Pittsburgh

On the second weekend in November we had a gathering of Butlers in Pittsburgh.  Andrew and Mindy live just north of the city. Maryanne and Jared and the kids made the long pilgrimage back to the land of their residency from Iowa, and Tom and I drove across the state because - hey, Pittsburgh is a lot closer than Iowa.  It was a whirlwind of a weekend, but really fun.  We were grateful that the weather was gorgeous.

Below are photos of some of the highlights.  Unfortunately, we don't have any pictures from the other highlight of the weekend which, of course, was Saturday evening with Andrew and Mindy.  It was really fun to see them, to see their new house and to meet Elizabeth. The boys were hilarious and as exuberant as ever.  Almost as soon as we walked in the door Parker and Cole wanted to show us their room.  They told us that because of the sloping roofline in their room, they couldn't push the beds up against the walls.  They then proceeded to demonstrate how they could climb over the top of the bed, down to the floor on the opposite side and pop up from underneath.  We love those kids!!  We're so glad we get to see them more frequently now that they are in the same state. We also got to catch up with our good friends Jack and Maya who stayed with us for three months this summer - they really are sweet cats.  We ended up staying much later than we intended but see that as evidence that we were having a great time - we hope Andrew and Mindy see it the same way too.

Here are our adventures with Maryanne and Jared and the kids:

Delicious Indian food for lunch at the playground in Squirrel Hill:

Temporarily resting at the Science Museum:

On Sunday, we enjoyed the children's program at church and then ran into these two:

Levi and Emily (Nelson) Dean (this is such classic Emily that I had to post it).  It was really fun to see them.  We definitely got confused looks from some folks at church who wondered how on earth we knew each other - Brooklyn, of course!

Lunch after church at Schenley Park - the place was packed on such a gorgeous afternoon.

 I love this picture of Eli - too bad he was just about to throw the ball at the stroller.

Thankfully, Isaac didn't wake up.

It's funny how Pittsburgh seems so familiar and homey after visiting Maryanne and Jared there for so many years.  It was nice to see the usual sights and places and, of course get time to visit with lots of family and unexpectedly bump into old friends.  Unfortunately, after lunch, Tom and I had to say goodbye and head home.

My New Friend

I never thought I could be so excited about a new vacuum, but this thing is great.  Some of you have already heard my raves about it.  Here are the details with pictures. Our old vacuum was fantastic on the carpet in our old apartment, but we don't have carpet anymore and it was terrible on our hardwood floors.   I'm not expecting this one to perform on the carpets, but it is a master of the hardwood floors.

Here is what I love about it:

1.  It works - this thing has major suction.  I can see it pulling stuff out from the cracks in the floorboards (yes - our floors are that dirty). The suction is also adjustable with the little dial on the back so it doesn't eat the couch or rug or curtains (for those people who vacuum curtains).

2. It's light - somewhere around 12-13lbs.  I have been appreciating this more and more lately.

3. All of the wheels swivel.  This is an awful feature on an Ikea shopping cart - hello knees feeling like they're getting ripped apart - but something I can get behind in a vacuum. It follows more smoothly and it's easy to kick out of the way.

4. The attachments all hook into to a small collar at the base of the hose so it's really easy to switch between them.  There's no need to open the thing up.  The attachments aren't fancy, but work just fine for us.

5.   Telescoping wand - maybe the best thing ever.  Moving between floors, stairs, furniture and just getting into tight spots is so much easier because of this.  You also don't have to figure out where to put a section of the wand if you do take it out.  Look at all those notches!  That's a lot of flexibility!

6. It has built-in solutions to the problem of what to do with the wand that flops all over the place in storage.   A wedge (not the right word, but it isn't coming to me right now) on the back of the floor foot slides into a slot either on the back of the vacuum for storing it with the canister horizontally or a slot on the underside of the canister for vertical storage or to simply carry it all with one hand.  Also a strong contender for being the best thing ever.

7.  Its entertainment value - at least when you have a dopey cat who is more than willing to face off with it.  All other cats we have had, or that I know of, run and hide at the slightest movement of the vacuum - not Bert, he prepares for battle.

These are things I can get behind.

Wallpaper-Free

After months of scraping and chiseling and spraying inordinate amounts of soapy water onto our walls, they are finally clear.  It finished with a fantastic day with friends and family.  I've been talking about scraping wallpaper, but it really was more than that.  At some point in our home's history, somebody got the grand idea of skim-coating a layer of plaster over the wallpaper and then painting over that.  Things would have moved a lot faster had it not been for that skim-coat.  There were large sections where we were literally chiseling a 1/16-1/8" layer of junk off the walls in order to get down to the plaster.  Here is the transformation of our parlor and dining room from chocolate milkshake brown to bare plaster.

