Mondays are fine

Jess on January 24, 2011

Kyle will be home any minute! I’m so excited.

Work went pretty well today. I let my intern loose to do real work (after about 3.5 hours of training) and she did great. Cataloging isn’t exactly the hardest thing anyone has ever learned to do, and she’s done a little bit of it in a class before, so I decided the best training would be actually working in our database. The nice thing about PastPerfect is that it’s super standardized so it’s easy for most people to learn. But, as with all museums and standardized databases, we’ve gotten in the habit of using it a certain way, favoring certain fields over others, and maybe using a few features to add more work. I’m not quite sure that we use it to the best of its ability, but it’s still a good system.

It turns out that I don’t really enjoy training. I think it’s mostly just that I’m so new at it, but I feel like I can’t quite strike the balance of what is over-explaining and what is under-explaining. I told James the other day that my problem is either that I’m actually smarter than everyone else so I don’t explain enough of what needs to be done and/or that I think I’m smarter than everyone else so I explain too much. It’s difficult to strike a balance. When I was trained, I felt a little overwhelmed by wanting to get to actually doing the work, so if I can avoid that feeling by teaching a little at a time, I think I’ll be better off. Also, I’m in the market for a “how to train volunteers” workshop. Hopefully a volunteer center will offer that.

I also have an education workgroup going right now and they seem to be making real progress on this travelling trunk that we’re doing. I’m so glad we’re finally getting programming churned out. And after October, I’m geared up to write another grant. I think this one will focus on our textiles collection and should be really good for us.

Long, long weekend

Jess on January 23, 2011

Maybe it’s that I was busy directing a remodelling project the last few times he’s travelled for debate, or maybe it’s that he hasn’t really been at a tournament that required actual travel, but I really miss Kyle this weekend. He’s been gone since Wednesday so the last time I really saw him was Tuesday night.

Sad.

I keep reminding myself that it takes time to make meaningful friendships and that I have enough socialization to get me by, plus we spent a lot of time remodelling and not really going out and getting into friend-making situations. Still, I’m pretty ready to have some friends that our age in this town. Is it so much to ask to want to find someone who is nearish our age and pretty hip? Apparently. I’ve had some suggestions: junior league, church, etc. I think it’s about time to revert to my old strategies and start hanging out around coffee shops until someone looks like they might be worth being friends with.

I’ve been handling my loneliness by tumbling a photo anytime I would otherwise make a comment to the live human being with whom I usually share my life.

Hello

Jess on January 22, 2011

I am spread out all over the internet.

I started blogging before the term existed, in an opendiary I started in 8th grade. It is ridiculous to be able to read my innermost thoughts (that I posted on the internet) from middle school. I kind of think that the beauty of paper journals kept in middle school is that they decay or get lost or stolen or thrown away in a fight with a friend before a person reaches adulthood so you can look back on those years a little more nostalgically. For example, I know that  my friend’s Nicole, Allison, and I passed a book of notes back and forth in the hallway of our junior high and I know (because these past on-line journals still exist in some form) that I was mostly an overemotional stereotype of puberty while writing them, yet I can separate these two truths and remember the books as completely undramatic.

Eventually, I got caught up in the demands of college and graduate school and was satiated by the instant gratification of facebook statuses and twitter updates where somehow I forgot the joy of blogging. Meanwhile, blogging became distinct from journaling and everything is all SEO and planned content. I just want to journal and be comfortable with the idea that no one reads its. I am embracing the fact that my life is often not interesting enough to blast to my friends in a microblog. So here it is, I’m back. I am opening a new journal.

Problem is, I never learned how a paper journal worked.

Her hair, matted with sand

Jess on January 17, 2011

i noted the size of your hand,
small, with unevenly bitten and manicured nails,
and i could almost smell your perfume over the ocean—

i could almost tell it about you.
how is it that it’s written on us before
we even know it ourselves? how is it
that no one is surprised,
(but still there is room
for others to be outraged.
and oh!, here. here!
of all places!)

so let’s leave longings to the imagination
and sigh, only, through a furtive glance
delivered in no direction at all.

We're moved in!

Jess on November 1, 2010

We are now living in the new house, though it’s not finished yet. We got pretty busy toward the end of October rushing to get laminate installed, drywall and priming finished and baseboards hung to get ready for carpet. Not to mention cleaning. While a shopvac is certainly an incredible invention, there was so much to do and we were all a little delirious by the time we left the house Wednesday night, ready for carpet to be installed on Thursday. Actually, we were not quite ready. The plan was to have Kyle finish the main floor vaccuuming in the hour and a half between when we woke up on Thursday and when carpet was scheduled to come. This plan was ruined when the carpet installers called to announce they’d be about an hour early. Luckily, they were willing to do the sweeping for us, which likely means that they did a better job than we do.

