Molly Sue Newton was born at 6:48 on Saturday, May 6, 2006. She weighed 7.5 lbs and was 20.5 in. long.
Instead of working on the yard last night like we should have Tim and I rented a movie and read the paper. Here's an up-date on the Park Inn that I caught.
Wright On The Park gives progress report on hotel restoration efforts
And yes, still no baby (my due date was Tuesday).
For me this Blog is a kind of entertainment. I don't feel pressured to write, even when I am actually pressured by friends and family to up-date. I write to track my own thoughts and progress through this "journey" we are taking.
Ok, and even though it's really weird, I like being noticed in places like the grocery store. I enjoy having complete strangers come up and comment on things like wall paper choice. The house has been a lot of work and I'm darn proud of it. And I guess it really is one of my favorite subjects to talk about.
But today I've stumbled across a whole new valuation of the house that makes me feel kind of guilty (thanks for the link Hillsdale House). It's called BlogShares and it's a fake internet trading kind of deal for blogs. My blog is on there and I actually have an "investor." The investor owns 25% of the blog which even though it's fake kind of creeps me out. What makes me feel guilty is how much the graphs on this page show that I've been neglecting the blog.
So yes, friends and family members I can shrug off, but show me a graph and I freak out.
I had lunch at the bakery in town today since I had to take my library books back and get stamps anyway. I came across this article in the Mason City paper. It's not terribly informative, but it caught my eye because I toured the Melson house last spring as part of the preservation conference I went to. Peggy gave a lovely tour and knows so many interesting things about the wonderful house she lives in.
These Old Houses
Last weekend we had a local carpenter, Al, out to fix our roof (situation still not resolved, so still no story). He had his sons out with him and one of them was climbing up to the second story off the north porch and the ladder slipped. He FELL!
We had joked that our roof would be the death of someone, but we never believe that it could happen.
I was at my moms and Tim was working in the field. I didn’t know about it until Al came in to be paid at the end of the day. I was mortified.
I imagined that he fell on one of the many piles of junk we had lying around. He could have been KILLED.
But his dad said he landed flat on his back on the grass, got up and brushed himself off, and then got back up on the roof. I told Al that you wouldn’t have seen me up on that roof again for three or four days (I was actually thinking never again), and he agreed.
I feel really bad about this. It’s really been bothering me. Are you obligated to do something like send flowers when your house almost kills someone? These guys even gave up their weekend to help us out and get the roof taken care of before it started raining again. It seems like something you’d write Dear Abby for advice about. It seems like you should do something, but what?
Nothing is happening on the house. And if you've got a problem with that you had better keep it to yourself. I've discovered that being nine months pregnant can make you very tired, cranky, and a little less receptive to criticism.
We are done having Dale work on projects. We decided with some of the major cost we have coming up that we need to start saving some money. Tim refuses to work on anything until he has his field work done even though I've politely reminded him that he promised to have the down stairs bathroom done and the door separating the up-stairs from the down up before the baby comes. Lucky for him I've become so tired and cranky I haven't gotten up the energy to ask him non-politely.
I have been spending what little free time I've had putting together pack-and-plays, annoying toys, high chairs, etc. These items have proven to be more difficult to assemble than any house-related project I have taken on. A certain Fisher Price play yard had me in tears threatening it with the screw-driver in my hand one evening. One important lesson I have learned however is that even if the instructions do not call for a hammer, you need one.
I've been waiting for the preservation group who is working on the Park Inn to start the process of trying to purchase the adjacent bank building. Now based on an article in yesterday's Gazette it looks like it might happen. Hopefully it's not some cruel April Fool's joke :)
Restorers will buy, renovate Wright's bank
Saturday was a long and exhausting day (well, at least for the fat pregnant lady), but it was well worth it. We've still got some issues to address like the doors on the TV cabinet, the lack of a light fixture, and the pictures need to be hung on the walls. But it was good enough for us Sunday night when we settled down on the ol' familiar couch and watched our first rented movie in years.
Yes, life is good.
