’s brother and his fiance flew in for a weekend visit, arriving late Thursday evening.  I went to the gym and work as usual on Friday while the CFO entertained them.  The CFO was also in charge of meeting the installer for our much anticipated living room and kitchen window treatments at 3:00pm on Friday.  It took over 2 years of off and on shopping to find a material that the CFO liked and then another 6 weeks to have the shades made.  At around 3:30pm, I received a text message from her saying “they look awful.”  “Oh great,” I thought.   We just spent a chunk of money on these roman shades and she doesn’t like how the material looks.  I hoped that she was just over reacting a little, so I didn't dwell on it..

When I arrived home after work, I immediately saw why she didn’t like them.  It wasn’t the color/pattern of the material or how they were put together, it was the fact that sunlight blasts right through the back liner and the material, totally whiting it out, except for a 1.5” band around the edge where the material was doubled over for a hem.  She was right, they looked like crap.  I immediately got on the phone with our representative at Lowes and, of course, since it was after 5pm on the east coast, she would have to wait until Monday for a resolution.  As the weekend went on, our unhappiness with the shades got worse.  At 6:30 am in the morning, when the sun is on the OTHER side of the house (these windows face west), they are still washed out by the indirect sunlight.  The only time you can see the true look of the fabric is when it is pitch black outside.

 

I took this photo in the early morning, when the sun was rising on the OTHER side of the house.

 

This one should give you an idea of how dark the fabric actually is, look at the valance at the top or the side where it is folded over.

 

It will be interesting to see how this works out, since these were custom ordered.  However, we were never told that the material would wash out in sunlight, even with a liner behind it.  Why would they even sell a fabric for shades that can’t block sunlight?   Hell, if this was the look that we were after, we could have spent $10/each for some cheap roller shades that would give us the same look.  Some of you are probably laughing because this kind of crap always seems to happen to me…  It made me start to wonder, do I expect too much?

On Saturday night we all went to see Darius Rucker perform outside at the Corn Crib, our minor, minor, minor league baseball stadium.  Just like last year's show at this venue, it rained all day, stopping just in time for the show.  Considering the fact that it rained all day, we really lucked out and had a nice cool and dry evening to watch the show, it was almost perfect.  Our seats were one row back from the baseball dugout and the front of the stage was sitting behind second base.  A group of 6 women and 2 men in their 40’s-late 50’s came and sat in front of us.  As my luck would have it, the two women in front of us were chatty Cathy’s and they talked all through the two opening acts.  I bit my tongue through those two acts and the CFO, seeing my frustration, kept giving me the “just ignore them” look.

I don't know why I keep posting blurry, Iphone photos of concerts, but here is another...

 

After they talked through the first two Darius songs, I had finally had it.  When I say “talked,” I should really say “shouted” because that is what they were doing.   When the music got louder, they just talked louder.  It is entirely possible that they didn’t realize how loud they were being, but I could hear every word that they were saying and it was driving me nuts.  Having observed the fact that the two guys in their group were both bigger than I am (wearing wranglers and boots, of course…), coupled with the fact that they were knocking back miller lites one after the other, I knew that I had to be somewhat tactful with my approach.

Halfway through the third song, I finally couldn’t take it any more so I leaned forward towards the two ladies and said, “I don’t know if you came here to have a conversation or to listen to a concert, but I came here for the concert, not to hear the two of you talk.”  I wasn’t sure how my comment would be received, so I just sat back in my seat and refocused my attention towards the stage.

One of the ladies looked shocked and pissed, like I had just kicked a 50 yard field goal with her toy poodle… How dare I say such a thing to her?  The other seemed somewhat more understanding and looked back and offered a half-hearted “Sorry.”  The good news is that they were much quieter through the rest of the concert and they didn’t mention it to the rest of their group.

I know the CFO wasn’t happy that I spoke up, but talking during a concert is like talking at the movie theater… you just shouldn’t do it.  We have had talkers around us at the last couple shows that we have gone to, I don’t know if is a function of me buying cheap seat tickets or if people in general are just getting more rude and inconsiderate.  I have a feeling that it is the latter, which is really sad.  What is this world coming to?  When you go to a concert (or a movie, show, etc.),  I don’t care if you sing along or occasionally comment on “how hot the performer is,” but otherwise, please shut the @#$% up and enjoy the show.  You can talk about it after it is over.  Yet again I ask: do I expect too much?

We headed up to Chicago late Sunday morning and went to Gino’s East, a Chicago style pizza place.  This was our second attempt at Chicago Style pizza, having not really enjoyed the first place that we tried.  The waitress took our order and informed us that it took about an hour to make the deep dish Chicago style… I thought to myself, “if it takes that long, it better be good.”  When the pizza arrived, the waitress explained that Chicago style means the sauce is on top… yes, the layers are the deep dish crust, then the cheese, the toppings and then the sauce.  You pretty much have to eat it with a knife and fork.  Gino’s tasted much better than the last one we tried, but I still wasn’t wowed by it.  I prefer a more doughy crust and this crust was more crumbly.  Perhaps I really do expect too much.

 

We then walked to Navy pier to go on an architectural river boat cruise.  Finally, something that met my expectations!  The guide was enthusiastic, very knowledgeable about architectural terminology and the history of the local buildings.  We saw some great views of the buildings, some of which you just don’t get walking on the crowded downtown sidewalks.  After doing this tour, I would definitely like to go back and take a more detailed walking tour of some of the buildings with the architectural society, the town is full of interesting architectural history.  And then, 45 minutes into our 1 hour tour, it happened.  Our inexpensive, small digital camera (I didn’t take the SLR because I was worried that it might rain) flashed “battery low” and promptly shut off. Seriously?!  The batteries can't make it through one hour of snapping photos?  

Yes, it is official, I do expect too much.