We still have a little bit of drywall work, mostly patching and a little bit of sanding, to finish up and all of the painting. Plus, our kitchen won’t be fully installed until Wednesday at the earliest so hopefully that gets done soon. I definitely like being in this house a lot more than being in our rental (especially because the rental was so cold the last few days without the furnace turned on), but I can see the end of this remodelling tunnel and I’m ready to just be there already.

October is a busy month.

Jess on October 18, 2010

This month is full of grant applications that are due in two week increments. We’re also making a lot of presentations around the county to school districts about our potential educational programming. And, we’re getting together our newsletter. Plus, I have a bunch of meetings for regional organizations that we want to be more active in. Oh, and we got to go to Columbia to accept an award. Obviously, all of this is very exciting and awesome and I’m glad to be busy at work.

But, this month is also full of remodelling, of scraping wallpaper and trying to get sleep and meet deadlines. In the next two weeks, we need to go from where the house is currently at to having it livable. This means we need to:

  • Finish the drywall in the kitchen (just a few walls) and in the new master closet (all four walls) and pantry (all four walls and the ceiling)
  • Mud the drywall in the kitchen, new master closet, and pantry
  • Take down the rest of the wallpaper in the three upstairs bedrooms and both bathrooms
  • Patch drywall where wallpaper damaged the drywall as it came down, or the drywall was bad in the first place
  • Clean the residue of work zone off house
  • Paint the whole house
  • Lay laminate
  • Get the carpet installed
  • Get the cabinets/kitchen installed
  • Move

Then, voila, a house.

This is all very stressful, but I think I’ll enjoy the slower pace of winter when we get settled in. And maybe I’ll start eating better, eating at home more, and experimenting with new recipes. I really want to get into eating more local food but so far, we’re too busy to think about anything and just getting a bottle of milk is a chore that gets pushed to the bottom of our list. While I dream about a future with knitting and local foods and whole foods and just simply not gross foods, I must say that if there is one thing I’ve learned during both of these projects it’s simple: Sleep is good, very good, and you should do it whenever you feel tired without regard to how lame your idea of a good friday night is.

Tedious or outright impossible? Wallpaper removal stage

Jess on October 10, 2010

We are at the point in re-modelling where it is time for the wallpaper to come down. In this whole process, there has never been much of a bad time for the wallpaper to come down, but after demo was finished, we have had a lot of different kinds of contractors in and out of the place and I was out of town for a weekend so I’m getting around to it starting last Monday and continuing yesterday. I had to take a break throughout the week because we were without water in the house for a few days last week after an incident involving the shower. Also, our shower now turns on by hose valve attached to the shower head. It’s a great look for an upstairs bathroom. Luckily, the room is a total afterthought to me. I haven’t even really thought about color schemes or fixtures or changes I want to make to it. It is just the room with the window that looks out at my favorite tree and it is basically a Johnny-on-the-Spot at our worksite. Really.

We happen to be very cursed with the kind of wallpaper that was applied directly to drywall. This means that it’s difficult to take down. I want to emphasize that it’s difficult but apparently not impossible. I’ve read a lot of places that it’s impossible and that you should consider painting over the paper. But our paper was somewhat poorly applied so it’s coming down in too many places and re-gluing it to the wall would likely take as long as removing it with worse results.

Beginning wallpaper removal

Yesterday, I started at this point and I now have all of the wallpaper above the border removed. Today, it is back at this room and then I may get going on an upstairs bedroom or too because I’m convinced that will be a little bit easier because there isn’t three or four layers of wallpaper to work with. And, I kind of sort of have the hang of it. Sort of.

Kitchenspiration*

Jess on October 6, 2010

Saturday, I spent most of the morning and early afternoon at a household auction in town, bidding on odds and ends and a Whirlpool dishwasher that we got at a really good price. That night, I went to dinner with Mom, Dad, and Devon at Legends. Since I was out that way, I decided to meet them at Nebraska Furniture Mart so I could look at laminate. While we were there, we discovered a totally badass stove on sale for almost half-off the list price. It’s a five-burner Whirlpool gas range with a continuous cast-iron grate. So this means, we have spent 1/3 of our total kitchen appliance budget on 2/3 of our kitchen appliances. Hopefully, this means we can get a nice, Whirlpool refridgerator to complete our kitchen.


