Living fabulous

When is it not totally crazy in the Hannafin household? The past few weeks have been just been busy. Busy, busy, busy. When I’m not at work, I’m doing stuff with the family, what little free time has been used up with getting crap done around the house. Even Facebook has been a victim and I can quickly update that from my phone, that is when the twins are not playing a game on it. Granny has been in town for the past week and it’s been nice to have time to visit with her. We babysat the twins over the weekend while their parents went to a wedding in Napa. I love those little guys with all my heart but Jesus Christ on a cracker, they can suck up what little energy my body can create in a twenty-four hour period! But I am happy to be there when they need me. We also enjoyed a lovely visit with Courtney’s cousin and her son who is a year older than the twins. The three boys got along great, like they had known each other for years. They are all in their tattling phase right now, so there was a lot of “Elisabet he took my book. Elisabet he hit me. Elisabet he won’t play with me”. Ahh those special family moments.

Since there is nothing on TV and my in-laws don’t subscribe to any movie channels, I had time to read. I started reading The Bucolic Plague by Josh Kilmer-Purcell. If you haven’t been watching The Fabulous Beekman Boys on Planet Green you are missing out on some great television. The book provides a background on how Josh and Brent found the Beekman mansion and decided that they wanted to change their lives. I was truly touched and inspired by their story. It made me think more about how I want to change things in my life. If they can do it so can I! Of course I can’t drop everything and buy a farm, but I can make little changes such as building my garden.

The whole garden thing has been in the plans for a few months but in the horrible Arizona summer there isn’t much I can plant. I am cracking the whip on Courtney to get the beds made so I can be ready to plant next month. I have been researching what I would like to grow and what can grow in Arizona, it looks like I am going to go the heirloom vegetable route. Stuff that we eat now only better. I’m also working on a growing schedule so we can eventually can and freeze stuff to have during the hot summer. I’m actually excited to make my own pickles and can tomatoes. I used to do that with my Nana when I was kid, of course I hated it then. Maybe it will be something that I can pass down to Maggie and the twins some day.

The quilt has been basted and is ready to quilt but I haven’t had time to sit down to get it done. I started practicing free motion quilting on practice squares and I just don’t have the hang of it yet. I’m trying the stippling pattern, I keep trapping myself and crossing stitches. Practice, practice, practice. I’ll get the hang of it soon.

The other thing that has me a bit preoccupied…guess…Twilight: Eclipse! It’s simply amazing but did you think that I would say anything different? Ha ha ha. I’ve seen it five times now and I still cry at the same part of the movie. I can’t help it, seeing it on the big screen is exactly how I pictured it in my head. Waiting for fifteen hours to see was totally worth it, I can’t wait for Breaking Dawn!

ds

Progress

So there it is…my first quilt top. I have to take off the borders and square things up a bit. I have all next week, well except Tues & Wed, to get it done. I have another quilt in my head, read to burst out for all to see. More progress pics soon.

On repeat

Dayle and I went to see Greg Laswell at the Rhythm Room the other night and it was one of the best shows I’ve been to in a long time. I fell in love with his music a few years back when I was just wandering around the net. His music has been on every playlist ever since. What I loved most is that everyone there were true fans, fans who seemed passionate about the music just as much as I am. I love small shows like that. Go get the newest album, Take a Bow. I promise you will love it as much as I do.

Greg Laswell “Take Everything” HD from FVMMO FILMS on Vimeo.

Apprecation

I’m at the movies with my office crew waiting to see the ATeam movie. What a cool way to spend an afternoon. Since I have a few minutes I thought I would blog a bit.

Courtney is in Taos, NM with Sean until Saturday. I’m keeping busy doing stuff around the house. The dogs must have known that Court wasn’t home last night, Molly and Winston sat at the edge of the bed facing the door, barking at every little noise and ready to attack. I’ve been getting in some pool time, trying to get some sort of tan. I used to tan so easily as a kid but now I go from pastey white to lobster red in no time.

