It’s getting hot in here 29 July 2009

I think summer has finally arrived.  It’s getting hot.  Generally our daytime temperatures hover around 80º, but it doesn’t drop far enough at night to keep it cool in the house.  In Washington, we never needed a/c because we would just suck in all the cold air overnight and proceed to shut all the windows come morning to keep the house cool.  And it worked!  For the most part, anyhow.  But the glorious thing is the temps would plummet down into the 50s every night.

Here, not so much.  Today’s high was 80º, though I know it didn’t get that hot, but the low is only 70º.  Methinks we need to install our a/c units soonest.  Although it’s not really that bad, not till about 5pm.  And by then you’ve only got a couple more hours till it really cools down, and then I figure the effort to put up the a/c units is just too much.

We’ll have to do it soon, though.  We’re having more company (can you believe it??) in a couple of weeks.  I’m thinking of shoving their two kids in with Grace and ME, and they’ll get the guest room.  It’ll probably behoove us to have the a/c units functioning by then.  I have a feeling it’s going to get hotter come August.

Today was just a comedy of errors.  Where to even start??  Lately Mary Ellen’s feet and knees have been getting so black, crawling around — and I know I’m a better housekeeper than that!  I mean, I vacuum at least once a week.  There’s no reason for black feet!  So I decide to get out the steam cleaner for the carpets, which is a little difficult because it reminds me so much of Koolit.  We bought it because he kept having accidents in the house, you see.  But I soldiered on, and did what I had to do.  I filled it up with hot water, got the heater going, and started laying down the water.  When I let go of the trigger, the water is supposed to be suctioned up and out of the carpet.  For some reason, that just wasn’t happening.

Hmmmm.

Being the somewhat bright person I am, I went for the most complicated solution.  It must be clogged!  So I take the whole damn thing apart and clean it out.  That’s when I found nearly enough fur caught in the cleaner to knit myself a new Koolit.  Ew.  I put everything back together, get the steam cleaner working again, and tried once more to see if the water would be suctioned up.  No such luck.  Gahhh!  Now I’m annoyed because I can’t think what else the problem could be.

I fiddle with it a few more moments until I realize DUH.  The damn thing is set to HOSE, not to FLOOR.

Yes, I am serious.

I switch the dial to FLOOR and now we’re cooking with gas!  I steam-cleaned the dining room, the living room, the foyer, and the hallway.  ME was napping throughout the ordeal, and I set up the fan to dry the floor as much as possible.  I must have done something right because later this evening, after she’d been crawling all over everywhere once again, her knees and feet stayed clean.  Yes!

Plus now my house smells clean and fresh.

Then I decided it would be a good idea to bake some cookies.  Ms Cheez-It and her family are moving down to South Carolina, and the movers arrived today for the first stage of packing.  She’d given me a whole ton of baking goods that she didn’t want to move with, and in that basket was some chocolate cookie dough mix.  Grace and I whipped up a batch and set the cookies to baking.  After the ten minutes had elapsed for the second batch, I checked on them, but they were still pretty soft in the middle.  I set the timer for two more minutes — but they were still soft.  Two more minutes… and still soft!  What was going on??

Somehow I had turned my oven off.

Cookies don’t really bake very well when there’s no heat.  Just in case you were wondering.

I preheated the oven once more, and after a couple of minutes in the now-hot oven, the cookies came out awesomely.  And I hied myself down to Ms Cheez-It’s home, where her sons inhaled them before I got both feet across the threshold.

Anyhow, after all that cleaning (the steam-cleaning, the vacuuming, the laundry, the sweeping and swabbing of the kitchen floor, the dishwasher emptying, the bottle washing, etc), I figured I was due for some time off.  My friend and I headed down to this delicious Mexican place down in Newport, where we drowned our woes in two margaritas apiece.  I have driven down the street that it’s on many, many times, and never once seen it.  But it’s totally worth braving the summer crowds of Newport, that’s for sure.

Margaritas, anyone??

Looking up through the clouds 27 July 2009

Two weekends down, several more to go.

The last couple of weekends we have hosted some guests.  The first weekend was Kurt’s aunt and uncle, and this past weekend were good friends.  We’ve got about a week and a half break before we have more friends (plus kids!) coming in for five or six days, and then my cousin comes for five days.

Let me tell you, I am So Excited.  I could do this whole hospitality thing more often.  Plus it gives me a good excuse to get out and see my town like a tourist would!

Anyone want to come visit?  Anyone??  We have a spare guest room!  I’ll even cook for you, though I never managed to cook the last couple of weekends.  How is that even possible?  I don’t have a clue how that worked out.

This past weekend was seriously fabulous.  My friends arrived late Friday night, having experienced zero traffic from NYC to here, surprisingly enough.  They had one request that I was only to happy to fulfill — a lobster roll.

Behold, a lobstah roll from Flo’s Clam Shack down in Newport:

How do you even begin to resist this?? (Unless you don’t like lobster, at which point I ask, “Can I have yours???”)  Not only is it a lobster roll on a deliciously grilled New England hot dog roll, but it is a mayonnaise-less roll.  Most lobster rolls are made with lobster salad, which is lobster, mayonnaise, and whatever else the chef decides to throw in, like celery or onion.  This was nothing but lobster and a small piece of lettuce.  NOM.

And yes, that’s my own photo, taken about two seconds before I commenced inhaling the roll.  It was not long for this world, that’s for sure.

The rest of the day was spent visiting Marble House, one of the Gilded Age mansions down on Bellevue Avenue, and strolling along the main drag of Bristol, Rhode Island.  It’s a cute little town that loves the Fourth of July.  It’s got its main street painted with a red, white, and blue stripe down the center of the road, and all the houses that face that street are festooned with red, white, and blue bunting and American flags.  There isn’t really much to the town, but it’s fun to walk the streets and peer into the storefronts.  The only store that was open was the bakery that offered wedding cakes.  They were absolutely beautiful!