Flooring, All-American Chateau Satin Crimson

To complete the rest of our kitchen, we picked out countertops and cabinets yesterday. We are thinking that for the flooring we’re going to go with All-American Chateau in Satin Crimson so that was kind of our starting point when we looked at cabinets. The rest of our starting point is that we have a tiny kitchen and we want to go lighter rather than darker with our cabinets. Ideally, I think we’d go with all-white cabinets, but alas the budget prefers the stained Oak. And so, we chose Oak cabinets with a Cider finish.


Cabinets, Oak with cider stain

Picking countertops is the most stressful part to me. I don’t know how I could ever put granite in a home because seriously I panic about how a design is going to look. Maybe it would be better if we were going with something natural, but I really worry that a laminate countertop is going to look fake or tesselate wrong or something. Lucky, the place we bought our cabinets and countertops from made the decision fairly easy. When we walked in, they had a big island in their showroom that had a granite-looking laminate countertop on it. Something about it just struck me and so after we were walked through the process of choosing countertop, I asked what was on that counter and then we eventually narrowed our choices to two options from the WilsonArt line of “Milano” granites. Kyle and I settled pretty quickly on the Milano Mahagony. It had most everything we were hoping for and when we saw a bit larger sample of it, we were set.


Counters, WilsonArt Milano Mahogany

It’s pretty nice doing this remodelling project with Kyle because we really do have nearly identical home decor tastes and we really trust each other’s opinion. Plus, we make decisions with just a glance.

*I like to think of kitchenspiration as a new alternative movement to thinspiration for people who like healthy eating. Let’s get it started, okay?

An HVAC crash course I can now forget

Jess on September 28, 2010

Like wedding planning, re-modelling a house is one of the best-worst times of my life so far. This week, it’s a good week. We got word today that we will be able to run return vents to the upstairs (read: run central air upstairs) and stay within our budget.

We had been told that there was not space for the duct work required for return vents. Without the return vents, we’d have two options for the second story:

  • not very functional central air.
  • non-existent central air.

Because of the lack of return vents, we’d be likely have an upstairs that was 8 degrees warmer than the rest of the house year round. Likely, this inability to properly cool the upstairs because hot air has no escape would mean that our air conditioner would overwork itself while running too little to cool the house. Most of the stories I read online suggested that air conditioners run too hard trying to cool the upstairs and then cool the downstairs to the set thermostat temperature and stop. So the upstairs never gets cool and the air conditioner breaks

Our other option of no central air would have meant hotter summers than with the air conditioner and the stories on how cold we’d be in winter range from Mom and Dad’s horror stories of scraping frost off the window as children to the HVAC contractors’ opinions that the gravity vents would work fine and our heating/cooling woes would not be as big of a problem in winter.

Contractors had also told us that the only work around would require adding walls which means unplanned framing and drywalling of three new walls and a loss of floor space. Luckily, our current HVAC contractor can get large enough return vents upstairs to make the whole system work correctly. I guess it pays to work local with someone who has some experience trying to squeeze return vents into old houses.

Hooray, now I can forget everything I know about forced heating.

Austin, a place to eat

Jess on September 27, 2010

This week seems to be shaping up as a pretty good one, possibly due to the refreshing weekend I had while attending a conference in Austin, Texas. Being my first time in Austin, I had a lot to see and managed to see a lot of it. I stayed at Brendan and Mary’s with Mary because Brendan was out of town — fortunately his trip to LA for a job and unfortunately it meant he didn’t get to hang out with me too much. But, Mary and I had a fun time lady hangout weekend. We spent most of our time with Tom and Beth and occasionally Katie who presented on the panel with the three of us.

My weekend can best be summed up by noting that all of the scholarship and museums turned my brain back on and I feel re-invigorated about the pre-starting job ideas I had for what I might do at my job. Not that I’m not invigorated, or haven’t been, but there is a certain amount of overwhelmed that one feels when she starts a new job and a few weeks ago just having a clear vision of what is going on around me was a great success.

In addition to the brain activity, I felt noticeably better when I ate Austin food. Austin is known for being a good town to live in which has to mean it’s a good town to eat in. Now, consider that I live in a place where Dairy Queen is a culinary oasis in a sea of pizza. Oi. Fried foods make me sluggish. Luckily, Austin had plenty of tofu and mexican and thai and french to keep me happy. I think my favorite meal with a crépe I had at a downtown café on my way out of town. Smoked salmon, capers, herbed boursin, heirloom tomatoes, and delicious. But the thai was also great because I require thai food to live and I currently live 55 minutes from a thai restaurant. The closest restaurant that serves thai food is in the next state! So even if I thought the pad see euw was missing the flavor of a well-aged wok char, it was still better than Dairy Queen.