I am loving the new sewing machine. I ordered all the fabrics to make a quilt for Maggie. I have the week before 4th of July off and I hope to get it done then. I sewed two market bags and got more fabric for a few more. The urge to sew is taking place for my urge to scrapbook. But I was thinking that scrapbooking tonight wasn’t a bad idea. I think that I’ll try to organize my crap before I begin anything big. My craft table is a mess. I think all the disarray keeps me from being creative, I hate walking into that room. Well if I’m going to clean it up, tonight would be a good time to start. I can obsess better when Courtney is gone.

I’ll post pics of the market bag when I get home.

A better Sunday

To add to my homeowner drama, yesterday as I was doing laundry I noticed water on the floor near the water heater. Fabulous, now we need to get a new water heater. What more can go wrong around this place and why does crap like this happen all at once??? So I spent the day stressed out about how we were going to pay for a new fridge and water heater. Such a waste of time for me because when I’m stressed like this I tend not to get anything done. I just mope around the house and watch endless hours of TV. Courtney and I stopped by this shop that sells used appliances for really cheap to see what they had in stock. This is one of the reasons I love Courtney, he has this ability to strike up conversations with people, like repair men, with no fear of saying anything stupid. I could never do that. So Courtney does just that with the refrigerator repair guy and asks if he could take a look at ours before we drop some cash on a new one. The repair guy came out, took a look at it and said it was a simple fix. After 30 minutes and $76 he was done, and we were spared from having to buy a new fridge. It was such a load off my shoulders! Now I could put that fridge money towards a new water heater. The bummer part is that we had to throw out a bunch of food but I can live with that.

I got a good nights sleep and I’m motivate again to get things done today. Being the nerd that I am, I leave you with a tribute to a great ad campaign that has come to an end:

Being a homeowner sucks

I come home from work hoping to enjoy a cool tasty treat on this 100 degree day, but instead my refrigerator is craping out. It’s barely five years old! It’s not a fancy model, white, simple, one would think that it should last longer. So now I’m freaking out. How much is it going to cost to fix, is it even fixable and how much will a new one cost? Then this has me thinking about the whole baby thing. If we can barely afford a new fridge how could we afford a kid? If we buy a fridge at full retail price that pretty much wipes out any saving we have. Savings that I have been hoarding away for the last few months in the hopes to have some sort of cushion should a car crap out. It’s things like this that make me think that having a kid isn’t in our cards. I know that you’re never ready to have kids but I feel like one needs to be more prepared than we are. I suppose I need to roll with the punches and cross my fingers that we win the lottery.

Disappointed

I was hoping to have better news today which is why I’ve waited to post something. The insemination didn’t take and it goes without saying that I’m completely devastated. I had such a good feeling that we would were going to be successful. Now I am an emotional wreck because my hormones are out of control. I’m crying every few minutes! What’s next?? Since I literally put all my eggs in one basket we can’t afford to do another cycle until next year. When I started this process I put a cap on how long we’ll try, if nothing happens by the time I turn 40 then it just wasn’t meant to be. I have just over a year to go. I just don’t know how much more dissappointment I can take.

It’s almost over

My sabbatical is almost over. Where did the last six weeks go? I do feel really good about what I’ve accomplished on my time off. I have this overwhelming urge to get things in order. I’ve gone through our closets and dressers and was able to get rid of a ton of stuff. I swear our laundry machine has not stopped in the last three days. And what’s good is that I’m folding clothes right away instead of letting them back up in the laundry baskets. It feels good to have order again. We’re acid washing the pool this weekend. I can’t wait to have that chore checked off my list.

On the baby front, we’ve decided to go the low tech path, clomid with insemination. I have a strong feeling that it will work this time. Once the pregnancy test comes back positive I think being on the progesterone for 9-10 weeks will help prevent an early termination. Right now I’m waiting for my OPT to come back with a positive result. I have the mid-cycle ultrasound on Sunday, hopefully it will be good news.

