1-21-08

 

A few years ago, when I was shopping in Crabtree and Evelyn, I spotted a box of citrus-scented disposable towelettes on sale, so I grabbed four boxes. When I got home and tried them out, I was very pleased – they’re a nice size, they smell good, and I keep a couple in my purse at all times. I don’t use them all that often, but they are VERY handy to have around. Yesterday, I grabbed one out of my desk to wipe Tommy’s butt (GOD the smell), which is when I realized that I was down to my last three wipes. I Googled around and found them here, offered at 50% off while supplies last, and they’re 53 cents cheaper per box than if you get them directly from C&E. If you have the need for some decent wipes, I recommend them, especially at that price!

 

I spent the weekend alternating between being really hot and really cold. The temperature has dropped, and on Saturday it never got above the mid-30s, which doesn’t sound all that bad but with the wind chill factor it was in the teens. It was actually cold enough that I sucked it up and asked Fred to make a fire in the dining room. He did, and kept it going well all day, but the problem is that the fireplace keeps the dining room nice and warm, but it doesn’t do much for any other room in the house. We turned on the ceiling fan to circulate the heat and put a floor fan in one corner of the room, but the temperature in the hallway never got above 68, and only got that high because that’s what the thermostat was set on. (flickr) Fred didn’t work outside on Saturday because not only was it cold, it was dreary and overcast, and so he went to Closeville and got some movies and some junk food and we were all set. I bundled up under a blanket while we watched our first movie and I wouldn’t say I was “warm” exactly, but I wasn’t too terribly cold, either. Friday night we’d started watching Mr. Woodcock (and only got about ten minutes into that before deciding we weren’t interested in it and stopping it) and one of the trailers at the beginning of the DVD was for Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and we discussed that neither of us had seen Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and maybe we should check it out, so when Fred went to the movie store Saturday morning, he got that. We watched about 20 minutes of Harold & Kumar and were both tired from having just eaten lunch that we decided we needed to pause the movie and take a nap. I only napped for about 15 minutes, then stayed in bed and petted Miz Poo and Elle the Belly and Skittles, and wandered around the house, and stood in front of the fire, and visited the bathroom due to some intestinal distress, and about an hour after we’d paused the movie, we settled down to watch the rest of it. I had to get up several times during the next hour to go to the bathroom, and told Fred not to bother to pause the movie, because I wasn’t THAT interested in it, and besides it was clearly one of those movies you can miss 3/4 of and still not really miss a thing. But at one point I came back from the bathroom and sat down and Fred paused the movie to recap what had happened. “And Kumar said this and Harold said that,” he said (paraphrased). “Wait,” I said. “Who’s Harold?” Fred looked at me. “The asian guy? The one who’s not Kal Penn?” and “You idiot!” was rightly implied but not spoken aloud, because he’s not suicidal. All in all, it wasn’t a bad movie, though if you asked me about any plot points I wouldn’t be able to tell you a damn thing except that Kal Penn, he’s a cutie pie and looks like just the nicest guy on earth. After dinner (for Fred, because I still wasn’t feeling up to par), we settled back down and I whined about how cold I was, even though I was wearing a sweatshirt and slippers and had a blanket over me, and Fred got up and got a quilt and went in the dining room and held it up in front of the fire for several minutes, then came back in and tossed the quilt over me, and it was HEAVEN. We watched The Heartbreak Kid, which wasn’t bad, but it was no There’s Something about Mary, either. The girl who played Miranda, Michelle Monaghan, looks strikingly like Justine Bateman to me. And I usually like Ben Stiller, not least because he just looks like the nicest guy. I feel like I’ve heard that he’s an ass in real life, though. Anyone else hear that, or did I just make it up and decide it was fact? After, Fred put some dorky looking dragon movie in and I read magazines while he watched that (and he went off to warm up my quilt by the fire again a couple of times), and after he fast-forwarded through the movie to see the dragon parts (which he found somewhat lacking), he took the movie out and said “What now? It’s kind of late to start a movie. Do you want to see if we have anything on the DVR?” Which is when I gave him a look to let him know I thought he was crazy, and indicated that it was time to watch us some Arrested Development. We decided before we started watching the DVDs I bought on eBay that we would only allow ourselves to watch two episodes at a time, because otherwise we’d blow through all three seasons in no time