We are not all dead. We have been very busy but are about to become significantly less so.

Tuesday (yesterday) I found out that the college I work for has decided to cut my position. While it is not at all reflective of my performance, it still stings a little bit. Next Tuesday is my last day. Chris and I haven't quite decided how we're going to proceed from here but are confident that we can handle this, too.

Emma is happy and well. She can nearly sit on her own and enjoys bites of applesauce, cream of wheat, tomatoes and sweet potatoes. She does not at all enjoy bananas or white potatoes. Click this picture for more!

Emma May 2009

I have resolved the bath tub! Actually, I resolved it on Sunday but I've been too tired to post since then. New valve stem and we were back in business. Sounds simple but you try finding a 50 year old valve stem in Bumblefuck Bible Belt on a Sunday afternoon....

Emma is happy and playful. She has figured out locomotion via log roll and nothing within a four foot radius of her original position is safe. Still not doing so swift on sleeping through the night but we're making progress and co-sleeping makes the interruptions not so bad.

House is, errr, still a wreck. I dunno when it will get unwrecked. Perhaps Friday, as Chris will take Emma to babycare while he's at work and I'll be able to be at home by myself. Of course, I may have a hot bath and some knitting instead.

Need to go put supper on...

Now accepting theories as to why the bathtub hot water knob/valve decided to fail at 4 am? Also, as to why there is no water shut off valve to the tub. I had to turn the water off (outside into the rain to get into the basement, with a flashlight and in my bathrobe) to the whole house to get it to shut off.

As if one adventure with plumbing wasn't enough this week...

It worked!!! The removal of strange and curious things from the toilet tank has cured the commode. I am greatly relieved that it was fixable with no outlay of cash.

I have just removed a comb, fifty cents and a styrofoam container from the toilet tank. Do figure I was lucky enough that removing them fixed the toilet running?

Off to buy paint for the house. Green and white kitchen. Blue office. Blue and white bathroom. Cream bedroom. Teal and chocolate "headboard" for our bed. Also buying a tub surround and some pewter spray paint for the cabinet hardware in the kitchen. Not to mention all the bits and pieces of painting supplies that you inevitably end up needing - drop clothes, brushes, rollers, paint tray liners, tape... My check book is very, very afraid.

Chris and I are officially homeowners. It's entirely daunting and I'm tired just thinking about all the things we need to do. So far we've gotten all the out buildings cleaned up and the stuff picked up out of the yard. I know where my vegetable garden will go and which shed will be my (temporary) garden shed. We've hired an electrician to convert us from a fuse box to a circuit breaker box. There's a ton more electrical work that should be done but it just isn't in the budget at the moment. Still to go: painting the bedroom, nursery, kitchen and office. Cleaning the whole entire house. Buying and installing a washing machine and clothesline. Gutting and redoing the bathroom (we will be reusing all the fixtures but need to redo all the wall treatments, re-hang the sink, fix the toilet guts and rebuild some cabinets). Potentially also build a closet in the office and perhaps, if we can scrounge the materials from what we found in the outbuildings, some built in shelves on the wall below the stairs. Tons of work. Not tons of time.

BBC’s Book List

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy the list into a Note and put an ‘x‘ after those you have read, count ‘em up, compare tallies. This should be easy. Strutting and preening is optional.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x)
2 The Lord of the Rings (x)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (x)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (x)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee ( x)
6 The Bible (x)
7 Wuthering Heights (x)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (x)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (x)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (x)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (x)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (x)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (x)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (x)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (x)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (x)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (x)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (x)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (x)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (x)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (x)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (x)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (x)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (x)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (x)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (x)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (x)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (x)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (x)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (x)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (x)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (x)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck (x)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (x)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (x)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (x)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (x)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante (x)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (x)
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (x)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (x)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (x)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (x)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (x)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute (x)
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (x)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (x)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (x)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


47 out of 100... I sorta thought it would be higher than that. I've been meaning to plow through more of Dickens. I've also been meaning to read Les Miserables. Some of this is newer stuff that I just haven't gotten to - it's still on the bestseller shelf at the library.

Now. I challenge you to go through the list and see how many you've read! Have fun!

We have a closing date on the house. I finally believe that this is really happening. I'm envisioning gardens and starting to day dream about paint colors. I should probably day dream about floor scrubbing, first, but paint is more fun.

Emma went to the pediatrician yesterday because of horrible bum rash. Turns out she has overly acidic poo and it gives her chemical burns on her bum. I'm cutting acidic foods, especially citrus, out of my diet to help treat. She also got a new diaper cream that is supposed to help. She weighed 7# 14oz, which is a gain of 12oz in 10 days. I'm on antibiotics for mastitis so we're also watching her carefully for signs of yeast infection.

For the first time in a very long time, we went to a church function and actually felt welcomed. We've been checking out new parishes to join once we move and I think this one is a winner. We went to the Fat Tuesday dinner (potluck, with the best fried chicken since Berlin) and then stayed for the burning of the palms. The priest is wonderful (any Catholic priest who can wear a Mardi Gras jester hat and feather boa while directing the buffet line at a church supper AND dancing wins my vote...), the parishioners welcoming and the church has loads of different ministries that really appeal to us. They're just starting a young families group, they have a healthcare ministry that Chris is interested in and they're very active in the community. I'm so looking forward to having a good church situation again!

I don't think there's anything in the world sweeter than a sleeping baby. I happen to have one on my lap at the moment, though, so I could be a bit biased.

Chris wanted me to bring Emma in to his work today but I don't think we're quite feeling up to that. I haven't driven since Emma was born (due to the c-section) and am only just off of that restriction. Somehow I don't think that a two hour round trip is the way to kick off driving again. Also not sure how I'd handle it if she got super fussy as we were driving - it's awfully hard to pull over on the interstate. Instead I think we will hang out at home, bake some tasty munchies and come up with something good to have for dinner. If I decide to go out, the grocery store is calling to me.

Our mortgage got approved! We just need to set a closing date for sometime in mid-March. I want to be closed by March 21st because my littlest sister would like to come for her spring break and help clean and paint in the new house. This also means that I need to do some serious price shopping on things like a washer and dryer and the utilities for the new house. I'm also going to need to call the electric company and see when they can get someone to come out and determine if they can upgrade the electric service to the house... I'm both excited to be starting on those homeownership tasks and also completely overwhelmed at the thought of juggling all of that and a new baby.