grrr

Another quick one. The final walk through on the house did not go as expected. Aaron said he was pretty sure it was going to happen, but I was pretty disappointed and irritated. Basically, we gave them a list of nine things to do, and they only got five of them fully completed. The rest were either half-done, or not done at all. I can't remember everything, but the air conditioning unit was not fully wired, the furnace was not fixed and cleaned out, the garage still had debris and the rotted sheet rock had not been pulled off the walls, and the washer and dryer were ALMOST ready to go, but the dryer was not fully hooked up to the gas, and there was no line leading to the outside of the home for venting purposes.

What does this mean for us? We can't do our closing today as we planned. We're going to try to push it back to Friday (our Realtor will let us know today if that's possible). It also means that we'll have to do one more final walk through before closing, which means I'll likely have to take more time off work than I would just for the closing to drive down to the house, back to work, and then go to the closing office (which happens to be in the same office complex that I work in, so that's good).

Well, they were close, but no cigar.

I'll let you know how Friday goes.

quick "hello"

Sorry for the lack of posts the last couple of weekends - we seem to be really busy all the way up through Sunday nights lately, and I haven't had time to recap the week.

We close on the house this Wednesday, the 22nd! I'm really excited, and can't wait to get everything in the house and out of the apartment. We've been really busy packing, and trying to hang out with friends as well, so not much time to blog.

I'll try to post more later, maybe after we move!

house, wedding, packing update

Well, this weekend has been VERY productive. We've got all of our seasonal clothing and coats packed, most of the kitchen packed, more living room stuff, and a little bit more bedroom and bathroom stuff packed away and in the garage. We still have four weeks left until we move, but I prefer the slow and steady pace to trying to pack up the entire apartment in a week before moving.

We got a lot of the house paperwork taken care of yesterday as well, and it just now needs to be sent off to our mortgage loan lady, which I'll do on Monday from work. We tried to do it from Aaron's work yesterday, but the scanner wasn't working right, and then we couldn't get into my work building on the weekends. Oh well.

Wedding invitations are almost done. I just have to print off directions, get a map back from a friend of Aaron's who offered to draw it up for us, print that out, and they're done! I'll be so happy to get them out of my hair! I don't know what I was thinking, needing to make them myself. But I guess it's given me a lot of time to figure out what kind of wording I want to use, as I just do one piece at a time. If I'd ordered invites, I would have had to figure out all the wording at once.

Today, we may spend some time cleaning behind the fridge and the stove. We'll have to do it SOMETIME, and Aaron figures doing it now once, and then going over it again right before we move out is the best way to go. Not as much elbow grease needed in the end.

Well, I'm out here in the living room, nursing a headache, and Aaron's in bed because he didn't come in to sleep until 1am or something like that, so it's probably going to be a slow start to the day. Which is fine with me...

Rock the Garden

This Saturday, Aaron, Bret, Jess, and I went to Rock the Garden at the Walker Art Center / Sculpture Gardens. It was SO MUCH FUN. The opening group was Solid Gold, a local group, then Yeasayer, a group out of Brooklyn, NY who have a very African tribal feeling to them, Calexico, a band from Phoenix, Arizona, who use a lot of horns and sound a little "south of the border," and then The Decemberists closed the set.

We arrived close to 4pm, with the first concert starting at 4:30. Everyone quickly grabbed their beer tickets, and I got me some cherry lemonade (since I don't drink beer). We found our spot on the lawn, set up camp, and the concert soon started. It was sunny and 85 degrees outside. We actually took the bus from Bret and Jess' house to the gardens so we wouldn't have to worry about parking.