flat, and then be sitting around all sad, saying “NOW what are we going to watch?!” We’re halfway through Season 2, and still loving the hell out of it. The more I watch it, the more I appreciate Will Arnett. The more I appreciate all of them, actually. I love the HELL out of that show. We were in bed asleep by 10:00, because we are such the party people. Sunday morning Fred said he thought he’d be working outside on the coop, because it was cold but the sun was shining. He ended up working out there for just a little while before deciding it was too goddamn cold out there, coming inside for breakfast, and then asking if I wanted to go to Nearville to the pet store to see if they had a heated water bowl he could buy for the chickens, and then to Lowe’s because I’d decided that we needed Roman shades for the front room. See, the windows that are directly over the couch where we sit and watch TV in the evenings look out onto the porch, and after we had our most recent visit from the walkin’ dude, Fred went out onto the porch after dark and realized that anyone standing on the porch can see pretty well into the living room, even with the blinds shut. The blinds, I should point out, were pretty close to the cheapest blinds we could buy at Lowe’s last year when we were renovating. We can close them so that the front part of the blinds go down, but if we try to close them the other way – so the front part goes up – they won’t close all the way. Yesterday, when we watched our movies, the blinds didn’t block the light enough, and the light coming through glared off the TV screen, which bothered Fred quite a bit. I decided that putting Roman shades OVER the blinds might be something that could work for us, so I wanted to see what Lowe’s had to offer. Lowe’s had to offer nothing that we wanted, except for one kind of shade that was NOT hideously ugly, but WAS expensive as hell, so we went and looked at the blinds. The blinds the previous owners had hanging in this house were ugly, textured, fake-wood 2″ blinds, and I disliked them so much that I decided ALL fake-wood 2″ blinds were hideously ugly and were not going to hang in MY house. However, yesterday we actually found some very simple, decent-looking fake-wood 2″ blinds at Lowe’s that we liked well enough, so we got three for the windows in the TV-watching area. We’re going to see how well they work, and if they block the light enough, we’re going to replace the blinds in the other three windows in the front room with the same blinds. At the same time, we got blinds to put over the window on the door. The window on the door isn’t completely clear – there’s a pattern there – but if you stand in front of it, you can see well enough in the house if you spend enough time looking, and the idea of someone being able to see that well into the house just creeps me out. (flickr) I think that we might replace the door at some point in the future, but for the time being, the blinds will ensure that no one can see into the house unless we invite them in, and that makes me feel a lot safer. After we left Lowe’s, we drove to three different pet stores looking for a heated water bowl for the chickens. We were unable to find one anywhere, so we finally gave up and came home. After lunch, Fred went and worked on the chicken coop for a couple of hours, then came inside and hung blinds, and I just generally sat around on my dead ass for most of the afternoon (though I did run Lupe the Roomba through her paces in Fred’s room, the rest of the upstairs, and the laundry room, which is not so much me “doing something” as me “instructing the robotic maid to do something while I sit on my dead ass”, and also “rescuing the robotic maid from places where she likes to hung up, ie – the grate in the floor of Fred’s room”) until it was time for dinner. For dinner, I threw together a vegetable medley consisting of sauteed onion, garlic, summer squash, okra, green beans, and dehydrated cherry tomatoes (except for the onion and garlic, we grew everything ourselves!), which we had with leftover turkey and rice casserole. After dinner, we had to say about a thousand times “Wow, that is SUCH a good meal!”, because guess what? It truly is. I’d have to put turkey and rice casserole pretty close to the top of my favorites list, although the making of the turkey and rice casserole (the boiling of the turkey carcass and picking the turkey off the bones) is kind of a pain in the ass. Then we did our usual evening stuff – hanging out on our computers, watching TV, loving on the kitties. Despite the cold, a pretty good weekend. And best of all, it’s a three-day weekend so it’s not over yet!

 

Elle the Belly makes herself at home. She’s such a sweet girl!

 

Previously 2007: No entry. 2006: No entry. 2005: Yeah, it doesn’t take a whole lot to make us laugh, I guess. 2004: Now isn’t there anything we can do to force Joey Buttafuoco back into obscurity? 2003: So if you meet me in person and expect a “Mighty fucking fine to meet you, fuckface!”, you’ll likely be disappointed. 2002: Wrong on that one, Brigitte. Trust me. 2001: No entry. 2000: No entry.]]>