In case you have not seen it yet, here is the final Eclipse trailer:

All I can say is WOW! And yes I screamed like a little girl after watching the trailer. I got chills just watching it. It’s going to be an amazing movie! June 30th can’t come fast enough.

Life or something like it

So far my 30 day challenge is working, ten days and no restaurants, well until last night. We did grab Delux burger for dinner but I don’t think that one time in ten days is a bad thing. I’ve been trying to use what we have in the freezer and be creative with our meals, so far we haven’t had the same thing twice yet. I’m back baking my own loaves of bread. Tried the King Arthur white bread recipe, made one cinnamon sugar loaf and one sandwich loaf. The recipe is totally simple and tastes fabulous! Tomorrow I will make an attempt to master biscuits, not that mine are bad, they aren’t but I want more height out of them. More fluffy and flakey biscuits. I’m going to add eggs to my recipe and see how that works.

Time away from work has really been therapeutic, I hate thinking that I have to go back in nineteen days. We’re still trying to pull up the old parquet flooring in one of the bedrooms so we can put down the new stuff. New paint colors for the guest room and living room have been chosen. I’m going with a more taupey-grey color which I think will look great against the white moldings. Courtney and I getting organized for the big job of acid washing the pool next weekend. We’ve never done it before but I have faith that we’ll be just fine. I’ll let you know if we burn off a limb ;)

I’m just going to put this next thought out there…have you ever noticed a series of numbers that pop up repeatedly? You’re moving along throughout your day and when you happen to look a the clock it’s 1:11 or 4:44? This happened to me the week before I got my promotion, then after I got the news all was silent. I just find it interesting that these numbers popup everywhere in my life. I feel like I need to be on the lookout for some bigger meaning but maybe it’s all just a coincident. For now I’m taking it as my sign that something big is going to happen so I bought 11 lottery tickets. Who knows??

I’ve been building my fabric stash but I haven’t pulled the trigger on a new sewing machine yet. I also haven’t been scrapbooking. My creative spark is a bit low right now. I’m going to focus on getting my house in order, clearing the clutter in my craft room and then my creative thoughts will be able to flow more freely.

We met with the fertility doc this past week. It’s not great news but I don’t feel completely hopeless. I’m thirty-eight, my eggs aren’t as fresh as they once were and there may not be a lot of them left. There is no clear explanation for the two miscarriages, it just happens. All the numbers she threw out were all within the normal ranges for my age, trying to have a baby at this point in my life will not be easy without some help. Where does that leave us? We have three options, IVF, egg donor or timed insemination, where they will wash the sperm, place the guys in my uterus and hope that they find their way to a good egg. We’re going to go with the third option, we’re no where near financially stable to be able to afford IVF and a donor just doesn’t feel right to me. We’ll be able to do one cycle of clomid with the timed insemination this year and I will be able to budget for the possibility for three more tries next year, hopefully that won’t be necessary. Its a crap shoot but right now that’s all we’ve got. Isn’t life one big crap shoot?

My 30 day challenge

I’m headed back to the desert in about an hour. That trip was almost too long, it will be nice to get home.

I have thirty days left of my sabbatical and I have huge to do list that seems to be growing bigger everyday. One thing that I’m really motivated to do is stop eating out. Over the next thirty days I will cook all of our meals. I’m doing this to see if I can really do without the restaurants and to see how I can improve our eating habits. As a foodie I know this is going to be very difficult, how will I survive with out a weekly stop at La Grande Orange? But I do think this is going to be a good thing for Courtney and I. Another change, no more quick trips in the car to the Safeway across the street. If I need something, I will have to walk. It’s less than a mile, there is no reason to hop in the car. This will also help me plan my shopping trips better, getting everything I need at one time. Lots of changes in the Hannafin household over the next month…this is going to be exciting.

I have more pics to post and I’ll get to that this evening when I get home. Enjoy your day!