Solid Gold is an interesting band - popular in Europe, but based out of the Twin Cities. We weren't sure how they'd translate from studio performance to live - but were pleasantly surprised! They were great! Yeasayer and Calexico were bands I'd only heard a couple of songs from on the radio, both were very good. Lastly were The Decemberists, performing their new CD, Hazards of Love, which is a concept album, all the songs go together to create a story. I'd only heard the whole album once, but it was great live, and I was happy they sang 4-5 other songs from their earlier CDs after the set. They ended with "Crazy on You" by Heart, because they have two female singers who were AMAZING. Very powerful vocals, and they were both able to pull of that song.

We walked downtown to have some drinks and food after the concert, and grabbed a cab back to Bret and Jess' to end the evening. I wore tons of sunscreen and was lucky to not get burned.

All in all, a very good, very long day. I am excited to see who they bring out next year!

Today is mostly a day of recovering from being out in the sun for 6-7 hours, working on wedding invites, and maybe we'll get around to doing some cleaning, too.

House!

On Monday, we made an offer on a house that we'd seen the week before. They countered, we countered, and they accepted, all within the span of three hours! I was so happy, I couldn't even concentrate on work for the rest of the afternoon.

So we had our inspection on the house on Friday, and things went very well. There are still a lot of things that need fixed up, especially in the basement and garage, but most of them are required by law to be done, and the sellers will be required to fix all of them before we move in.

I took a ton of pictures while we were doing the inspection, as the pictures aren't available on the realty website anymore. There are a lot of pictures of the basement, since I wanted to document the areas that needed to be fixed by the sellers. Here's the link, as I don't want to post them all on the blog right now.

Saturday, Aaron's company was having a "garage-less" garage sale of some old computer hardware, servers, etc. It started at 10am, ended at 2pm, and we saw all of two people come in the whole time. I brought the laptop with me, and the PSP to keep me entertained with some video games. We ate lunch, ran to IKEA to look at some window dressings and curtain rods, as each of the rooms in the house have two windows, and we're very close to the neighbors on the right. Then, one of my co-workers had a party at her house in a suburb of St. Paul, so Aaron and I went there for some drinks and tacos, schooled them all at Guitar Hero, World Tour, and headed to the Bret and Jess' house for dinner and Rock Band, drinking, and dice games. It was a fun time, we haven't done that in a while.

Today, we had planned on pulling out the stove and fridge and cleaning behind them, in preparation for moving out of here and into the house. Well, that never happened, but we did manage to go to the grocery store and get all of our laundry done for the week. I've been getting boxes for packing at work - mostly printer paper boxes, which are good because they're small, but sturdy, and you can't over pack them or make them too heavy. Others have been HUGE, and I have no idea what we're going to pack in them. Linens and pillows? I use the boxes at work and make forts at my desk, no stinky boys allowed, of course, and tear them down at the end of the day to take home. It keeps me and my co-workers quite entertained, that's for sure.

Well, I think that's it for my update, until next time!

what's going on?

Well, when my own MOTHER Tweets about me not updating my blog, that only means one thing: the world is coming to an end. I mean, I'd better update.

So apparently I haven't updated since we looked at the first house. Well, we've since looked at five other houses, and might be considering one of them, but would like to look around a bit more. The house is in a nice area, needs some TLC, and has cool personality, but has a railroad track just on the other side of the backyard fence, which I hear from EVERYONE will hurt the resale value when we're ready to leave it.

The next weekend, I don't really know what we did. The weekend of May 16th and 17th was spent hanging out with old friends from Spearfish, SD who came to Minneapolis for the graduation of another hometown friend. People came from Illinois, Iowa, Colorado, and South Dakota for the graduation. We ate out a lot, reminisced, watched funny videos, ran all over tarnation and back, and generally had a good time. Oh, and we saw our friend graduate college! It was a great time, and great to see everyone again. I wish we could do it again soon, but I think the next time that will happen will be in October for the wedding. Which is better than another year from now!