P.S. For those of you wanting a baby up-date, there really is none. Only thing new is for some reason in the last two weeks I've doubled in size. At least now I can lay on the couch and demand things be done for me :)
Two days ago I placed calls to my mom and Tim's mom. They have been offering to help "get things in order before the baby comes" since I was just a few months pregnant. And up until this point there really wasn't much for them to help with, but now I have a project...
We are sooooooooooooooo fiscally irresponsible. I blame the house. If you remember my post on the history of this place you'll know we're not the first ones to be "charmed" into pouring money into the place. Remember poor Mrs. Cable? We laughed the first time we read the abstract, but it's becoming more of a scary reality for us. Last year at this time we saw our financial advisor and he pretty much told us that if we kept on this route we would never retire. "You do want to retire don't you?" was how I think he phrased it.
So we have major structural damage to our roof. It needs to be replaced (it's a long story that I don't feel right telling now). So what are we doing? Looking at un-godly expensive wallpaper samples.
We've always planned on doing Bradbury & Bradbury wallpaper in our foyer. We'd love to do it through out the house, but from what I figure I will have to work approximately 175 hours just to afford the foyer, and that doesn't include the installation fee. No way are we going to mess with this stuff ourselves. So the plan was that we were just going to put a quick coat of paint on for a few years while we recovered from our financial irresponsibility.
The only problem is we need to know what color to paint the stairwell. We were never going to attempt to paper that. The 18 ft. Ceiling is just to scary, plus that would add another 50 hours of work to the total.
So a few weeks ago Tim ordered samples. Just one problem. He didn't ask me what sample I liked. So you can imagine how ticked I was when the Dresser Tradition 1 Elements showed up. I really don't care for that pattern. Granted I don't dispise it like the Neo-Grec paper, but I really didn't see myself loving it for the rest of my life (yes, we'll pull the old Victorian trick of taking the wallpaper with us if we sell the house, buyer beware!).
So I spent a week looking at it, and it just never grew on me. I could tolerate it, but if I'm putting in 175 hours of work I want to be pleased with my purchase.
So I got on the web site and found the Neo-classical Roomset. I had requested the Neo-classical catalog about three times from Bradbury and they never send it. We loved the patterns and colors. Granted we both love different colors/patterns, but we think we can work it out.
We ordered the Cream set. We had wanted to do something with a little more color, but we also wanted a blue tint in the papers. The surrounding rooms are green and red and we wanted something to break that color block up a little. So Dove was way to colorless, and Jasper and Pompeiian had to much green.
The only problem is they papers are sooooooooooo beautiful that we don't want to "wait a few years" to order them.
New roof vs. Really expensive wallpaper
Bets anyone?
Being married to a pilot can be interesting at times. Like when I want something and he's in the middle of doing something else he doesn't ask me to wait or hold on, it's "Stand by."
Yesterday we had the wallpaperer out and the living room is now ready for trim. Here's an interesting tid bit I didn't know. Wallpaper rolls are manufactured for people with 8 foot ceilings. That is what the companies base their calculations off of. Since our walls are 9 foot we could only get three cuts out of a roll, not four. Basically we were a roll short.
Luckily the wallpaper guy had this all figured out before he started the job and was very conservative with what we had. So disaster is averted once again. Yea!
Then I was talking to my mother-in-law over the phone and she asked if he staggered the pattern. I said no, there was no pattern to stagger. But then I went into the room and sure enough he had varied the height of the flowers so they didn't end up in rows across the wall.
Who knew wallpaper could be so complicated?
So now it's just down to putting the woodwork up (which Dale has finished and waiting) and moving the furniture in.
Company you are officially on stand-by.
March 2, 2003 was the day after we put the offer in to buy this house. It was also the first time we did a walk through with a camera. So I consider this date the anniversary of our house even though we didn't officially take ownership until early April.
Every year around this date I do another walk through and try to photograph the same location that I did originally in 2003.
To celebrate our three year anniversary (the first one we've had blogging) the posts that follow will take you through each room of the house. I've included the anniversary photos and, since we are getting close to finishing, my punch list for what I would like finished in each room before we have that open house I've been talking about for the last three years.
Exterior Punch List:
Punch List:
March 2004
March 2005
March 2006
Punch List:
March 2005
March 2006
Punch List:
March 2004
March 2005
March 2006
Punch List:
