The lovers, the dreamers, and me

No bedding, no blinds, no closet door yet, but we're getting there. We still need all the little touches and artwork and such, but I'm just thrilled we made it this far on the weekend. Just a few short weeks ago the room had vinyl flooring, old marred-up ugly almond walls, and a layer of dust so thick we needed to keep a rug outside the room to wipe our feet on.


 Not bad, yes?

Sitting here cozily under a blanket on the couch with the wind ripping through the trees outside the windows and with Scout sleeping peacefully on my lap reminds me that life is good. It really is.

Spent yesterday doing house stuff all day - raked leaves for 2 hours and filled up two HUGE cans, trip to the hardware store for varnish so we can start on the doors today, and cleaned and conditioned the leather couch again. While I was doing those things that amazing husband of mine was doing ductwork in the attic and installing a new super-quiet fan for our master bath. He really is incredible.

Last night he went off to go to a concert with his friend and I went over to Darci's place to hang with her and some of her swing dance friends. They refer to themselves as swingers, which made me internally grin several times throughout the evening. There was much mirth and many pop-culture references to Labyrinth (The babe with the power. What power? The power of voodoo. Who do? You do.) and The Princess Bride and all Ramstein. Best not to ask, really. When I left at around 11-ish I went home and turned on the beginning of LA Confidential and waited for B to get home.

And now Bryan's come out to sit on the couch with me and is playing with the cat trying to intice her to paw at his toes by wiggling them under the blanket (Ha! she just tryed to bite his feet! The joke's on him). Oh, yes, life is good.

I haven't been getting on as much as I would have liked, lately. Grump.

In a nutshell:

Work is good. Very, very busy, though. We're implementing some new strategies to aid with student recruitment and it's taking up a large portion of my time these days. All I can say is thank god I hired a work study who knows her stuff. I need to start hiring some more part-time work study students, and if I could clone mine I'd do it in a heartbeat.

We went to Bryan's company party on Saturday night, where I spent the majority of the time hanging out with two of the partners' wives, because they're just so darn fun. I used to hate his company gatherings because I didn't know anyone. It still don't know the vast majority of the poeple he works with (obviously - it's a 75 person firm), but I know ten or so along with their spouses. So when it came time to go gamble at the party (it was sort of a monte carlo-esq night) I could just walk up to a table and feel fairly confident that there would be at least one person I could talk to. And we won stuff at the raffle! Hit diggity dog - we NEVER win stuff. :) We got $100 in gift certificates to various restaurants. Oh, and we got a $25 gift card to Old Navy... which we weren't technically supposed to get, but there are times that it's good to have friends in high places, and this was one of those times.

We painted one of our master bedroom walls with our accent color - a gorgeous rich greyish-brown. Picture a cross between a Hershey bar and a very foggy morning. It's absolutely luscious and I adore it. The other walls are trimmed (but not rolled with paint) and the baseboards are cut, which means next weekend we could theoretically install our carpet. BE STILL MY BEATING HEART. After two and a half years we'll actually have carpet rather than concrete floors in the bedroom. And you know what that means, right? We'll actually get to put our furniture in there! In case my excitement over this isn't clearly evident let me just say that I've been using a fucking DAIRY CRATE FOR A NIGHTSTAND FOR OVER TWO YEARS. Soon our room will contain it's intended nightstands along with their intended bedside lamps. It was also contain much, much joy. So excited, so excited, so excited.

All Harry Potter fans should download and listen to PotterCast Episode #14 on iTunes (it's in the podcast section and it's free). Those are so my peeps.

I met with my broker last week. (I still can hardly fathom the fact that I have a broker, but whatever, I do.) I was exceedingly pleased that what he recommended we do is the exact conclusion we had come to on our own after doing our research. Makes me feel somewhat vindicated, and I fully plan on throwing it in the faces of whomever doubts our financial planning in the future.

I spent the day at Cal State Northridge today meeting with some faculty. Makes me doubt the days of just being a student with nothing but a part-time job as my other responsibility. When I'm at the university I work for it's different since I associate it so much with ongoing work issues- that building ver there? I have a meeting there on Monday. This pathway over here? That's where I got into a conversation with the dean about faculty member X who's being a problem. This building is where the other members of that committee I'm on all have their offices... But a foreign campus thrusts into focus the students who populate it. What are they studying? Do they enjoy it? Do they have grand plans to go out and change the world, change some lives? I hope so. We need people like that around us to make us re-examine our own issues.

We're in the midst of trying to select a new cell phone plan since our old two-year contract is about to run out. It's looking like we'll be taking the Pay As You Go option from T-mobile, since that seems to match our needs most closely. Anyone have any experiences with that? Yea or Nay? (please say Yea. I've don't too damn much research on this already and I'm ready to just buy the stupid thing and get it over with.)