Upstairs Painting

Home remodeling is not me - considering it has taken a week after work and an entire weekend to paint the upstairs hallway and one bedroom. I can't complain - I still ended up saving some cash by doing it myself.

The picture doesn't do justice to the wall color - it's a very nice yellow (Resotration Hardware via Lowe's color matching). And yes, this is the original 'Winnie the Pooh' room - sniff, sniff. I even got rid of the purple window treatments and did some Target magic.

Hopefully the carpet will arrive soon and the whole upstairs (except for the bathroom) will be all done.

American Idol Night

Week 4 of the American Idol finals at Jason and Amber's. Hey! Don't judge me ... It's the only TV we watch each week (hence the need to actually go over to Jason and Amber's)

So can't decide who should be voted off ... But I'm bumming that tattoo chick was voted off.

Mona

Most of you have heard about her, but few have actually seen her. This is Mona, my Nespresso coffee maker at work.

Yes this is a little weird of a setup, but you can't expect me to pay $2 for a crappy espresso at Java City. Plus she's very social.

The only issue I really have now is getting my other machine to work at home. Unfortunately it has a European plug, and all attempts to convert the current have failed. When the last converter started to smoke after a few seconds, I decided to give it a rest

World's Largest Hamburger Bun

OK, it might have helped if I put in something to give you a sense of scale - the 'bun' is about 18 inches across.

I bought a new book on bread baking from some freak, so I'm still searching for the perfect french bread recipe. These recipes are using a pate fermentee to make the first fermentation go easier, but I still haven't gotten the crust right and the dough itself is a unstructured blob of dough to shape.

We'll see.

Jakob Colclasure

Our friends Jason and Kelly just adppted a new baby boy (is "new" baby redundant?), so we ran over to the house for a quick visit.

Cute baby, but they really don't do anything interesting for at least another couple of months. Jakob does confirm my suspicions that they (babies) are a serious drain on disposable income. Forget about college tuition, just the cost of batteries for toys requires a second income.

For Sale

Would you buy this house?

Actually the house isn't for sale yet, but hopefully in a year or so it will be. Granted there is still tons of work to do on the house before we put it on the market (i.e. kitchen, bathroom, basement baseboards, etc) - we'll see.

Amaryllis Seeds

Kind of feel a little like Jack and the Beanstalk.

Now with most of the Amaryllis bloomed, some of the super strong ones will put out seeds. No telling if these will sprout and make viable baby Amaryllis (plural), but it's always fun to see what works and ends up not being eaten by chipmunks.

By the way, the plural of Amaryllis is probably Amaryllis - I looked it up. It seems there are actually people who have more spare time on their hands and are more nerdy than I am - I know, I was shocked too. Although Amaryllii (fungus->fungi, Amaryllus->Amarylli), Amaryllides (plural of the greek word 'Amaryllis'), and Amaryllises (english plural of Amaryllis) all made logical arguments to why they should be the winner, I'm going with Amaryllis. I'm clearly referring to a genus of plant, and that's never made plural - although I'm wondering if the fact that not all of Patrick's Amaryllis come from the genus Amaryllis, I could be asking for trouble.

OK, Amaryllis bulbs.

Yes, sometimes the easiest answer is right in front of us.

Linda back in town

Feeling the need to no doubt buy something at Pottery Barn, Linda scammed another trip to the US for something 'critical'.

Good timing too, since I needed her video for Patrick's birthday (more on that later).

We headed over to Mr. Green's house for a quick dinner - since her social calendar was already full - ahem, but a nice time had by all. Well, except for Liam, he was a bit over the whole thing until Barney was turned on, but what do you expect for a two year old. Liam, not me.

Kelly trying to be like Wade

Imitation is the highest form of flattery, so it all went to Kelly's head when I stole her Mother's matching baby blue jacket. Actually I was just making fun of Kelly in the fact that she matched her mother - who does that?

Kind of shocking that you can't even tell us apart.

Brian is in town

Nothing says I'm a poor college student than visiting your relatives in Indianapolis for Spring Break. Granted I'm a cool Uncle and everything, and Patrick's a keeper - but I don't know about the rest of them . . . Kelly.

In truth it was good to see Brian again, and he was in Indy for a couple of days. This is us at Taste, a quaint little upscale, now too popular on Sunday morning hangout that actually doesn't do too bad a job of melding french and American foods together.

And that's also David holding Kelly back, since she wanted to sit next to me the whole time.