I'm not dead! I swear!

So it's been a while, I know. I have a good reason, though. If you might remember from my list of goals, I am going on the job market this year. Given the amount of time that particular goal is sucking up, I am hereby revising my list of goals.

Goals for 2008-2009
1) Get a job.
2) Stay sane.

I think that I can accomplish that.

Anyway, this is my way of saying that posting might slow down a bit. I'm hoping to use blogging as a break from writing my thesis. However, that activity competes with such perennial favorites as eating, sleeping, petting my cats, and kissing my husband, so that may not happen. In the meantime, here is a short play-by-play:

1) The kitten is huge. Like, the size of a small adult cat. We're thinking of renaming her Mongo. I need to take more current pictures, but here's one from a few weeks ago. Maggie is still unimpressed.

2) The garden has been hugely productive. We've had over 100 tomatoes, probably 25 Anaheim chilies, a ton of carrots, many many lemon-drop peppers, pounds of potatoes, and more lettuce than I know what to do with. Our plot has to be cleared out by the 16th. I'll try to do a final count before then.

3) I got an Ipod touch.
Ok, so it actually belongs to Ross, but he lets me play with it, and I'm plotting a way to steal it for myself. So it's kind of mine already.

4) I think that the bread shop around the corner from me is run by the mafia. I would go into more detail, but I wouldn't want them to find out. In fact, on second thought, I definitely don't think that the bread shop is a front for an illegal drug business. Not at all.

5) I have developed a tremendous addiction to the show House. Ross is even more addicted than I am, which seems impossible considering how much of my addiction is fueled by Hugh Laurie's devastating attractiveness. I even liked him as Bertie Wooster. Ross, on the other hand, has no excuse.

6) I have thoughts on the financial crisis, the bailout, and the presidential and vice presidential debates. Some of them are even worthwhile. But I don't have the energy to write them up. Sorry about that. Maybe next time.

Pantry Raid

The backstory: I've always hated the pantry in our kitchen. The shelving inside was poorly laid out, and we really couldn't fit all that much inside. Here is the photo I took at our housing inspection 3 years ago

This photo is also a nice illustration of the overall look of the kitchen before we moved in. The woman in the picture is the last owner--she tried that wall color on two walls before deciding it was a terrible idea and giving up. We painted over it before we even moved in. The light fixture was also terrible. It was ugly as sin (strike one, brass...strike two, random curlicues...strike three, frosted glass globes) and Ross was always hitting his head on it (no small thing when the attachment between the fixture and the ceiling is a solid brass rod). We replaced it with a more attractive, lighter (read: more head-friendly) fixture from IKEA. It now looks like this (although we have a different picture hanging on the wall):



Anyway...since the pantry was near useless, we were using a set of wire shelves, which made the already-cramped kitchen even harder to use (I don't have a picture of the shelves, but there were three of them, and they took up one entire wall of the kitchen).

The objective was to redesign the pantry to make a useful space and get the wire shelves out of the kitchen. Ross tore out two little bookcase-style shelves in the pantry. We planned on 4 new shelves, about 12" deep and spanning the entire width of the pantry. The nice man at Lowes cut two pieces of birch plywood into four shelves. Ross cut some narrow wood into rails for the shelves to rest on, leveled them, and screwed them into the walls. Meanwhile, I painted all of the shelves. We had one slight hitch with the painting--when we went to buy a second can of paint, they sold us "base 5" instead of white. It took us a while to figure out what was going on, because while it looks white in the can, it goes on basically clear. Anyway...after approximately 42 coats of paint and a truly heroic amount of cleanup on Ross's part, we have our new pantry:

The bluish glow you see near the top of the picture is the battery-powered led light Ross installed (read: stuck to the door frame) to illuminate the top shelf. We installed the rack on the door almost as an afterthought--there was plenty of room for it, and it adds an appreciable amount of storage. The bottom of the pantry houses the recycle bins. The cat in the foreground is looking for stray bits of kibble that Ross might have missed when cleaning the floor.

If you are really interested in pictures of our pantry, Ross has posted more here.

Triangle of Desire

Triangle of Desire, originally uploaded by rcoconnell02.

The wireless network at the Kellogg school of business won't let me upload anything to any server (or download my mail to Thunderbird...grrrr) so I still can't get the pictures into the garden post.

However, I can give you this great picture that Ross took of Maggie and Roxy Anne. Note the relative positions of cat, kitten, and tail.

Bad decision in 3...2...1...