This last weekend was super busy! Aaron's parents showed up Friday evening, and my college roommate and maid of honor, Jill, showed up on Saturday. Jill got her bridesmaid dress ordered, we checked out some malls in the area, including the outlet mall in Albertville. We grilled out at the campground Aaron's folks were staying on Saturday and Sunday night, introduced Jill to some friends and Rock Band, Jill and I saw the Sculpture Garden in the downtown area on Monday, and all five of us went to the Twins vs Red Sox game at the Metrodome. Jill is a big Sox fan (booo!) and of course the rest of us rooted for the Twins. It was a fairly uneventful game until the bottom of the 9th inning when they finally brought Joe Mauer out to bat and he hit a two-run homer, which put us only a point behind with one out to go. Of course we didn't win because the next batter hit a pop fly right to center field, but it was still fun.

Back to work on Tuesday, which was very busy and a little chaotic near the end, which ended with me having to stay an extra half an hour before I left due to putting out some fires with some clients on the phone. Put me in a sour mood. But I got the bird crap washed off my car after work, and that perked me up a little.

So, there you have it. My last two to three weeks. Happy?

Weekend news

Had a pretty productive weekend. On Friday, Aaron and I went to look at a house w/ our Realtor...the price was right, and it was in a really nice neighborhood. Unfortunately, it had been severely neglected by the last tenants, who were probably college kids with smelly dogs, because the house reeked of dog urine, and had been completely gutted, there was only a skanky old fridge, a washer, and a dishwasher as far as appliances go. The main floor wasn't too bad, aside from the kitchen, the upper floor was weird, with two tiny rooms created, they were seriously the size of my cubicle at work, and the basement was horrendous. There was also an in-ground pool in the back yard that was in need of major repairs or just being torn out of the yard.

The house tour was Friday morning, by the time I made it back to work, it was already off the market. Aaron said that made the decision that much easier, because he didn't really want to waste a lot of money tearing out a pool, and the house, especially the kitchen and basement, needed a lot of work.

Friday night I was invited to play in a double-header softball game by one of my co-workers, so while I was doing that, Aaron went over to a friend's house to play some video games and have some drinks. He ended up spending the night, and once he got home on Saturday morning, we went to the Paper Depot to get the wedding envelopes cut out so I could get them all folded.

Saturday night we saw X-Men Origins: Wolverine with a couple of friends - great movie, I thought, but probably because I got to drool over Hugh Jackman for almost two hours.

Today has been mostly cleaning and laundry, as usual. Possibly some grocery shopping. And maybe some tacos for dinner. Mmm, tacos.

Fires

I forgot one thing about this weekend. As Aaron and I were driving home from Will's house on Saturday night, there was a firetruck hauling butt on the bridge at our exit, heading in the direction of our apartments. Then, as we got closer to our exit, as police car was hauling butt to get to our exit, and to also head towards our apartments. The air was thick with smoke, and smelled like burning rubber or plastic. Once we made it to our exit and over the bridge, we couldn't initially tell where the smoke or fire was coming from.

This all made me a bit anxious, because I can't imagine something much worse than coming home to find all of your possessions destroyed, and being homeless, because of someone else's carelessness. What really made me anxious was the thought of Odin still in the apartment. If our apartment was on fire, he'd have no way of escaping. Sure, if someone came into the apartment to check for people, he might run out into the hallway...but what if no one did? Ugh, it just made me sick thinking about it as we approached our turn. As we got closer, we realized that the fire was actually coming from across the street in a different apartment complex, and that it wasn't anywhere near our building. I felt much better after that, but still a little odd.