Once we all rolled out of bed late on Sunday, I whipped up a batch of blueberry pancakes while Kurt attempted to make bacon.  I say “attempted” because the oven decided it didn’t want to function.  My brand new oven!!!  I had the electric skillet going, Kurt had the toaster on to toast the bagels, the microwave was running as well, and on the other side we had my electric kettle and the oven so Kurt could bake some bacon.  It was just too much for our electrical system to handle, and the breaker popped.  After Kurt reset it, the oven just wouldn’t come on.  The stovetop would work, and the broiler would work, but not the oven.  He called the emergency maintenance line, and a technician came out at noon.  He turned on the oven, and voila!  It worked.  Bah.

At least we didn’t have to pay for the trouble call.  Thank goodness for military housing!  I’m doubly glad that it was fixed so easily because I just got that stove.  We’re still getting to know each other!

There’s just something weird going on with me and electronics.  My camera decided to wig out a bit over the weekend.  I always press the shutter halfway as I take a photo to lock exposure and focus, then when I’m ready to take the photo, I press it all the way.  It works like a champ all the time — except when I wanted to use the flash.  For some reason, I had a lag of a few seconds, and it would shine my autofocus light first.  Why???  I finally decided to hit the factory reset buttons to set it back to the factory defaults, and it fixed my issue — without resetting any of my defaults.  That’s odd, but hey, it’s fixed.

So the rest of Sunday was occupied by returning to Bristol and taking in the local Columban Fathers Outing and Bazaar.  I was hoping they’d parade the monks around, give them a good ol’ outing, but alas, I didn’t see any.  There was one priest with his collar undone, but I can’t be sure he was an actual monk.  The only monks I’ve seen (one Franciscan and one Russian Orthodox) were both wearing robes, so I’ve got not much to go on.  What does a Columban Father look like?

It was a fun little fair, though.  There were a bunch of kiddie games set up so the children could win prizes, there were booths set up so that the locals could sell their wares, there was lots and lots and lots of food, and there was even a beer garden with both kinds of beer — Bud and Bud Light.  And wine poured from gallon jugs.  It had much more of a local flavor to it than any other fair we’ve visited this summer.  It felt like Rhode Island, and not Anytown USA.

So yeah.  It was an awesome weekend.  We were so sad to see our friends go.  But now it’s time to gear up for the next visit — and time to go through my recipes and figure out what to cook for them.

I’d best get started!

Y’all are awesome 24 July 2009

No, really.  I mean that.  Y’all are awesome.  And I realize I did wrong by posting a photo of something like that to begin with.  Initially I thought it was harmless, especially since you couldn’t see the person’s face, and I kept my comments rather mundane.  But still.  It wasn’t nice.  I shouldn’t have done it.

I just really appreciate y’all coming out and telling me that I am okay the way I am.  It helps to know that I have such supportive friends, even if I only know you through the internet.  I have to admit to some hesitance when dressing this morning for my lunch.  Should I really wear my “new” (new to me — I got it at the thrift store) embroidered linen blouse, or does the pink look that bad against my red hair?  But I wore it anyhow, and my friend complimented me on my choice of pink shirt, white tanktop, and grey capris.  Heh.  Yes, that’s a rather 80s color combination, but I like it.  My sister had a Huffy 10-speed back in the day that was pink and grey.  And I wore my white sandals, so I think I looked really cute.  Not anywhere as lovely as my friend looked, but she’s got a much better defined sense of style.  At least I didn’t embarrass her.

She was seriously craving a margarita, but the place she initially wanted to go to isn’t open for lunch.  Then the other Mexican place we decided to try was BYOB — which doesn’t work well if you want a mixed drink.  So we ended up down at one of the swanky tourist places where we each got a shrimp Caesar salad and a couple of Bellinis.  NOM.  I’d never had one before, but it was delicious.  The Bellini, I mean, not the Caesar salad.  The salad was pretty good, but sadly enough, it wasn’t nearly as delicious as the one I got from one of those a la carte places in the San Jose airport in February.  A Bellini is usually more of a girly drink than I’m wont to go for, but it was still yummy.  Usually I go for something strong or tart.  My new favorite drink is a caipirinha, which is a rum sour made with a special Brazilian rum called cachaça.  I found the recipe on Gourmet.com, and amazingly enough, this liquor store in Massachusetts carries the cachaça.  It’s very tart, made with basically lime juice and rum, but it goes down so easily.  Yummmmm.

It’s been a good day, though.  Kurt finished his work amazingly early, so he was actually home no later than 4pm today.  The past several months he’s been working till 5:30, 6 o’clock, which isn’t so bad till you realize he starts work at 7am.  That, and I was used to him being home at 3:30 or 4 every afternoon.  Work’s ramped up a bit, so that doesn’t help.  But I’ve gotten a lot more housework done lately.  It’s so much easier to clean whe there isn’t a husband underfoot.

I did find out today that Ms Cheez-It and her family are moving within the week.  We’ve inherited their air conditioning units, which is nice, but I will miss them.  It’s been a while since we’ve hung out, but they’re wonderfully lovely people, and it’s been nice to have such good people just a couple of doors down.  My next door neighbor will be gone by the end of the month too.  I also found out that my neighbor across the street is moving within the next couple of weeks, and that my good friend down the street will move in February.  There are new people living in Bridget’s old house already, but our street is starting to look rather bleak.  By February I might be all alone.  I just hope that we get some awesome new neighbors soon.

I’ve got my fingers crossed!