Story A Day

Okay, not really…  Remember the “free parking” blog from last week?  Well, I had class again tonight and inadvertently handed her the ramp ticket from LAST week, thus the $66 charge!  As I scrambled to figure out where I put today’s ticket she noticed it in the cubby to the left of my steering wheel.  Phew!  Only $5.50, thank goodness…

It is days like today when I ask myself…why do I live in MN?  But then I remember how much I do like having all four seasons.   Our house is especially drafty too, it is currently lacking some of its exterior insulation – the contractors FINALLY decided to start our siding replacement, only to discover it was too cold to finish.  Yes folks, this is STILL remnants of August storm damage.  It’s amazing how long it can take to work through insurance hoops, contractor schedules, etc.  We are hoping to have a “fully-wrapped” house again by the end of next week – pleeeeeeease!  The heat bill would like that very much

I am a person who enjoys and thrives on routine, this is what I am remembering about myself in the last week. My work has been anything but the “normal routine” as of late, and it is totally throwing me off! I am in the heat of recruiting season so I have been spending many an evening at college campuses meeting potential applicants (some amazing folks I might add). In fact, just last night I was at my alma mater, which boasted one of the best turnouts yet – go CSB/SJU! Good times. And a shout out to my good friend Christine for letting me crash on her couch! So kind. As a notoriously drowsy driver I decided it wasn’t such a good idea to hit the roads last night after a few not-so-well-rested nights in a row Thankfully, the presentations are winding down and I will be back to my usual routine soon, which means I will have a chance to grocery shop and do laundry again – woohoo! The simple pleasures

Check out the BEFORE and AFTER….

For the first time tonight we have a fully-lit basement! We passed our rough-in electrical inspection so we were free to hook up all the switches and tie into the main breaker.  Thankfully, the lights work!

We’ve decided that electrical is one of the easiest steps of this process so far. I’ve always been a little bit afraid of the electricity part, Tim was the brave one. He deserves the credit for running the show – deciding where/how to run wire, how to connect to the main power, etc. I learned little bits from him as we went along. Now I can say that I know how to hook up outlets, attach light switches, splice wire connections, work in junction boxes, and more. We were cheering with glee this evening when the lights came on. One step closer! And an update to yesterday, NOPE, we won’t be ready for drywall yet this week! Still some more things left to do, and my adage of “it’s always 3 times more work that we think it will be” holds true again. That’s okay, we’ll get there!

…spent at Menards!! Woo-hooo! Aren’t we the wild ones. In the company of Tim’s sister and brother-in-law (great helpers and owners of a big truck ) we made one more step toward basement completion! We purchased the cement board needed for the shower, the remaining insulation and we picked up our bathroom vanity and counter top. Our sheet rock crew called today and apparently misunderstood our time line a bit and they are ready this week! Yikes! We were thinking of being ready by the following week. But hey, this might be the extra nudge we need to get things rolling! We’ll see if we can get it all done tomorrow I’ll report back on that. In the meantime, anyone have a guess as to how popular Menards is on a Saturday night? Anyone? There were about 15 cars in the lot when we rolled out at 9:30 pm. Woooooo-hooooo! Yeah, we’re livin’ the wild life now!

I left my grad school class tonight and was surprised to see a HUGE line of cars exciting the parking garage that I too needed to exit.  There must have been lots of classes that let out at 8:30, or some special event.  Yikes!  I sat in the line 3 levels up for about 5 minutes, not moving at all, hmmm…should have parked closer to the bottom I guess .  And then…they opened the gates!  There was only ONE teller and she either got permission and simply made a decision that the probably 50 cars in line should probably not have to wait 30 minutes to head home from class.  Woo-hoo.  Free parking!

I spent the evening getting lost on the Carleton and Saint Olaf campuses in pursuit of great applicants for Breakthrough. Okay, I didn’t really get lost, but I did feel fairly ditsy at times as I asked students for directions to various places And then there was the inevitably ditsy moment with the “different-than-all-the-other-campuses” LCD projector (really, it was different). They are WAY to high tech at Olaf They don’t even have light switches! Instead, digital displays with lots of funky functions – I’m not kidding! A great evening despite my ditsy endeavors I got to meet a bunch of enthusiastic college kids who are dreaming big about their summers – can’t beat that! If they’re smart enough to figure out those crazy light switches (or I guess, more accurately, light-operating digital displays) – I’ll take ‘em

I started one of my grad school classes tonight. Yes, I am getting credit for a class called “Healthy Humor”. It’s awesome. We listened to about 15 minutes of a comedian named Brian Regan. He’s pretty funny – good, clean humor. Just search his name at YouTube and you’ll find hours worth of humorous entertainment! In all “seriousness” the class covers a lot of research on the value of humor in many contexts – health care, work places, etc. Here’s a tidbit for the evening. A group in the UK did a research study, polling over 100,000 people across multiple countries. The result of that survey was that this in the #1 joke throughout the world, of those on their list (I don’t know what the other choices were)….

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are going camping. They pitch their tent under the stars and go to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night Holmes wakes Watson up.

HOLMES: Watson, look up at the stars and tell me what you deduce.

WATSON: I see millions of stars, and many planets, it’s quite likely there are some planets like Earth, and if there are a few planets like Earth, there might also be life.

HOLMES: Watson, you idiot, somebody stole our tent!

Feeling humorous today – post a comment with your favorite joke!

I was absent from my blog for a bit this weekend because I spent a couple days with my friend Christine in St. Joe. I try to take a semi-annual trip to stay with her in St. Joe and catch up on all the happenings in central MN. We started off the weekend with some Latin dancing at the Local Blend (formerly Meeting Grounds, for you CSB/SJU alums). She teaches Latin dancing there once a month. I had a great time learning about Salsa, Cumbia, Bachata and Meringue. I am guessing I spelled at least one of those wrong We stayed up chatting late into the night. The next day we went to mass at CSB and saw our friend Steph who recently entered the Monastery. The three of us spent the afternoon catching up with Kate, Brent and their son Elijah. We learned all about their efforts to make more food from scratch, including making their own flour! Now that is truly making food from scratch! It was a great afternoon of conversation and catching up. A fun weekend! I had today off since schools are closed on MLK day. I spent most of it doing laundry and catching up on things around the house. Tim and I also joined his mom for dinner this evening and heard all about her adventures with being audited by the IRS. I think I could live my whole life wit

I was on Facebook earlier today and a friend had her status posted as “Colder than a polar bear’s toe nail”. Funny. Me too. Current temp outside = -5. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…..