Aaron and I drove by that apartment complex this morning before we headed out for breakfast, checking the windows of all the rooms, and not finding anything. Aaron had seen flames when we turned on to our street. Then he noticed it: two silver cars, burnt and melted, from the inside out, in the parking lot of that apartment complex. We aren't sure what happened, but Aaron thinks one of the cars was being jump started, and something went terribly wrong.

more weekend adventures

So I never posted about last weekend when Aaron's folks were in town because we kept ourselves pretty busy that entire weekend. Friday the arrived and we ate a nice dinner, took a walk around our mile long path at the French park that Aaron and I had been to before, came home, then called it a night. On Saturday, we were up fairly early, and headed to downtown Minneapolis to go to the Mill Ruins Park in the old industrial area of downtown where a lot of flour mills used to be. It's right off the Mississippi River, and all in all, we walked around almost 6 miles that day. We stopped in the middle of our walk to get pizza at Punch. After that walk, I forget what we did for dinner, but I remember there was napping involved. We did watch the baseball game in the in-laws-to-be's hotel room, then headed home.

On Sunday, we drove around a bit to kill some time, got me some potting soil to plant my flower seeds, and went to the Twins vs Angels game (we won!). After the game, we had soup and sandwiches for Randy's birthday dinner, did some more hanging out, and then his folks left for the night, and left for South Dakota the next morning. They'll be back next month on Memorial Day weekend as they pass through the state again.

This weekend was not terribly exciting, as there was impending doom (see: rain) all day Saturday, and rain all day on Sunday.

Friday was pretty lame - Aaron ended up having to stay late at work because some crap was blowing up all day, and they got it mostly fixed by the end of the day, but as son as he got home, it started happening again, so he had to go back to work, and didn't get home until 2:30am. We hung out with some friends on Saturday night, after spending most of Saturday in Aaron's car, driving around. We ran a few errands, not really getting much, but we drove through quite a few neighborhoods, looking at houses and areas, seeing what we liked. We drove WAY out West of the cities, to a town called Mound, which is near all these lakes. Apparently there were some houses at a good price, but that would be a ridiculous commute.

Today was a rainy day - spent most of it cleaning the apartment, running a few errands, and going out for breakfast, something we haven't done since probably November when my parents were in town.

I planted my flower seeds and Odin's cat-grass on Tuesday after work - his grass is already about three inches high, and he LOVES it. My three flower pots each have a few teeny little sprouts! I'm very excited about those, can't wait to see all the different blooms that come from them. I've been keeping them inside the apartment for now, Aaron was worried the birds might come on the deck and eat the seeds, but I think I can start putting them on the deck now that they've sprouted.

We finally gave up on toilet training the cat. He gets upset when we have company over, and ever since Aaron's folks showed up, he's been pooping in the bath tub non-stop. So I've given up, he wins. He gets his covered litter box back. Dumb, stubborn cat.

And those are my last two weekends in a nutshell!

Walk

Went for a walk today with Aaron on a trail that goes by Medicine Lake, which is in the French Park off of Highway 9. I remembered to bring my camera this time!


Someone put a stuffed raccoon in a log - thought that was pretty cute

Things are just starting to bud and soon will bloom

Cat tails by Medicine Lake's shore

Me and Aaron

Interesting trees - wish they had leaves on them

Down the path we go

Aaron loves having his picture taken...or not.

Aaron dared me to lick it, but I didn't want poison ivy or something all over my tongue.

Hopefully we'll be able to go for a walk on the weekends out here this summer. I think admission to the park is free for now, but we may have to pay a season pass once it is officially opened. Not sure when that will be. And we can always go walking around at the bird sanctuary again, and you just have to pay for parking there.

Aaron's folks are going to be in town this coming weekend, so that's going to be fun. We'll be going to a baseball game on Sunday, and I don't really know what we have planned for the rest of the weekend. Now that we have our venue booked, I think it would be fun to take them INTO the Earle Brown Heritage Center and show them the room that we reserved.

Aaron bottled his beer this weekend - it's his first attempt at a recipe, not a kit, so there were LOTS of hops in the bottom of the beer keg when we were bottling - the tap got plugged up a couple of times, and we ended up bottling the last two by straining it through a cheese cloth, into a funnel, and then into the bottle. We'll see how those turn out! They'll be in the closet for another couple of weeks to a month, going through their second fermentation, and getting all bubbly.