Before:

June 2:

July 27:

September 15:  Making a Mess

Part of the border exposed

Tools of Destruction:  ladder, scraper, spray bottle of soapy water, trash can.  Not pictured: utility knife for scoring skim coat, putty knives

October 12:

Cool Discovery:  Name and Date written on the plaster.  Dated either May or November 9, 1938.    Next to the name and address is the word "pastemonkey"  Perhaps this was the person who did the wallpaper.  

October 27: Work-Day at the House.  Unfortunately, we didn't take quite enough pictures - so we don't have pictures of Kristen and Justin and Tom's parents scraping, scrubbing and sanding away at our walls - but are grateful for their help on a long, productive day.  By the end, we were wallpaper-free - yay!!!

...End Intermission

So we've had the "technical difficulties" post up for the past couple of months, but we really can't blame all of our inactivity on that.  I wish I could say that we've just been doing so much on the house that we've been too exhausted to post, but that has not been the case.   In reality, we just haven't gotten very much done - so there hasn't been much to tell.  There have been a number of reasons for this - beginning with one crazy Memorial Day weekend (the week before our old laptop kicked the bucket).

We made a little discovery on Memorial Day -  we have wallpaper in the dining room and parlor.  How did we discover this?  - you might ask...by removing the switch-plates in preparation for painting, naturally.  Tom unscrewed the switch-plate in the dining room and, instead of popping off, it ripped off with a three-foot long section of wallpaper.  That is how the day that Tom and I were finally going to start priming the downstairs of our house with our good friend Dave turned into a day of scraping wallpaper instead.  Queue intermission music (and put it on repeat).

The silver lining to finding the wallpaper is that the 'roman bathouse' look that part of the first floor of our house has taken is a decided improvement over brown paint.  That is, in addition to the reality that peeling 80-ish year old wallpaper off can be remarkably satisfying (sometimes).  Unfortunately, this peeling project is still underway over three months later (it's only two rooms - it shouldn't take this long).  Thankfully, it has picked up in the last month.

What you can see here is about a third of what we got scraped over the course of three months:

There were some things that slowed us down, though.  A big one was the heat.  The week surrounding the 4th of July was when the first heat wave hit and, coincidentally, when we got our first major house guests - our sister-in-law and three rambunctious boys - and two much smaller, furry longer term guests - their cats Jack and Maya.  As you can see below, we had a great time with them...

(This is the intermission in the blog post that is probably properly proportioned to the one we took this summer from working on our house)

We soaked up the air conditioning at the Franklin Institute while Andrew was still here (unfortunately, I don't have any pictures).

We hit up the local kiddie pool (free - at the park right around the corner - awesome!):

I had to put this in because it is so stinking cute.

We went to the playground:

and, on the 4th, we joined in the festivities at our local fire station around the corner.  We joined the parade for about twenty feet,

then pulled over to watch all of the fire trucks from the nearby townships go by.  This is just a few of them, there had to have been 15-20 trucks and ambulances.  After our parade, all but a couple from our own fire house drove on to the next town over for the next parade.

After the parade, we hung out at the fire house and munched on soft pretzels, popcorn, hot dogs and other Philly delicacies.  The big finish for our neighborhood 4th of July celebration was this:

First came the candy,

then peanuts

They handed out candy and peanuts to the little kids to keep them from getting pelted (or trampled).

It was a fun morning, but it did get really hot.  When we got back, Tom took care of that (at least for the little guys).

(end intermission)

..... but those were the fun parts between sitting in our un-air conditioned house trying to move as little as possible because it was still 90 degrees and some insane percentage of humidity inside.  So, anyway, our first obstacle in getting very little done one our house this summer was the heat.

The other big thing that slowed us down for a while was my sheer exhaustion brought on by the little kiddo we have heading our way.  I knew I was really tired at the time, but it wasn't until I rolled into the second trimester and my energy came back over a one week period that I realized just how useless I had been.  We are extraordinarily excited about the little one who will be joining our family at the end of January - we just have a lot more work to do before then.

Sweaty, tired and happy the night we found out...

We have gotten more done since my energy returned, but we've had other things like a 2 week vacation, visits to and from family, a concert in Central Park to go to and fall weekend work commitments that have slowed us down (okay - most of those were our own doing and lots of fun).

We are on the verge, though. Serious progress is right around the corner (and this time, it's for real) : )

Technical difficulties

We had a bit of a set-back this past Saturday...our macbook's hard drive died on us.

Fortunately, Kathryn had backed-up all of our photos right before we moved and our music will be easy to recover.

Unfortunately, we did lose almost all of the pictures that we have been amassing since we moved in March.  Not a huge loss, but still a bit frustrating and sad (we are going to keep the dead drive on the off-chance that we decide to send it to a data-recovery firm).

The up-shot is that we can put a new hard drive into the laptop and re-load the disk image I made when it was bran'-spankin'-new four years ago.  Well, that and we are finally getting the 'second' computer that we have talked about for a long time.

So, please bear with us while we get our technological life back in order (we do have a couple of updates in the wings...they just won't be as pretty since we lost the pictures).